(Original review, 2005)

"Urgit, High King of Othol Murgos, sat on his garish throne in the Drojim Palace of Rak Urga"

In "Sourceress of Darshiva" by David Eddings

"Urgit, High King of Othol Murgos, was wearing a blue doublet and hose, and he sat up on his garish throne in the Drojim Palace."

In "Seeress of Kell" by David Eddings

Uhm...something is afoot here...

The situation is that the demarcation lines between 'literature' and 'popcorn reads' and all points in-between run through the middle of genre fiction as they do through the mainstream, not outside of it. Within the fantasy field you have stuff like Eddings, Gemmell and Brooks at the lowest-common denominator, multi-volume, sub-Tolkien, somewhat mindless end of the spectrum and then you have people like Peake, Wolfe, Chabon, some elements of Moorcock and the magic realists hanging out at the literate, 'important themes' end of the spectrum (but not you, Mr. Goodkind, no matter what you say, you're way down in the hole) and the likes of Mieville, Martin, Erikson and Bakker running in-between. Gemmell and Eddings both wrote terrible, paint by numbers fantasy - although Eddings was somewhat worse. Neither of them had any capacity for creating characters or landscapes, and they deserve to be remembered as feeding adolescent pimply geeks with their cheap thrills. Tolkien created a whole culture, a new vocabulary, a whole new way of writing, and for this reason remains the master. You really can't compare hacks with genius. Despite being in Hell Pit of SF, David Eddings's names are "excellent" - he "understands" the value of linguistic patterns, so there prefixes such as Bel- and Pol- indicating service to a particular god, and phonemes such as Gar to indicate family relations (Belgarath, Garion, Polgara). Each country in his Belgariad and Mallorean series has its own linguistic quirks, but they're not too heavy-handed: he can make a character fit in or stand out from a community at a stroke. Added to that, he's got some of the best nicknames: Silk and Velvet are, of course, "sneaky and brilliant spies", whilst Old Wolf is the "garrulous but wise alter-ego of a great wizard."

People who don't know any better confuse SF with the dreary swords n' magic dross churned out by the like of Eddings: "Urgit, High King of Othol Murgos, sat on his garish throne in the Drojim Palace of Rak Urga" Book 5 (5 fercrisesake) of the Malloreon. This witless guff sells by the million to people who find "LOTR" a bit of an intellectual stretch.

Too bad Eddings couldn't write even if his life depended on it. He just gives SF a bad name. ( )

And the last of the Eddings books to add for now...always a delight to read! ( )

Omnibus, standard drill.

Sorceress of Darshiva:

Like Demon King, Sorceress is a little disjointed - it's very episodic, and the episodes don't have a ton of narrative or thematic flow to them. But on the whole I find them more entertaining than the previous volume, and while it's not quite up to King of the Murgos on my fondness scale, some bits - the Senji sidebar, the injured wolf, the last ridiculously dramatic scene - are personal favorites. I do get a little tired of the insufficiently varied random refugee/seaman/peasant exposition vehicles - Eddings can do about two dialects, neither particularly charming, and he uses them way too often. (Also, the one that's explicitly bad-Western Texas is particularly jarring because it's so specific and familiar - it always jerks me entirely out of the story.) And there's just not a ton of narrative tension, because the story is so prophecy-driven - it's very clear that things will work out precisely how they're supposed to work out, and so no incidental danger is actually a threat.

This is also a good place to rant about Vella. Like Taiba in the first series, she's an attractive woman who's aware and in control of her sexuality. She has a bit more personality than Taiba ever did, but she is still explicitly being groomed to be a "reward" for one of the male characters - there's the instant-obsession factor that's frankly creepy and she has no other goals or desires at all. (Other than wanting to be worth a lot of money when she's sold. Because she's a Nadrak woman, and therefore property, but not a slave, really, it's fine... gah.) Plus, just as a bonus irritation, this volume has a detailed sidebar of her feminization - she can't just be a really hot armed badass, she has to wear dresses instead of leather and realize "there's more to being a woman" than she could possibly have known. Despite, you know, being an at least thirty year old widow. Gah. I like Vella a lot - I have a weakness for leather-clad knife-wielding foul-mouthed badasses - and I really wish she could slice her way out of this story and find one where she's taken seriously.

