Thursday , March 28 2024
Conclusion to Inheritance cycle fails to live up to promise of earlier books.

Book Review: Inheritance (Book Four of the Inheritance Cycle) by Christopher Paolini

I’ve begun to notice a worrying trend in fantasy novels these days. It seems like more and more people are writing epic length books and epic length series when they could just as easily have told their story in half the number of pages. Not only are many of these books a prodigious waste of paper, they do the authors a horrible disservice. Most of the time there’s a decent enough story lurking somewhere within the dross, if only the publishers had taken the time to properly edit the books. However, because they’ve been allowed to wander off in all directions authors learn all sorts of bad habits and their books either become progressively worse or appear to as we lose patience with them. There are times I want to reach into a book and shake the author by the shoulders and yell, “Get to the point already”.

When Christopher Paolini was 15 he self-published the young adult fantasy book Eragon. When he started to have some moderate success with sales on his own, Knopf, a division of Random House, republished the book and bought the rights to the series. Eragon and its sequel Eldest had shown a great deal of promise. An exciting adventure story filled with magic and magical beings. Sure it wasn’t the most original of ideas, but there were at least enough new wrinkles thrown in to make the first two installments compelling and interesting to read. Some of the sub plots were probably unnecessary but they at least helped further the story and didn’t interfere with its forward motion. However, even before the release of a third book, Brisingir — in what was supposed to have been a trilogy — there were indications Paolini was running into trouble. For along with the announcement of its forthcoming publication came the news that the series was being extended to a fourth book as the author hadn’t been able to find a way to finish it in three books.

Brisingir wasn’t a bad book, no better or worse than any number of fantasy books on the market, but it did very little to advance the overall plot of the series. There were a few pieces of information given out that would prove significant, but for the most part it was taken up with adventures which did little or nothing to advance the plot. So when it was announced that book four, Inheritance, published by Random House Canada on November 8 2011, was going to be over 800 pages long, I seriously wondered what Paolini was going to fill that number of pages with. Sure there were a number of questions that still remained to be answered, not least of which were how was the hero going to defeat a seemingly unbeatable foe, but even half those pages should have been sufficient to bring the series to a conclusion.

The most pressing of those questions was how the hero of the series, Eragon, and his dragon Saphira, were going to overcome the evil king Galbatorix who ruled Alagaesia with an iron fist. Eragon had been the first new dragon rider since Galbatorix had killed the rest of them, along with their dragons, when he rose to power. Everything we’ve seen in the series to date has made the success of the young rider look like a long shot at best. Even with the four races of people — elves, humans, dwarves and Urgal (a race of warriors with large ram’s horns growing out of their heads) — banded together to form an army of resistance known as the Varden, the forces of the king seem overwhelming. Not only are his armies equal to, if not larger, than those of the Varden, his powers of magic are so strong that even if Eragon and every other magic user in the kingdom linked their powers they wouldn’t be able to overcome him through force. Galbatorix is so strong he was able to force Eragon’s half-brother Murtagh, and his dragon Thorn, to swear oaths of allegiance to him against their wills; oaths that if broken would destroy them.

The only clue Eragon has to a possible solution to the problem of how to overcome Galbatorix is the second part of a cryptic piece of advice given him soon after he became a dragon rider: “When all seems lost and your power insufficient, go to the Rock of Kuthian and speak your name to open the Vault of Souls”. Unfortunately nobody he’s talked to, not even the werecat who gave him the advice, have any idea where either of them are located. When the leader of the Varden, Nasuada, is captured in a daring midnight raid by Murtagh and Thorn, the chances of their success have never seemed slimmer. Their armies may have captured some of the cities controlled by Galbatorix, but they are running out of supplies and have to figure out how to defeat him quickly.

