Brisingr: or 7 ways to lose your attention

Quite possibly the worst book I’ve ever read. Paolini’s autistic/home-schooled precision in creating shockingly detailed cultures, lands, and histories is EASILY exceeded by his abominable story-telling and pathetic understanding of characters and how to make them believable.

By Christopher Paolini, 2008

1 Star

I’ve never stopped reading a book 2/3 of the way through before… before Brisingr, that is. Even after reading up to page 444 there simply wasn’t any story. Every page I read was part of a vignette, a scene Paolini fantasized over but ultimately had difficulty integrating into a cohesive larger picture. It gave me the strong impression that Paolini’s editors were bearing down on him to finish the trilogy after his multi-year hiatus and his response was to vomit up a pile of disjointed scenes. Paolini doesn’t know how the story will resolve, and it painfully shows. It thus comes as a VERY bitter pill for any fans of his works to swallow (BEWARE: PLOT SPOILER) Brisingr will NOT be the final book in the Inheritance Trilogy.

You read that last line correctly… The Inheritance Trilogy will be concluded by a FOURTH novel in the series. I thought home-schooled kids were good at math and bad at social skills, not bad at both! Does it become any clearer that Paolini doesn’t have a clue how to resolve his own story?

It’s easy to concieve the self-important pretentious nature of a book with the title Brisingr: or 7 oaths and 7 challenges.
Paolini is a dungeon-master gone wrong! His ability to generate background information is like a chandelier: large, gaudy, and entirely fragile. The land of Alegasia is geological improbability cubed. He outright stole his magic system from The Wizard of Earthsea novels. Even his interpretation of dragons and their mythologies could arguably be derived from Anne McAffrey’s works. He gives a tremendous amount of thought to individual microcosms (the dwarves, the elves, the urgals, the Empire) while only tangentially intersecting them in highly improbable ways.

Paolini seems to dwell in the violence and gore. In the fantasy genre, that’s old news, but for fantasy specifically geared towards children and adolescents, it’s completely unacceptable. He provides such disgusting iconic imagery as an impaled baby on a spear punctuating the top of a pile of human corpses. The greater bulk of this book were scattered vignettes of combat just for the sake of combat.

If Brisingr were ever committed to movie format, 2/3 of it would be deleted scenes. Tolkien’s works are replete with major battles and skirmishes, but they are all responsibly worked into a larger framework. The fighting was always done tastefully, elegantly crafted to instill an emotion like dread or victory without drawing undue attention to the gore. Paolini’s violence feels again like the dungeon-master gone awry – excessive, just because. In short I would strongly discourage any parent with concern for their child from reading any of Paolini’s works.

Paolini’s works are a wasteland of relatable characters. With the exception of Eragon’s instructor, Brom, I felt that all of the protagonists were either incredibly dim-witted (Eragon and Roran) or heartless (Nasuada, the Twins, any of the elves). Eragon and Roran make so many moronic choices that I’d be embarassed to read it to my kids. Eragon perpetually over-promises and under-delivers (much like the author), always stumbling around scenarios like the gibbering village idiot. The attempts Paolini makes at wit or humor are contrived, prosaic, and burdensome. His characters are reed-thin and just as dry. What humor there is is also dry, witless, and prosaic. The dwarves, being the most jovial, are at times a pleasant surprise, but the rest of the cast are a near total vacuum of personality or interest.

I’m inclined to say that Paolini would be excellent as an advisor to another story-writer. He puts together political intrigue like it’s second nature. He’s creative in background and supportive material but lacking in the overall view, story, completely losing scope and understanding of his muddling, wafer-thin characters and his thick interpretation of characters. Fifteen pages of a short story by Alastair Reynolds or Ray Bradbury would encompass the story that Paolini can say with close to 2000.