The Epistler's Murtagh Review!
Dec. 13th, 2023 08:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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antishurtugal_rebornWell, I finished the book nobody asked for, and other than actually being good (HAHAHAHNO) it would only have been sort of worth reading if I actually cared about the alleged romance between Murtagh and Nausea. Which of course I don’t. Or, alternatively, if I wanted to see Murtagh turned into a whiny klutz with the IQ of a teaspoon.
As such Anya was correct in labelling this thing #NotMyMurtagh and #NotMyThorn, and my earlier renaming the protagonist here to Morontagh in the WormFork Spork was even more dead on than I realised at the time. But moron that later.
This thing contains all of Paolini’s worst habits, and all of them have somehow become even more pronounced. The results are not pretty to say the least.
Plot
It won’t surprise anyone who’s familiar with Paolini’s work to know that there really is no plot in this book, or at least that what plot there is to be found is so threadbare it wouldn’t be enough to carry a short story.
Instead our old friend Padding, aka “Essential Story Elements” is back in full force. For about 80% of the book all Morontagh does is go on various stupid unnecessary sidequests which in video game fashion net him a growing collection of random items, including such standard RPG fare as gemstones, a dented goblet, a cursed dragon scale, and a skillbook for levelling up on magic.
There’s no villain until right at the end, and the actual overarching threat takes even longer to be established, and it’s not worth it when it does. I’m not even going to bother with spoiler tags because I couldn’t care less about whether I’m spoiling this for anyone: Morontagh and his scaly red donkey stumble across an extremely generic creepy cult who are led by a “witch-woman” who never actually practises witchcraft (in book one it’s established that witches rely on herbs and potions, but she uses magic pretty much like a Rider would but without the AL). The “witch”, Bachel, is clearly supposed to be creepy and seductive but just comes across as an annoying weirdo who clearly loves hearing herself talk because she never shuts the fuck up, to the point that she repeats herself to a truly aggravating degree.
Your average exchange with her goes something like this: “I am the Speaker! You don’t understand anything but soon you will! Now serve me! Also did I mention that I’m the Speaker? I just feel like that’s kinda important for you to remember. Also I’m the Queen of Crows and this has absolutely no relevance to anything. OM NOM NOM FOOD NOM.”
Yeah, when she’s not endlessly monologuing she’s stuffing her face during a string of meaningless feasts put together out of food which apparently comes from nowhere. Not that spontaneously appearing food is unique to Cult Town, as I’ll get into later.
Anyway, so after even more wasted time it’s finally revealed that the cult is worshipping an extremely generic Cthulhu wannabe which, in a shocking and not at all recycled twist, has supposedly been manipulating events this entire time. You know, exactly like the Eldunarya. And any minute now it’s going to rise out of the earth and devour the sun. Also Bachel and her cultists trained Galby with Durza’s assistance and she essentially sent him to go kill the other Riders. So yeah, dude was being used the whole time. Congratulations, Chris; you just neutered your original villain even further and made your supposed hero’s big victory even more meaningless.
Then, in a truly offensive and tasteless turn of events, Morontagh is taken prisoner and tortured into becoming Bachel’s lackey, along with Thorn. Because apparently Paolini couldn’t think of anything else to do with those two except “reluctant slaves of the villain”. This was about the point when I got out and out angry because come on. After all Murtagh and Thorn have gone through, Paolini thought it would be a good idea to retraumatise the pair of them by making them suffer the exact same thing as they did last time around? It’s not just repetitive and lazy; it’s just unfair to both of them.
Morontagh eventually escapes thanks to a new character who was another of the straws which broke the dromedary. Remember how people have frequently said the Urgals were an offensive Native American stereotype? Well now Paolini finally said the quiet part loud because we meet one who:
-Is a shaman who previously lived in the wild With Every Beast His Brother and had a raven familiar
-Speaks in broken English with turns of phrase such as “Murtagh-man”
-Becomes “blood brothers” with him via a ceremony involving pressing cuts together (not something that’s ever been proven to have been practised by any Native American nation, but rather something that has appeared in clichéd fictional portrayals of them, which in my opinion just makes it even worse)
-Is named Uvek Windtalker. Yes, really.
How the hell was this not stopped by an editor? There were ten of the useless fuckers! I checked!
