So much for jabs!

A couple of days of self pitying cold symptoms and I shun the typewriter. There’s an archaic word for you!

As I have been feeling sorry for myself (it’s a job only I can do with the requisite sincerity) I have neglected my writing. Part of that neglect was also immersing myself in a book.

I would like to say that my choice of literature was uplifting and intellectually respectable. But it wasn’t.

My choice of reading matter was a chance encounter with one of the books donated by past staff to the reading shelf in the staff room: ‘Eldest’ by Christopher Paolini.

This is the second volume of his ‘Inheritance’ trilogy, of which ‘Eregon’ was the first volume. This book has already been turned into a film with Jeremy Irons emulating Alex Guinness and acting as if he was in a much better film.

It comes as no surprise to find out that the author was home schooled and started writing the first volume when he graduated from High School at the age of fifteen. That sounds very arch and knowing and is a wilful acceptance of a stereotypical assumption that anyone home schooled will, of necessity, turn to fantasy worlds to fill in the lack of socialisation stemming from a lack of peer group contact.

There again, what the hell do I know about the realities of Christopher Paolini’s life? I should just go with what I’ve read in this volume.

So. The content of this narrative will not come as a surprise to anyone who has read any other fantasy books. Take a cast which includes elves, dwarfs, dragons, magic, humans and a scattering of semi humans and then you place them in a chosen-one-aiding-the-final-battle-against-evil sort of scenario and that’s what the book is about.

As someone once said that there were only seven basic plots (“The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories” by Christopher Booker – thank you internet where a casual comment can be footnoted in a couple of seconds!) I suppose that it would be unfair for castigating a novel which uses a fairly hackneyed structure. It would be far fairer to assess how Paolini uses the framework to tell his story.

And it isn’t, in my view, very good.

His archaisms in his writing of speech are cringe makingly irritating and he simply doesn’t not have the authority in his narrative thrust to enable a reader to ‘roll with the punch’ of some lazy formulation and get on with the story.

His descriptions are weak and, while he undoubtedly creates some pretty pictures his prose does not rise to the necessary heights for set pieces which promise much but deliver little. The promised battle that is the thrust of much of the volume is a woeful let down when it finally occurs.

It is an amusing, though not very taxing literary game to list all the sources that are shamelessly stitched together to create this tale: from The Star Wars saga, though Lord of the Rings to The Old Testament no epic is left unplucked!

Tolkien’s genius was to choose a central character for the Lord of the Rings who was tangentially human; incorporating all our flaws while remaining visually and morally ‘other’ – close and distant at the same time. There is none of that subtlety in this epic wannabe.

Having said all that: I enjoyed reading it, but at the same time I would only recommend it for those who are enthusiasts of the genre. And adolescent boys. Or is that a tautology?

Nice portrait of a dragon on the front cover, courtesy of John Jude Palencar. Whose surname, now I think about it, resembles the honorific title of some long lost elfin King in the fabled country of Çleñdälé? It looks so much more convincing with bits around the letters doesn’t it?

Whatever.

I shall return the volume to the staff shelf on Monday rather than place it firmly among my other books.

That must tell you something about my reaction to the book!