Wastrel’s Reviews > Pawn of Prophecy > Status Update

My first fantasy as a kid (after Tolkien). Still love it.

(by which I mean that it helps to give credibility to the otherwise simplistic worldbuilding)

On which note: Silk has arrived. Silk was a big part of why I liked these books as a child, and a big part of what I expect to dislike about them as an adult. Because Silk leads to moderate fun dialogue...

...which, when I reviewed the Elenium a few years ago now, I found to be a problem in those later books. Because those novels were dominated by "witty banter" that had to carry not only all the infodumping AND the comic relief, but also most of the plot, and that, while fine in isolation, really got on my nerves over time and made it hard for everything else about the books to produce strong emotional reactions. And that produced a lot of tonal whiplash and too much exposure to Eddings' warped and objectionable worldview.

This is my concern with Silk; the novel so far has been mostly old-fashioned narration, and the introduction of Silk (and more generally expanding the cast list) is going to lead to a lot more dialogue, and in my experience that's not where Eddings had his strong points.

Also: it never occurred to me before, but is Silk an antisemitic caricature? He's obviously not explicitly Jewish and lacks a lot of Jewish markers (the Ulgos are the Jews of this story, pretty clearly, once we meet them). However, he is a duplicitous character with a love of money whose most prominent (and first-mentioned) feature is his long nose...

Maarten wrote: "My first fantasy as a kid (after Tolkien). Still love it."

Yes, mine too. [well, I was bought this book and The Colour of Magic at the same time. I can't remember which I read first, to be honest, but the Belgariad was definitely the one I read quickest and (at first) most. My parents had to laminate my copies with protective plastic wrap, I was reading them so much. I even have an additional two-volume hardcover omnibus somewhere!]

I don't love it anymore - I remember too much of the simplicity, the clichés, and the general racist/sexist worldview - but I do have affection for Eddings' writing, nostalgically. I re-read and reviewed the Elenium a few years back, and while I still really liked some things about it, other things I did not like, and I assumed the Belgariad would be the same.

I still mostly do. However, I'm surprised how much better it is so far than I was expecting. I do remember that a lot of the lazier, more... bantery, convivial tone set in during the Mallorean rather than the Belgariad, but let's see.

In general, my view is that Eddings actually has some really good ideas, it's just that his execution is often lazy, limited by his abilities, intentionally dumbed-down, or too warped by his own Issues. But, again, I'm trying to keep an open mind on this re-read!

True. It is simplistic fantasy besides sexist and a bit racist. Eddings child abuse (rediscovered after his death) also doesn’t help. Still I love the Belgariad/Mallorean and Elenium/Tamuli books as youth sentiment. For completeness I read all his books a few years ago. The books he wrote later are quite bad, basically even simpler versions of an already simplistic idea. (The dreamers books).

Maarten wrote: "True. It is simplistic fantasy besides sexist and a bit racist. Eddings child abuse (rediscovered after his death) also doesn’t help. Still I love the Belgariad/Mallorean and Elenium/Tamuli books a..."

Yeah, I never read that far. Nor, for some reason (because I was still re-reading his other books at that point) Althalus, which iirc is thought of as better than Dreamers but worse than Tamuli.

I did really like Belgarath and to a lesser extent Polgara, which I guess are also his most "radical" and interesting novels in terms of deviation from the norms of fantasy stories. But I've no idea how well they hold up execution-wise, comparatively...