Seeress of Kell:

As with Enchanter's End Game, I like the climax and the leisurely happy ending a lot, and I am much less excited about all the random filler beforehand. The adventure on Perivor in particular was just egregiously pointless - it might have made a decent stand-alone short story, but there's no tension, no mystery, and a whole lot of wasted time. The Poledra reveal should have been more interesting, but it was set up so there was no tension for the reader, so all of the shocked characters just looked rather thick.

I do like the Malloreon somewhat better than the Belgariad - it's denser and aimed a little more carefully at adult readers. But neither series is shooting for a particularly high bar - the writing is understandable but hardly elegant, the plots transparent, the narrative tension nonexistant, and the characters lovable without being all that deep. (And the surface feminism is badly undercut by the core gender-essentialist sexism that pervades the entire work.) And the Malloreon in particular is plagued by what feels like a fundamental lack of plot - there's just not enough to do to fill five books, so Our Heroes have essentially random adventures while on rails towards the final event.
The fact that this is considered a point of worldbuilding is... unconvincing.

So, short version, these are beloved childhood books for me, and I'd consider giving them to an interested ten-year-old who was excited to read Adult Books, but otherwise, these are firmly Nostalgia Only. ( )

I am glad to have finished reading the Malloreon. It means that I will not have to read any more books after it. Granted, there are books like Polgara the Sorceress and The something-or-other Codex, but I'll put off reading those books until I have nothing better to do.

I really, really did not like this series.

My biggest complaint is that it's derivative. Not only is it derivative of Tolkien, which, arguably, most post-Tolkien fantasy is, but it was derivative of the Belgariad, the previous series of Eddings. I felt doubly cheated: I've already read this story when I read Tolkien, AND I've already read this story when I read your last series!

My second complain is that it was five books just to tie up loose ends and do what should have happened on the last page of the last book of the Belgariad. Yeah, I totally called the end before I even picked up the Malloreon. I felt insulted as a reader.

Not only was the series just a massive attempt to tie up loose ends, but also, I felt that Eddings did not have enough story to actually do it all, so occasionally, two of the characters will break off into a dialogue, discussing clever things to do, or a better way to handle a situation, and about half the time after that, they actually go ahead and implement that plan. The other half, they go about doing what they've always been doing.

Further, if the story wasn't stretched thin enough, there's no real driving force behind the story. Well, there could have been, but Eddings sucked out the last bit of driving force and put it in the form of the Prophecy. In non-fantasy speak, that's called an Outline. In fact, it would have been more interesting to read just the outline, instead of having the characters just slave over the every last demand of the prophecy, and how you have to be somewhere at a specific time, or have to say something to somebody on the fifth Tuesday after the vernal equinox, or some other such silly thing that puts the characters in the right place at the right time without any real reason for doing so.

Additionally, the series depends too strongly on deus ex machina, quite literally.

And, further, the book, at times, insults the reader's intelligence by trying, and failing, to hide things from the reader. Or maybe doing this poorly so even a simple-minded reader (Eddings' target demographic?) could feel smart about picking up on something before the characters in the book do, you know, when they're not being theoretically clever.

When I finished reading this book, I took all my Belgariad- and Malloreon-related books promptly to the used book store. For serious. It was like: last page? Okay, get in the car.

I cannot recommend this book, or any other book written by Eddings to anybody, knowing full well that there are much better fantasy books out there. Tolkien's books, for example, are the pinnacle of Epic or High Fantasy (for these are, actually, the same thing). Donaldson wrote a tolkienoid series, but it was actually much better than anything I've read by Eddings. Of course, if you're sick of the Epic Fantasy Schmepic Schmantasy elves and dwarfs and dragons and evil sorcerers, you'll definitely like Sword and Sorcery authors like Moorcock or Lieber.

But, avoid Eddings. Life is short enough, you know? ( )

It was great to read these again. And I just love the collectors edition. I still have to get the Belgariad collectors edition.