July 30, 2024
Imagine, if you will, a novel written specifically for young adults, roughly between the ages of 12 and 17, that desperately want the validation of feeling very, very smart. Something with the pretense of sophistication, yet still extremely digestible and relatively simple to parse. This is what Christopher Paolini has accomplished with his reentry into the world of Alagaesia, Murtagh. Unfortunately, his writing falls more firmly into the “pretense” camp than it does the “sophistication” camp. Paolini understands descriptive language, but does not seem to understand cadence, pacing, and structure, thereby missing what it is that makes language beautiful. He understands heightened, sophisticated language but uses it inelegantly, which feels like a contradiction of itself. Largely, his writing feels like that of a teenager that recently discovered the ultimate potential of adjectives, which is maybe informed by his status as the youngest ever author of a bestselling book series. If the first thing you published (via your parents publishing company) when you were 19 becomes an international sensation, maybe there is less impetus to grow as a writer.
Perhaps that’s a bit harsh. Don’t get me wrong, Eragon and it’s sequels were extraordinarily formative of and impactful on the development of my tastes, and I remember them fondly as maybe my first foray into the realm of real fantasy novels. I was, after all, one of the aforementioned 12-17-year-olds. Paolini does excel in some areas, and his success is not unwarranted, but his strengths lie primarily in the ideas phase of his writing. The world of Alagaesia is well-built—simple, elegant, and vibrant. His magic system is easy to understand but leaves room for nuance and mystery. The lore of the world is interesting and compelling. Even his character concepts have depth and complexity to them. Murtagh himself is a character with phenomenal potential. Highborn, daddy issues, extreme trauma, shifted power dynamics, forbidden love, living in isolation but with a strong moral compass and sense of social responsibility. But his execution leaves much to be desired. A great deal of his writing can be summed up with “angsty sadboy feels badly about things”. Even the introduction of more nuanced aspects of his personality, e.g. writing poetry, a fascination with the technical workings of magic/language, etc., are underdeveloped, leaving a series of metaphorical loose ends in place of a fully fleshed out protagonist. Couple this with mediocre prose, half-baked plot devices, and, newly, a general lack of vision that I do not recall in his original series, and the reader is left mostly disappointed that a premise and an environment with such potential is served so poorly by the actual prose. The forced nature of these flaws feels almost as though he felt compelled to revisit this world before he was ready.
Maybe most glaringly, the novel is bloated. Clocking in at 600-odd pages, many (though not all) of the issues could be solved by paring down to 350 or so. More than once, a character or concept is introduced to serve only as filler, doing little to build out the world, or the characters’ motivations, or the themes of the book. Whether this is the fault of Paolini or a failing of his editing team, I don’t know, but it creates pacing problems, leaving a book with little momentum through the first two-thirds or so, and dramatic beats that fail to effectively pull the reader through into the next piece of action. Repeatedly, I found it difficult to stay engaged enough to make it through more than a chapter or two at a time, a problem which decidedly should not exist in a fantasy-action novel written for young adults.
I knew when it was announced that Murtagh would be a step back into the easy to digest fantasy novels of my childhood, but I remembered and expected something a little more polished. Paolini is still a wonderful creator of worlds and peoples and environments worth delving into, but that does not make up for the swollen, shoddy nature of this mediocre effort.
5/10
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