The Unbearable Dream

I first read David Eddings' Belgariad series back in high school. I hardly remember anything of it today, other than a generally warm and fuzzy feeling of liking it, and the Mallorean series that followed.

Years later, I tried one of his other series, and found it somehow less enjoyable than I remembered his writing being. The characters seemed pretty derivative of the vague recollections I'd had of the the previous series.

Still more years later, I tried his standalone book, The Redemption of Althalus. By this point, he was officially writing in partnership with his wife, Leigh. It seemed likely he'd been doing this all along and simply not putting her name on the books, but in any case, I'd found the new book to have another drop in quality. Maybe I blamed it on the co-author, maybe not, but either way, I swore off David Eddings for a while.

Now I have recently completed reading their newest series, The Dreamers, and I can tell you that I have now sworn off David Eddings permanently. This four book series was absolutely horrible, and I can think of nothing in it to recommend to anybody, no matter how much they like fantasy fiction, or how forgiving they are when it's written badly.

The cast of characters -- which numbers a few dozen -- all act and speak with essentially one voice. They all speak with "a wry smile," or "no hint of a joke," or "a grin," when they deliver painfully unfunny punch lines to close out passages of prose that rarely run more than two pages in length. When a character is described to the reader, it's always in the exact same language, whether it's the authors' narration, or the voice of an actual character. We hear repeatedly of "the archer who doesn't know how to miss," "the warrior queen," "the cunning little smith," and so on, again and again and again.

And again. Because the books repeat themselves endlessly. The plot often sees characters breaking off into groups, and then reuniting a few pages down the road to then explain to the other characters in excruciating detail everything that happened while they were separated. Everything we the readers have already read. Probably more than once, actually, because the narrative perspective shifts frequently, very often covering the exact same plot points two or three times. (But never offering a truly new perspective, since the characters all act and sound alike.) Put simply, it was quite common for any significant plot point in the story to be covered five or six times -- three or four times "as it happened" from different characters' perspectives, and another two or three times as those characters then retold what happened to other characters they met later.

And if only the repetition had been confined to a single book of the series. The structure of each of the four books is all but identical. A fantasy land, divided by geographical features into northern, eastern, southern, and western domains, is coming under attack by foul creatures encroaching from the desert at the center of the land. The plot of each of the four books is exactly as follows: one of the four domains is the next to be threatened; an army is brought to defend it; they spend hundreds of pages building fortifications and making preparations; the enemy army makes its advance; before any interesting combat or meaningful jeopardy can occur, supernatural forces erupt from nowhere to shut off the invasion for good. Lather, rinse, repeat for four books.

There's no sense of risk, no investment in any of the caricatures, no quality language in the prose, nothing but a reprehensible waste of ink and paper.

Why then would I actually wade through four books and actually read the whole damn series? Well, because of all these work trips I'd been taking in the last month and a half. See I had book one and two with me on one such trip, and nothing else to read. I knew before my flight landed in San Diego for Comic-Con than the first book of the series was pretty lame, but it was all I had with me to read. There was nothing else to fill the evenings in the hotel rooms, nothing else to read on the airplane back. By the time I'd returned to Denver, I was basically halfway through the four book series. And maybe thinking of liking those older Eddings books from years ago, I stupidly thought that maybe it would turn around in the last two books, and forged ahead.

Instead, the ending was the worst literary atrocity of all. In the last ten pages, the authors had the god characters involved in the story disrupt time and essentially render all the events of the four book series as never having happened.

I'm way against burning books, let me tell you. But I want to burn these books. I want to leave a flaming bag of poo on the Eddings' doorstep. I want my money back. I want my time back.

Most of all, I want to make sure that no one else I know ever wastes their time on these books like I wasted mine. Life is too short to read crap like this.