The Belgariad, Volume One

Omnibus edition! I'll be breaking these out as I finish them. The usual disclaimer - I first read these when I was a kid (maybe 13, at the oldest) and am irrationally fond of them. This will be an attempt to look at them with grown-up eyes, but that never actually works.

Pawn of Prophecy:

Two things struck me particularly about this book. First of all is the extremely stylized language - it worked very well on my as a kid, being completely understandable while still feeling Important. As I recall, this tone quickly fades as the series goes on, but it works well for me here. Second, there are some spectacular examples of telling-not-showing, largely in the matter of Garion's identity-crisis subplot. As an adopted kid myself, his clunky and heavy-handed struggle to deal with his genetic identity didn't make much sense to me then, and now it just highlights one of the classic bad-eurocentric-fantasy tropes - that race=culture=identity, such that people can identify nationality (even within a group of nations that are explicitly the same ethnicity, or in a nation that is explicitly a melting pot) at a glance. It's lazy writing, and it does bug me a little.

On the narrative side, I noticed something for the first time - reading this book *without* reading the prologue must be a very different experience. Because the prologue not only sets up the cosmology of the world, it also lays out very clearly how all of the nominal mysteries in this first volume are going to end - we know who Aunt Pol is, what Garion's family secret is, and what their mysterious quest must be right up front. But the actual text reveals those things gradually or not at all, in a way that's clearly intended to set up narrative tension. So... this is a self-spoiling book. I wish I could purge it from my head and read it unspoiled, for once, just to see how it went.

Queen of Sorcery

Queen of Sorcery focuses on Garion's development as a moral being, which makes sense, given that he's fifteen, barely hitting puberty, and just now noticing the world around him. I wouldn't say it's deftly handled, exactly - there is very little that is subtle in this series - but the various adventures are entertaining as well as not too obtrusively didactic. The various "hints" leading up to the "big reveal" of Garion's sorcerous power are equally obvious, but the actual climax is exciting enough, and both the justice of the act and its emotional cost are earned, I think.

The book also has a self-spoiling problem, in that the Prologue makes is very clear that Garion and Ce'Nedra are destined to be together, which undercuts any possible tension in their early relationship. I don't love that - they have some genuine problems to work through, and it feels like they're handled much too lightly because Prophecy. I am not generally a fan of relationships that begin with screaming fights and contempt on one or both sides. Ce'Nedra is only lightly characterized here, and I will no doubt gripe about her more later, but this is not an auspicious beginning.

There are some cool bits in this one, but it was never my favorite, and still isn't - too much of it feels like stalling to set up character development, rather than making the development part of the plot. There are also just plain too many characters, I think, and this book is where the author begins to find various excuses to ditch parts of the group for whole chunks of time just so it stays manageable. Lelldorin had some potential as a character and not a cardboard cutout but he goes poof almost as soon as he's introduced, Mandorallen never really becomes more than a caricature, Hettar gets plain forgotten for big chunks of the text, and Barak, Durnik, and Silk trade off the minor character moments but never really grow. Add in Wolf, Pol, Garion, and Ce'Nedra, and we're talking ten members of the ensemble - and every single bit of plot or action is initiated by someone outside the group, not within it. No wonder nationality serves as a stand-in for personality - it almost has to.

(And yes, this world has no black people. None. There are white people, who are good, and there are Asian people, who are evil. Just saying.)

Magician's Gambit:

Magician's Gambit covers not just the development of Garion's powers but the esoteric side of the worldbuilding, which has not been covered in much detail up until now. We meet a couple of gods, the Purpose of the Universe, and a high priest or two. The reason the Asians - excuse me, Angaraks - are evil is explained in detail (woo human sacrifice!) although the blame is very carefully laid on the people in power - lunatic kings and a power-mad priesthood, as well as their megalomaniac god - and we're actually left with at least a little sympathy for the common people. It's better than it could be, I guess.

We spend a bit of time in Ce'Nedra's head before she's conveniently left behind, and, try as I might, I have trouble finding fault with the characterization. She's spoiled, intelligent, and adolescent, and therefore mostly irritating but not unsympathetic. I think that over the course of the series, she doesn't develop as far away from that as she could, but right here I'm pretty much ok with her.

There are some bits that nag at me about this half of the series (Barak and his wife! Taiba! Relationships-as-cosmic-reward!) but they're better saved until later - I can't not know what happens, and be annoyed at the breadcrumbs when they appear, but on the whole this is is inoffensive. (Except, you know, for the race thing.)

And while I am not the same reader I was when I was 11, I still kind of love these books. They are fast-paced, amusing, and give the impression of discussing Serious Things without being at all challenging to a middle-class white American kid. The writing is fine, the dialogue is snappy, and the tropes are well-worn enough to feel totally comfortable. I can't help but be critical, now, but these are totally staying on my shelves. Everyone needs their wubbie. ( )

I first began reading the Belgariad series while in high school and still re-read these every few years. The series cemented my love of fantasy.

David Eddings wrote the five books that comprise The Belgariad while I was still in high school. I remember seeing them on the library shelves, and passing them by for other things. Frequently during those years, I would re-read novels that captivated me. So in 1983-1985, I entirely missed this series. I will blame the font because, in those days, I truly did judge a book by its cover (especially if that book was a fantasy novel, and the cover wasn't designed by Darrell K. Sweet). Now that I'm no longer fifteen years old, I've decided to read some of the titles I remember, but never actually settled on. I found The Belgariad in the "free" bin at my library and decided I needed something light. I hadn't been reading recently. I've been bogged down in a few heavy novels (literally. One book weighs several pounds). THis is an omnibus edition, comprised of the first three novels, Pawn of Prophecy, Queen of Sorcery, and Magician's Gambit. The books run smoothly from one to the next without much break in action.

