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beccaelizabethI finished reading Belgarath the Sorcerer.
Yes, I hated all 10 books that came before it. I have no logical justification here, I just kinda had to read the book.
(This is why me actually buying comics becomes dangerous - have you ever tried to actually own a complete run of comics? Yes? Well, try doing that with Justice League and all associated characters titles... Yes that included Batman. *shudders* Obsession - sometimes an actual bad thing.)
(/tangent)
So, anyway - I'd call this book completely useless, but it did help me pin down exactly what I like the least about this author's characterisation. Even ignoring the entire attitude to women side. (you know that thing where men can be smart and studious and logical but women just 'instinctively' know? That thing is not flattering.)
Nobody and nothing becomes. It just is.
The book ought to be about the whole slow growth and change and development, of nations as well as individuals. How all this came to be, sort of thing.
Instead, whenever we meet someone, they're already who they're going to be.
We meet Silk age 20. Any significant differences? Why no, he's already the best, knows back roads Belgarath doesn't after 7000 years of travel, has contacts everywhere, and has already established the two main cover identities we see him use later on.
So why the hell did we need to meet him? We learn nothing new about him.
See - pointless. Seriously.
Even the birth of nations - within 18 years of the primordial kingdom of Aloria being broken up the resulting kingdoms have already assumed seperate characters! They start with scrubby pony looking horses, within 18 years of selective breeding they have clearly superior horses. And their whole way of life has developed. Apparently nobody lived like that in old Aloria, and nobody in the new Algaria wants to live the old way. WTF? Again we learn nothing - about an entire country!
It's not just historically implausible. He's made himself an excuse for the entirely lacking sort of history he's got. Prophecy made everything get stuck. But it's psychologically implausible too. There's individual scenes where people react plausibly, but string them all together and you get people who jump between quantum states of being, never having transitional times, and just basically are who they're going to be.
I think it's summed up with Silk saying he was born for this work. It's like the author podded them out full grown. It's annoying as all hell.
Plus there's little things like how apparently locking two teenagers in a room for a couple of weeks until they agree to marry is in fact acceptable behaviour. Because of course there would be falling in love. And not any of the grotesqueries of human behaviour. Gah!
Plus there's how they deal with Belgarath's alcoholic decline. His wife dies so he crawls into a bottle to hide. It's the single most plausible moment in his whole psyche, given that they've been together for a few thousand years and he doesn't know how to live without her. But does he crawl back out again? Do we get an interesting, psychologically involving story of how he gets over it?
No. His god yells at him, and suddenly he's not an alcoholic any more.
And then - and I hated this - his brother sorceror gives him ale as soon as they get together again, because clearly Belgarath wasn't like other drunks, because he had a reason.
WTF?
Every drunk has his reasons. Trust me on this, I've had occasion to observe. The problem comes when someone has that twist in their mind that goes "I feel bad, therefore I need a drink". After that it all goes downhill.
I mean the casual shrugging off of alcohol abuse among Alorns (while at the same time absolutely condemning any other kind of drug use) just pissed me off all through the books. But now what's the author saying about how to recover? Have god yell at you! Then you can drink as much as you want but you'll never get that bad again!
See, plausibility isn't even a goal there.
All the way through, we don't see people learning what to do, we see how they listen to the prophecy and do what it says. Even when this contradicts previously given information, all that happens is people just suddenly know what they've got to do. It's bloody boring. We don't see them become the people that would react the right way in that circumstance, we simply see them being picked up and placed by prophecy.
I think the author actually got worse. I mean the ten book series kinda had development and sense making. At least at the start. Garion got a grand tour to teach him how to be king. We saw him learn stuff and apply it. It worked. But this Belgarath thing? Not so much at all. It's all from outside. He found god cause god put the idea in his head, he obeys the prophecy cause it tells him what needs doing, and sometimes he has amusing banter.
Blah.
Also, and this irritates more the more of a particular author I read, some people only have a few characters in them. They can give them different names, but they can't pull out different voices. Well, in DE's work you can tell the ones who speak with thees apart from the ones who don't, but aside from that? Rub the names out and mostly they smoosh together. Everyone's the exact same kinds of funny, and everyone relates in the exact same ways.
Boring!
... the fact that I'm now going to go read the Polgara book just proves that despite recent progress I am not, in fact, sane.
