Wastrel’s Reviews > Pawn of Prophecy > Status Update
Wastrel
is on page 70 of 332
This is... far better than I was expecting/remembering!
The prose of the Tolkien-rip-off prologue is pretty bad. But the prose of the main story is (while old-fashioned, almost Victorian) pretty decent, with some nice turns of phrase, and the characterisation so far is simple but effective. Very little has happened, but it's intriguing.
I still expect it will go downhill...
— Jun 10, 2024 12:24PM
The prose of the Tolkien-rip-off prologue is pretty bad. But the prose of the main story is (while old-fashioned, almost Victorian) pretty decent, with some nice turns of phrase, and the characterisation so far is simple but effective. Very little has happened, but it's intriguing.
I still expect it will go downhill...
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Wastrel
is on page 78 of 332
Good: I like the fact that there's not only a map at the beginning of the novel (the continent) but also one at the beginning of the story proper (the local country). Sadly, the latter map is virtually illegible.
I also like that Eddings has put time and effort into distances, with a character quoting the average speed of travel by wagon, and then a days-travelled a few pages later. Adds more solidity.
— Jun 11, 2024 11:51AM
I also like that Eddings has put time and effort into distances, with a character quoting the average speed of travel by wagon, and then a days-travelled a few pages later. Adds more solidity.
Virtually everything that happens in this quick summary of this world's history is directly ripped from Tolkien (and simplified with the whole semitic one-people-one-god thing). However, it's not ripped in order, and Eddings is actually quite clever in how he takes at least a dozen different elements from Tolkien's mythos and recombines them in a new way to form a coherent story.
I'm reminded of Eddings' description of his motivations and method: a failed author, he happened to find a copy of LOTR in a shop, and suddenly realised how many editions it had gone through, and what that meant about its profitability. So he decided to copy it, to get rich quick. His theory was that successful myths - whether greek, semitic, arthurian etc, all the way down to tolkien - used specific evocative ideas and images that readers couldn't get enough of - iirc he compared them to "crack", and he thought that by imitating these tropes (what today we'd call "memes") he could hook his own audience on a concentrated form of the drug.
Cynical though this is, his success kind of suggests he may have been right. And you can see right from the start of the novel how Eddings is doing this.
[although, to be fair, the whole "farmboy who is secretly both a prince and also the prophesied messiah" is kind of a thing that probably owes more to Eddings than to anyone else]
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Meanwhile, 70 pages in and there's only been one objectively racist element (Arends are all congenitally stupid). The depiction of the Murgos is also unflattering and exoticising... but, to be fair, if a random Mongol did turn up in medieval Norfolk, he'd probably come across to the locals in a similar fashion.
And the most sexist thing so far is the suggestion that all young girls like sweets. And the existence of a prototypical manipulative-young-seductress character, but, to be fair, she's not unbelievable and her personality is not unmotivated given the context.
I expect much worse to come.
And regarding child-beating, only one 'loving' adult has actively hit a child on one occasion and it was depicted as out of character. Although twisting children's ears and dragging them about is the norm...