The Belgariad.

[davywavy]

A few months ago, I announced to a flabbergasted world my intention to re-read David Eddings’ Belgariad. The reactions I got to this were largely predictable: confusion, disbelief, contempt, mockery. However, my word is my bond and, once given, is not lightly rescinded.
You might be wondering why I decided to put myself through the ordeal. Well, the fact is that when I was about 12-13 the Belgariad were pretty much my favourite books. They had stiff competition; The Stainless Steel Rat, Swallows and Amazons, John Norman’s Gor series, but from memory I’d say I had a real thing for Eddings’ work and I read and re-read them for several years. I remember picking up the first book ,Pawn of Prophecy, one Friday when I was off school (as this was the 80’s, I assume the teachers were on strike), and I read it cover to cover that evening and went to town the next day and bought the next one. I was instantly hooked.
With a gap of the best part of thirty years I was curious to know what I saw in them as I could remember very little and token_limey, upon hearing of my plan, generously donated his copies of the series to me. In an act of quite unpleasant spite, he also threw in copies of the sequel series to the Belgariad, the Malloreon, of which more later.
I’ve now read the Belgariad, and my abiding feeling is that the experience of reading it was the literary equivalent of pouring a bucket of water through a sieve: it’s not, in strict terms, badly written, but it flows through the brain leaving almost no trace of its passing. However, that’s the best I can say about it, and there are a few points about the series which struck me and I’d like to share with you. Points which, to be honest, highlight Eddings’ shortcomings as a fantasy author.

1) The Geography
Most fantasy novels or series take place in a cod-medieval Europe, even down to the scale. The Godfather of fantasy, the Lord of the Rings, has a map which can be overlaid in scale to Europe quite neatly, so if the Shire is somewhere in Somerset then Mordor is roughly equivalent to somewhere like Romania and I think this has set the pattern for fantasy as a genre.
The world of the Belgariad, however, is different. The world is staggeringly huge. If you consider the world map, it involves two entire continents which stretch from the Arctic to the Antarctic circle; and area roughly equivalent to that of Eurasia and Africa combined – and in this entire area there are a grand total of thirteen countries. The smallest country (Sendaria, which is supposed to be a tiny backwater) is about the size of Western Europe. The biggest is of a size which defies thought, maybe as big as Russia and most of Africa combined.
Every country has a clearly defined culture which is instantly recognisable from either history or other, better works. You have The Roman Country, The Egyptian Country, The Rohan/Mongol country, the Viking Country and so on, but there is absolutely no cultural cross-pollination between these countries at all. Their national characteristics are uniform and stop and start at the borders.

Ah, the borders. You see, like fantasy lands everywhere, the borders often fail to follow things like natural boundaries and instead are straight lines, much like the Midwest. So you have the Mongol Horsemen country bordering the Medieval Europe country along a perfectly straight border several thousand miles long across flat, featureless grassland. Perhaps they employ a relay of people using those lining machines they use on tennis courts to constantly re-draw a line to show where one country ends and another begins, because otherwise there’s no way at all to tell. However, if you’re born on one side of the line you’re an aggressive horse-warrior, and on the other side you’re a courtly spy and assassin, because THAT’S HOW NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS WORK AND DON’T YOU FORGET IT.
What’s more, these borders have been fixed, according to the abominable history of the world presented in the prologues of each book, for thousands of years. Despite, say, the Roman country (whose national characteristics feature them being incredibly mercantile and skilled traders) bordering the Fantasyland country (where everyone is a brave but stupid knight who talks with lots of thees and thous), there is no net flow of capital from one country to the other, and the two have never come to blows. Some suspension of disbelief is, shall we say, required.

Despite the huge scale of the map, the group of adventurers upon whom the book focuses move around the world like it takes no time. I remember watching Firefly and getting the impression that everything in outer space was nice and close together because you could get there by flying through space for a day or so at a steady thirty miles per hour, and the world of the Belgariad is like that – geography only slows the party down when the plot demands it. Otherwise you can walk to China and back in a week or two without too much difficulty.

And that’s just the Geography.

2) The Morality

The morality espoused by the characters in the Belgariad may be easily summed up thusly:
If you are Evil and attack a Good person, then the good person is morally justified in killing you in self-defence.
If you are Evil and are attacked by a Good person, then should you defend yourself the Good person is morally justified in not just killing you, but Sending you to Hell to be tortured for all eternity.

I’ve never read a series which not only has a more clearly defined alignment system in place, but also one which is so open to the sort of flexible interpretation (I'm good, so if I do something then the action itself must be good) you might find in a 12-year-old’s D&D campaign. Perhaps this explains what I saw in it at the time.

In the author’s introduction (a work of either staggering hubris and self-delusion, or one of the best sendups I’ve ever read), Eddings says that in writing the Belgariad he set out to write something “More realistic and gritty” than Lord of the Rings, and then compares his work to Homer. If he actually meant it with a straight face, in the light of the above he really had strayed into the depths of derangement before he died.