Anyway, Windtalker is essentially Morontagh’s Man Friday from then on until he swiftly disappears out of the book forever. Morontagh does a pointless dungeon crawl with random new very uncreative monsters including a blatant rehash of the Ra’zac, kills Bachel and saves the damsel in distress, and somehow survives a ridiculously fatal injury long enough to rip off the scene in Return of the King where Frodo wakes up back in Rivendell. It’s so blatant he even wakes up wearing a white nightshirt.
He and Nausea share a painfully unconvincing “romantic” scene together before Morontagh decides to stay with her and send Eragon a message about the Elder God thingy, the end. Good lord.
There are also, as usual, a bunch of subplots that get introduced and are never resolved such as the werecat kidnappings and what exactly certain side characters Morontagh meets are up to. Making this even worse is that in the Author’s Note Paolini explains that he did that on purpose. That’s not how you do sequel bait, dude. That’s how you leave a book feeling unfinished.
Prose
This has progressed in some areas and regressed in others. There’s a lot more descriptions of minor incidental worldbuilding stuff such as carvings and architecture unique to a particular area (and more “dwarf-made rugs” – why are the dwarves doing all the rug-making in this setting?). I also noticed that Paolini has gone from not describing characters all that much (unless it’s a man with hairy rippling pecs, of course) to giving exacting details about all the random NPCs Morontagh meets. It does give more of a sense of immediacy and makes the setting feel less faceless, but it also gets pretty tedious after a while because he meets a lot of throwaway NPCs.
As for the prose itself, the regression I referred to becomes painfully obvious in many places, where the descriptions revert to Eragon era style short choppy sentences which don’t flow together at all. Fight scenes are still bogged down by too much exposition and the POV character having far too much room to think. And we’re still getting long detailed descriptions of completely irrelevant shit such as Morontagh randomly stumbling across an otter, which he has no thoughts about.
Speaking of thoughts, far too much of this book is spent on watching Morontagh ruminate about past events, dream sequences, and flashbacks. The flashbacks do serve to flesh out his backstory in places, but it’s generally to no purpose or distastefully used as an opportunity to Sue praise Eragon and Nausea, both of whom Morontagh assures us are Totally Awesome. Even after all the horrible things Eragon said and did to him Morontagh only ever resents him in a way that’s framed as sulky jealousy. The rest of the time he’s thinking about how brave and heroic and noble his shithead brother is, and how he defeated Galby by “helping him” (this comes up at least three times). Nor does he seem to have realised that Nausea was clearly using emotional manipulation to get him on her side and never actually gave a fuck about him. Instead he constantly thinks of how brave and regal she is and how he could never have resisted the torture she went through the way she did, even though the torture he suffered at Galby’s hands is described here and is absolutely far worse. Because yes, it’s confirmed here that he did indeed give in because Thorn was being tortured too and he couldn’t bear to let him keep suffering.
Side note: Thorn’s egg was apparently really big, as in way bigger than Saphira’s. Apparently it was “knee high”.
It’s also painfully obvious that this book was not edited. At all.
First and foremost, my amazing editor, Michelle Frey. Your intimate knowledge of Alagaësia and the characters who populate it helped me elevate this book beyond what I thought possible. I am forever in your debt. No author could ask for a better working relationship. Hard to believe we’re lucky enough to still be doing this after so long.
Also in Editorial: Knopf publishing director Melanie Nolan, Andriannie Santiago, and veteran reader Michele Burke.
Copyediting: The incomparable Artie Bennett, the dedicated and eagle-eyed Alison Kolani, Janet Renard, and Amy Schroeder (masters all of grammar, punctuation, and continuity).
Managing Editorial: Janet Foley and Jake Eldred, heroes in managing (and re-managing) all the moving parts required to keep the book on track.
So he had an editorial staff of about ten people.
TEN.
And yet not one of them spotted the following massive continuity errors:
-Murtagh is eating “jerky” which somehow turns into “flatbread” on page 178
-Murtagh was “running past” when his evil dad threw his sword at him when he told the tale in Eragon, but now he was sitting at the fireplace?