Enough backstory. The Belgariad is quite good. It never won any awards, I believe, but has firmly established itself smack in the middle of 1980s fantasy literature. It's about an orphaned boy called Garion, who finds himself pulled into world-changing politics. Along with his companions, his Aunt Pol, an old storyteller called Mr. Wolf, a huge, bearded warrior (Barak) from the north, and a smooth talking thief who goes by the name of Silk, all the archetypes are there. Hovering over it all is the deformed god Kal Torak, whose evil priests and soldiers control the eastern half of the continent.

The story is good. The characters are solid and interesting. Eddings holds our interest in the plot through the interactions between his characters. Most of the three books' perspective is through Garion's eyes, and he's constantly struggling in that age where a boy isn't quite a man. His Aunt Pol hovers and nags. He is at times belligerent, as a fourteen year old boy would be.

Edding's Universe is complex and had me referring often to the maps, (there were three) and the book's prologue. His Realms are rigidly constructed, with peoples varied in personality, if not lifestyle. Sendari are pragmatic to the point of obnoxiousness; Chereks celebrate in warlike mead-hall fashion. The Nyissans are swamp-dwelling snake worshipers. Each land opens up a glimpse of Edding's Universe, and usually, had me scampering back a hundred pages to remember where I'd heard the name of that Realm before. This wasn't a bad thing, but the book probably would have benefitted from a brief gazeteer.

I read through the six-page prologue of each book. I wish I hadn't. It gave me knowledge of Eddings's cast of characters that, afterward, spoiled aspects of the plot. You knew who the cast was (or could easily guess), and you understood their purpose. Mostly, the story reminds me of a very well-written novelized depiction of a Dungeons and Dragons game, complete with the wizard, the healer, the warrior, the thief, the paladin: even the cave-dwelling gnomes eventually make their way into the story. It doesn't detract from the story; it does enrich the genre.

I liked the novels. The characters were engaging enough to hold my interest, despite being cut from a predictable mold. For those who enjoy an easy, somewhat predictable, read, I'd recommend the Belgariad series. In fact, I passed them on to my fifteen year-old son, who's already started reading Eddings's followup series. I'm not quite sure of their staying power in my memory. I have a feeling it will slip, like many stories, into my subconscious, and in a year I won't have anything but the vaguest recollection of the works. That said, they work. They're certainly not the best in Fantasy literature, but not the worst either. ( )

This omnibus edition contained the first three books in the Belgariad series, Pawn of Prophesy, Queen of Sorcery, and The Magician’s Gambit. The story is set in a land created by seven Gods. A legend involving those Gods and a powerful orb that led them to war undergirds the story in the Belgariad. The actual story itself begins thousands of years later after those events, and it focuses on the adventures of a 14-year-old orphan boy named Garion who is suddenly dragged from his farm home in pursuit of a mysterious stolen object that is somehow bound up in Garion's own past and future.

In crafting his world, Eddings does a lot of things right. He has created a fully fledged other world, with many different kingdoms and a long history that seems to extend beyond the pages of these books. And by having us travel this world with Garion, we’re able to get acquainted with it a bit at a time.

However, the overarching story is incredibly predictable. Part of this comes from the fact that there is a prophesy involved. What was especially maddening for me was that Garion couldn’t put things together. I also felt that Eddings just doesn’t raise the stakes for his characters enough. There are plenty of moments when the characters are in danger, I never got the sense that the evil characters were more powerful than Garion’s allies. They just weren’t nasty enough—at least not until well into the third book, where things turned suitably dark.

Also, most of the first two books had an episodic structure, as Garion and company traveled from one kingdom to another, usually picking up another ally along the way. Some of these adventures were good fun, and some of the supporting characters are wonderful (the comically boastful and chivalrous knight Mandorallen was a personal favorite), but the action doesn’t really build. If I had been reading this as three separate novels, I would have stopped at the end of Queen of Sorcery out of boredom and annoyance. (I really disliked the female character, Ce’Nedra, who was introduced in that book—and I was incredibly irritated that I knew exactly what her role was the moment she appeared without being told.) However, this being an omnibus, continuing into the next book required less effort than picking up another book would.So I pressed on.

This proved to be a very good thing because the final book in this volume, Magician’s Gambit, was a marked improvement over the other two. The exposition starts to give way to rising action, and the story finally gets exciting. The scary bits are finally scary, and the evil characters are finally evil enough. I found that I was starting to care a bit about what was going to happen, and there are a few aspects of the characters’ futures that do seem open to multiple possibilities. So I do plan to continue the series, but only because of the success of the third book.

See my complete review at Shelf Love. ( )

The Belgariad is an epic fantasy in the spirit of Lord of The Rings. However, it’s much easier reading, sort of a LOTR light. That’s not meant to imply that it’s not good though. The story is fun and the characters are interesting. You just don’t need to learn Middle Earth to get through the book :) Volume 1 contains 3 books (Pawn of Prophecy, Queen of Sorcery, Magician’s Gambit) ( )