Pawn of Prophecy

Rating:
Summary: Round and Round.
Review: Maybe I missed something. I don't know. I bought this book after the reading some of the great reviews of David Eddings. This was the first book I have read by Eddings and so far I am not very impressed. I found this book to be a bit pointless. There was not any great plot. A boy trying to figure out who he is. Nobody telling him much. So he gets angry constantly at his Aunt and others. This plot just went over and over. And even by the end of the book he still does not know much. I had to force myself to finish the book. I just can't figure out why this book got so many great reviews. Instead I would recommend George R.R. Martin for anyone looking to start a fantasy series

Rating:
Summary: Good, solid fantasy. Not magical, but better than most.
Review: The Belgariad, by Dave Eddings, may not be the high-handed, serious fantasy fiction that many readers crave--but then neither is most of the fantasy fiction these readers raise up as examples of greatness.

The Belgariad (and the rest of the books by Eddings) are 'solid' fictional landscapes designed to explore themes and tropes commonly found in fantasy fiction. Eddings accomplishes this feat with simplicity and a natural skill for narrative that makes his world at least believable, if not entirely 'magical'. While this series may not advance the fantasy genre in any significant way, it does show that good, well-written fantasy can endure in spite of the absurd expectations so often invoked by the fantasy-reading public. At least Eddings is able to write with clarity, a skill that appears to have been forgotten by many of the so-called writers in the genre.

Many of the reviewers for these books have invoked the names of Robert Jordan, Tolkien, Le Guin, et. al., as though each of these writers have written nothing but books that are flawless and unblemished. Nothing, of course, is farther from the truth. Each of these writers has his or her own literary failings, many of which far outshine any failing exhibited by Eddings.

With Jordan, we gain a complex world of mythical proportion, replete with mysteries, madness and mayhem. But we also lose so much in the way of realism with his bland characterizations, rough, arhythmic writing style, and his constant need to muddy plot-lines with self-indulgent meandering. Jordan, it has often been said, could use a good editor.

With Tolkien, we are endeared to a world composed of living history, language, mythology and medievalism. But this comes at the expense of building a narrative almost devoid of any real action or any characters who are not merely allegorical representatives of a greater ideal. As with Jordan's WoT, the LoTR trilogy also suffers from many seemingly needless deviations in plot, the end result being the creation of several unbalanced books that read more like Greek mythology or folklore, rather than a cohesive narartive. Tolkien, though arguably the progenitor of the genre, still had his flaws.

With Le Guin, we gain lyricism and a large amount of moral posturing. But we lose depth of characterization, clarity of plot, and are often sunk in too many layers of stilted (but beautiful) prose-poetry that we are ultimately distanced from caring about the story we're reading. How a person can fault Eddings' use of plot, but laud the absurd, wandering "plot" of, say, The Wizard of Earthsea, defies basic logic.

To say that Eddings, who writes plainly, strongly, and aptly--using fantasy conventions in exactly the same way as his contemporaries, but without all of the needless trappings of self-involvement--has written only a mediocre series does a great disservice to his contribution to the genre.