-Eragon taught him words in the AL during their time together in Eragon. No he didn’t. (Morontagh also has multiple moments of thinking fondly about those times and the companionship and everything, when what was actually shown was the two of them constantly bickering and Eragon treating him like shit and refusing to trust him. Come to that, Morontagh has also conveniently forgotten all about the horrible things Eragon said to him on the Burning Plains)
-In Inheritance Queen Nausea stripped the Evil Nobles of their titles and “ill gotten wealth” but didn’t execute them. Except never mind actually she executed a whole bunch of them and the surviving sons and allies are in hiding
-Morontagh is stated to only have apples and jerky in his supplies, yet at one point he’s suddenly eating porridge, and on at least three different occasions he’s drinking tea (FUCKING TEA) with breakfast. Not only that but it’s multiple different kinds of tea, and it’s never explained where he got it from when he’s been living in the wilderness for a year. That aside, can we please just drop it with the goddamn tea already? There are other beverages which would be available in Ye Medieval Times! Cordial, for one. Herb water. Diluted wine.
-Morontagh suddenly has a “blue werelight” in one scene instead of the normal red
No doubt I missed a few, but you get the idea. This is just completely inexcusable, not to mention unprofessional. There are self-published novels by no-name authors which had more care put into them than this overpriced piece of trash. But nope – nobody, from editors to cover artist to the author himself gave a rat’s rear and boy does it show.
Oh, and he still overuses “maw” and “garbed” to an obnoxious degree.
Characters
Murtagh
The Artist Formerly Known As Murtagh is a complete and utter idiot in this book, to an infuriating degree. But that’s okay because it’s for a reason! And that reason is that Paolini is so hopelessly bad and lazy at his job that he clearly couldn’t think of a way to place the character in peril without having him constantly blundering into obvious traps and trusting people with the words OBVIOUS BAD GUY tattooed on their foreheads.
This trained “master swordsman” and (we now learn) talented dancer has also now been reduced to a comically useless clumsy twit who gives himself away or is defeated in combat by constantly tripping over or otherwise falling on his arse when he isn’t making other incredibly stupid beginner mistakes such as not watching his back when entering a room containing potential enemies and (this one really infuriated me) sneaking into a place and not using the fucking invisibility spell. How the fuck does he not know how to use magic to turn himself invisible when he has one he uses to hide Thorn while they’re flying together? There’s another blatant retcon which states that oh, Morontagh doesn’t actually know that much AL because Galby didn’t teach him any more than he needed to so actually he’s kind of useless at magic, but this is just another blatant contradiction of canon.
As a result of all of which Morontagh, the guy so badass he kicked Eragon’s on the Burning Plains without breaking a sweat, now gets his rear handed to him by:
-A fish
-A cranky kitten/half starved little girl
-A douchebag nobleman with no magical abilities
-A wild boar
-A bunch of big ugly rat monsters
As if turning into an incompetent fool wasn’t bad enough, he also takes on the predictable traits of your average Paotagonist to the point that he frequently becomes interchangeable with Eragon. He occasionally consults Thorn about what he’s going to do next, but most of the time he either makes decisions over the head of his “partner of heart and mind”, assuming that he’ll totally be okay with it, or Thorn’s objections are overridden because oh you’re my Rider and I have to stick by you no matter what! Never mind what Thorn wants, because Thorn has no personal desires that actually matter (more on this later).
Morontagh also follows in his brother’s footsteps by flip-flopping between “ew killing and blood” to “I don’t have a problem with killing actually” to “WOO GENOCIDE” and then back to “ew, I don’t like killing!”. We even get a repeat of the Ra’zac issue as he openly considers driving the “fingerrats” (basically Ra’zac if they were rats with human hands) to extinction but oh well he doesn’t have time. By the end he’s grinning and feeling “satisfaction” while he mows down endless waves of mooks.
He also randomly bursts into tears a lot, which I’m betting is Paolini’s response to critics complaining about how his characters are emotionless robots. If so it’s a major overcompensation, because Murtagh has previously been characterised as a stoic, angry young man who had been hardened by his experiences and had a deeply cynical view of the world. But now he’s suddenly breaking down in tears over such things as visiting the site of Vrael’s defeat as if he personally knew the guy. The Murtagh we knew would have reacted with anger and regret, not weepy melodrama, because why the fuck would he be upset about Vrael’s death? He doesn’t owe the old order a thing! The only representatives of it he has ever met were his abusive father, the eeevil Galby and the other Forsworn he met (including newly introduced Forsworn Saerlith who was a weak ineffectual loser and had a pink dragon – yes really. No. Really), Oromis and Glaedr (who abandoned him) and Eragon and Saphira (same except ten times worse).