From that summation of events the final book had the potential for at least some nail biting adventure. However, instead of focusing on the matter at hand, having Eragon search out the Rock of Kuthian and the Vault of Souls and then confronting Galbatorix, Paolini clutters up the book with page upon page of battles that could just as easily taken place off stage. While some people might find the battle scenes and side adventures exciting, overall they merely slow the story down and needlessly detract from the through line of the series. In fact by wasting so much time on insignificant details along the way, the final confrontation with Galbatorix when it comes feels rushed. Even worse, discovering the location of the Rock of Kuthian and the Vault of Souls feels incredibly contrived. It’s almost like the author used the peripheral details hoping to distract us from the weaknesses of his resolution for the main plot.

Even more difficult to understand is how the last hundred or so pages of the book are spent in a very awkward attempt to tie up all the lose ends he had created throughout the series. While questions like who should rule Alagaesia after Galbatorix could only be answered once he was defeated, there should have been a way of resolving other threads more organically. Instead it feels like Paolini has remembered at the last moment he’s left questions unanswered and tacked on the answers in order to satisfy fan forums.The most truthful part of his conclusion was the ambiguous way in which he dealt with some of the issues facing his characters. This at least fit in with the idea they, and the world they lived in, were facing with a new beginning and an uncertain future.

The first two books of the Inheritance Cycle showed great promise. Paolini had created a world complete with an intricate history and a variety of different races. However, somewhere along the way he lost his focus, and the details took on a life of their own until they overshadowed the main plot of the story. As a result the final book in the series, Inheritance, feels contrived and rather forced as the author tried to cram in answers to all the questions he had raised in the earlier books. While I’m sure die hard fans will find much to enjoy, it could have been much better.

About Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of three books commissioned by Ulysses Press, "What Will Happen In Eragon IV?" (2009) and "The Unofficial Heroes Of Olympus Companion" and "Introduction to Greek Mythology For Kids". Aside from Blogcritics he contributes to Qantara.de and his work has appeared in the German edition of Rolling Stone Magazine and has been translated into numerous languages in multiple publications.

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5 comments

  1. I really enjoyed Eragon in middle school and even enjoyed Eldest when it came out. But by Brisingr I started to realize that Paolini hadn’t grown at all between Eragon and then.

    He was still the loveless home-schooled teenager he was when he wrote the first book in the series. Every single romantic interaction was handled with all the maturity of a hormonal teenager despite the fact that Paolini was in his late twenties when Brisingr came out.

    I wasn’t the least bit surprised when Paolini concluded his “epic romance” with less than a sputter at the end of Inheritance.

    Even by Eldest I found more to like and care about in Roran than Eragon. Eragon was an immature, incompetent, unlikable shadow of a character by the time Inheritance came around which, coincidentally, was exactly what he was in Eragon. He showed absolutely no growth in the intervening time.

    His little crises of morality came across as the musings a child forced to ponder the ethics of the Holocaust. I got so incredibly tired of his immaturity, his complete inability to make a sound decision, and watching him get written out of every situation his stupidity put him in.

    There’s a very good reason homeschooling is a bad idea; it limits human interaction to a very small group of people. It creates a false understanding of how the world works and cripples emotional development unless done very carefully.

    I look at Paolini as almost a case study in parenting at this point. His writing tells me everything I need to know about his state of mind, and neither are things I can get behind.

    Oh, and @ the rest of this thread; Am I the only one who noticed that the majority of supporters of this series, even after Brisingr and Inheritance, have atrocious grammar and spelling?

  2. I, personally, like the detail, it makes inheritance seem even more realistic. Even more so, the way it is made longer isn’t just filled with junk like a student trying to make his paper large as possible. I do agree though that some of the battles seemed completely pointless. I think that he purposely left some of the questions undone or for another sires, and i like it that way.

  3. The reason they have blogs like these is to remind you. Lets say your doing a book review; you would want different opionions and/or reminders of the book.

  4. I am Disappointed. Very unsatisfying conclusion. Totally contrived.

  5. good reivew but i thought only one battle was useless (the battle of aroughs and also the end is confusingy