Yes, I hated all 10 books that came before it. I have no logical justification here, I just kinda had to read the book.
(This is why me actually buying comics becomes dangerous - have you ever tried to actually own a complete run of comics? Yes? Well, try doing that with Justice League and all associated characters titles... Yes that included Batman. *shudders* Obsession - sometimes an actual bad thing.)
(/tangent)
So, anyway - I'd call this book completely useless, but it did help me pin down exactly what I like the least about this author's characterisation. Even ignoring the entire attitude to women side. (you know that thing where men can be smart and studious and logical but women just 'instinctively' know? That thing is not flattering.)
Nobody and nothing becomes. It just is.
The book ought to be about the whole slow growth and change and development, of nations as well as individuals. How all this came to be, sort of thing.
Instead, whenever we meet someone, they're already who they're going to be.
We meet Silk age 20. Any significant differences? Why no, he's already the best, knows back roads Belgarath doesn't after 7000 years of travel, has contacts everywhere, and has already established the two main cover identities we see him use later on.
So why the hell did we need to meet him? We learn nothing new about him.
See - pointless. Seriously.
Even the birth of nations - within 18 years of the primordial kingdom of Aloria being broken up the resulting kingdoms have already assumed seperate characters! They start with scrubby pony looking horses, within 18 years of selective breeding they have clearly superior horses. And their whole way of life has developed. Apparently nobody lived like that in old Aloria, and nobody in the new Algaria wants to live the old way. WTF? Again we learn nothing - about an entire country!
It's not just historically implausible. He's made himself an excuse for the entirely lacking sort of history he's got. Prophecy made everything get stuck. But it's psychologically implausible too. There's individual scenes where people react plausibly, but string them all together and you get people who jump between quantum states of being, never having transitional times, and just basically are who they're going to be.
I think it's summed up with Silk saying he was born for this work. It's like the author podded them out full grown. It's annoying as all hell.
Plus there's little things like how apparently locking two teenagers in a room for a couple of weeks until they agree to marry is in fact acceptable behaviour. Because of course there would be falling in love. And not any of the grotesqueries of human behaviour. Gah!
Plus there's how they deal with Belgarath's alcoholic decline. His wife dies so he crawls into a bottle to hide. It's the single most plausible moment in his whole psyche, given that they've been together for a few thousand years and he doesn't know how to live without her. But does he crawl back out again? Do we get an interesting, psychologically involving story of how he gets over it?
No. His god yells at him, and suddenly he's not an alcoholic any more.
And then - and I hated this - his brother sorceror gives him ale as soon as they get together again, because clearly Belgarath wasn't like other drunks, because he had a reason.
WTF?
Every drunk has his reasons. Trust me on this, I've had occasion to observe. The problem comes when someone has that twist in their mind that goes "I feel bad, therefore I need a drink". After that it all goes downhill.
I mean the casual shrugging off of alcohol abuse among Alorns (while at the same time absolutely condemning any other kind of drug use) just pissed me off all through the books. But now what's the author saying about how to recover? Have god yell at you! Then you can drink as much as you want but you'll never get that bad again!
See, plausibility isn't even a goal there.
All the way through, we don't see people learning what to do, we see how they listen to the prophecy and do what it says. Even when this contradicts previously given information, all that happens is people just suddenly know what they've got to do. It's bloody boring. We don't see them become the people that would react the right way in that circumstance, we simply see them being picked up and placed by prophecy.
I think the author actually got worse. I mean the ten book series kinda had development and sense making. At least at the start. Garion got a grand tour to teach him how to be king. We saw him learn stuff and apply it. It worked. But this Belgarath thing? Not so much at all. It's all from outside. He found god cause god put the idea in his head, he obeys the prophecy cause it tells him what needs doing, and sometimes he has amusing banter.
Blah.
Also, and this irritates more the more of a particular author I read, some people only have a few characters in them. They can give them different names, but they can't pull out different voices. Well, in DE's work you can tell the ones who speak with thees apart from the ones who don't, but aside from that? Rub the names out and mostly they smoosh together. Everyone's the exact same kinds of funny, and everyone relates in the exact same ways.
Boring!
... the fact that I'm now going to go read the Polgara book just proves that despite recent progress I am not, in fact, sane.