3) The characterisation
In the five books of the Belgariad, there are no more than about three dozen named characters in the entire world. A world which spans continents and where armies of millions (whose uniform is, appropriately enough, a red shirt) wheel and turn and march across the lands. So we’re not short of potential characters, it’s just that Eddings never bothers giving them names. As the party of Player Characters moves about on the map they encounter untold numbers of passing characters who, in a real world, would have things like dreams, motivations, personalities, and, above all, names. In the Belgariad they have none of those things.
In fact, the only thing which differentiates these extras from the party is that they don’t have names, as no characters have much in the way of an identifiable personality.

Let us step back for a moment and consider a master of the craft, Sir Terry Pratchett. I’ve never been much of a fan of Pratchetts plots . They tend not to be very good and fall to bits on serious examination. However, in terms of characterisation I can think of few authors writing today who can match him. Every character he creates – even throwaway bit-part characters in one scene – have not just personality but an identifiable voice which you can recognise in dialogue. I’ve read pages of Pratchetts dialogue in which I’ve never lost track of who is saying what despite him never using “he said/she said”; you can follow who is saying what by not just what they say, but also how they say it. In Eddings every line of dialogue has to be attributed to the speaker because not one character has an identifiable voice or personality. Moreover, he usually adds a defining feature of the character – i.e “Said the steel-clad knight Mandorallen”, or “Said the red-beared warrior Barak” – just in case you’ve forgotten what they’re supposed to be like from the last time you were told, earlier in the conversation. Which you might well have done.

4) The Metaphysics
The world in which the Belgariad takes place (which is never actually named, despite having read ten books and probably in excess of a million words) is one in which monsters, wizards and even gods stride the earth, sometimes twice a chapter. Despite this, characters believe or disbelieve in the supernatural on a pretty much random basis. If the plot demands the story cracks on then the King of Fantasyland believes in magic and happily accepts the main characters as powerful wizards, gives them the help they need and speeds them on their way. If, on the other hand, Eddings feels the need to have the powerful sorcerers who comprise the party get one over on an irritating petty official, then you as the reader are forced to sit through a scene like this:
”You?” sneered Sir Stupidde. “The powerful wizard of legend? Nonsense. No such man ever existed, and even if he did he wouldn’t be a pathetic old weakling like you. I shall not let you into the castle of King Goodlie – whose help you need to gain the next plot token and move to the Egyptian zone. Begone with you, you worthless beggar!” The unshaven knight shook a mailed fist.
“I don’t have time for this”, grumbled the old wizard Belgarath. Grabbing Sir Stupidde by his mailed shirt, he pointed one finger at the sun, which stopped dead. Then, muttering a short incantation and waving his arm, he caused the sun to whizz to and fro across the heavens before writing his own name in the sky. Finally he returned the solar orb to its proper place.
“Holy Belgarath!” gasped the mail-clad Sir Stupidde falling to his knees. “Forgive me for doubting you! I did not know! I shall take you to King Goodlie immediately!” He led them into the castle.
“The thing you must remember when you use magic”, said the grizzled old wizard Belgarath to Garion, “is that you must never do more than is needful, lest you cause the balance of nature to be disrupted.”
“I’ll remember that”, said the callow youth Garion.

The thing is, the entire population of one country – Romanland – don’t believe in magic (they’re described as solid and practical), despite the fact that their god takes an active hand in running the place and they live next door to Egyptland which is ruled by a giant talking snake. By this stage my suspension of disbelief was getting strained.
In the end, though, none of this matters. You see, none of the characters actually have free will, which rather undermines any sense of dramatic tension or even morality from the story. The primary motivating force of the narrative are a pair of competing “prophecies”, which are sentient, self-aware disembodied spirits who have competing ideas about how the universe should turn out but – get this – agree that certain things must happen, like the major characters in the books being in certain places at certain times. Leaving aside the observation that David Eddings doesn’t appear to have a foggiest what a prophecy actually is, this leads to scenes wherein characters arrive at the City of Eternal Wicked Evilitude and observe that they had to be there and no force could have prevented them. Forces like, say, the army of nameless, red-shirted extras they just carved their way through or indeed any sense of threat or challenge which the narrative might have vainly tried to construct. If the entire power of the universe means your characters have to survive battles and the machinations of ne’er-do-wells, then what’s the point in writing the book at all?

In reading the Belgariad, I found myself wondering if George RR Martin wrote Game of Thrones as a reaction to Eddings; Martin’s huge world, populated with hundreds – maybe thousands by now – of named characters and intricate politics between them, is the exact opposite of Eddings’ despite the settings being nominally similar. The way that Martin ensures that no character is unkillable and will bump of major characters at the drop of a hat – as opposed to Eddings’ characters coming back from the dead on a regular basis – is definitely refreshing. I get why Eddings was successful at the time (it was the peak of the Dungeons and Dragons boom and there was little enough fantasy literature out there), but if he wrote now he’d just be another hack writer on the creaking shelves of Forbidden Planet.

Oh, and like I say, token_limey also gave me the sequel series, the Malloreon. I shan’t say much about that because it’s the most risible, awful, terrible pile of steaming not as good as the Belgariad.