Thorn
A lot of people who read the first four books praised the fact that if nothing else Murtagh and Thorn had an actual relationship and were a good example of what a Rider and dragon are supposed to be like together going on how they’re presented in the text.
Well, never mind all that because in this book Thorn is reduced to Morontagh’s pet/flying taxi/attack dog, just like Saphira. Morontagh isn’t as much of a douche to him as Eragon was to Saphira but he still gets to make all the decisions and leaves Thorn behind while he goes off and does stuff, and all Thorn ever gets to do is come and save his ass a couple of times before being captured and tortured. The last of which is 100% Morontagh’s fault (indeed Thorn repeatedly says they should leave but Morontagh keeps refusing). Naturally there are no consequences for this; Thorn should have been fucking furious with him.
Other than that Thorn basically turns into Saphira 2.0 with red scales and male pronouns. He’s vain and arrogant to the point of god complex narcissism, likes the idea of killing and terrorising people, and openly enjoys destroying an entire village and presumably slaughtering everyone in it at the “climax”.
So… yeah. Character assassination be the name of the game, and how. The only part that caught me by surprise was that Morontagh would be repeatedly humiliated and depicted as a raging idiot, which is incredibly petty on Paolini’s part because you can’t convince me he didn’t do it on purpose so readers would stop thinking he’s cool. And he succeeded; Morontagh has none of the brooding bad boy appeal of his predecessor, and none of the nobility either. ARSE.
Eragon
He doesn’t actually appear in the book but I was irritatingly reminded of that gaslighting cliché Trump supporters love to trot out: he sure does live rent free in Morontagh’s head. He periodically stops to whine about what a great guy his half brother is when he isn’t being bitter and jealous about it, and even calls him “clever” at one point. His only real criticism of the git is that he’s naïve about political matters. He also keeps insisting that Eragon was nice to him, which is a canon-breaking lie, and that it was totally brave and amazing how he defeated Galby by “helping him” (arrrrrgh). He also several times thinks of asking Eragon for help (Saphira goes glaringly ignored) but is too proud to stoop to that until right at the end when he finally gets himself in a real fix and all but mentally begs for El Douche to come and rescue his sorry hide because waaaah I was wroooong!
He does at least get one genuinely awesome line when someone calls him a bastard and he thinks “Eragon is the bastard, not me”. So at least there’s that. And I suppose this would confirm that Morzan and Selena were in fact married? It’s never brought up again.
Nasuada
She also gets talked about a fair bit, but doesn’t actually appear until the end when she somehow was able to keep Morontagh and Thorn’s presence in the capital city a secret and insists she can keep it that way so please don’t leave. The romantic chemistry here is non-existent, and I got the nasty feeling that she just wants to control the pair of them the way she’s done with every other human magic user in the Empire. That Morontagh doesn’t realise this and get the hell out of Dodge doesn’t speak well of his IQ. But then nothing he does in this book speaks well of his IQ.
And that’s basically it as far as characters are concerned. 99% of the rest of the cast are just throwaway characters who never appear again, such as an obnoxious werecat who sends Morontagh on a fetch quest or the girl he rescues at the end (after deliberately wasting time while she was in danger, might I add. Good thing the villains waited politely for him to show up instead of killing her while he was screwing around renaming his sword and contemplating genocide). I’ve already said everything worth saying about the villains, such as it was.
I guess that means it’s time to wrap up with an old classic of mine: a final section I call…
WHAT THE FUCKERIES!
Morontagh has not one but two really uncomfortable encounters with little girls, and in the second one the kid is basically nude. Uh, should I be worried about your proclivities, dude? Or are you already on a government watchlist?
The Name of Names is suddenly useless because of reasons. And when it would be useful Morontagh frequently refuses to use it.
Paolini just can’t help but continue to screw around with the magic system and break it even further in the process.
Now there are suddenly these bird skull amulets which protect against all magic and this is never explained
Bachel has a personal army of crows which never actually do anything
Morontagh is somehow okay with robbing Glaedr’s grave in order to use one of his scales to… go fishing. Thorn’s only objection is “hey as long as it’s not one of mine”. The scale is also cursed but this goes nowhere.
(Yes, since you asked, the Frogurt is also cursed. But you get your choice of topping! The toppings contain Potassium Benzoate.
...that’s bad.)
At some point in the past Durza enchanted a random fish to become fuck-off huge and basically invincible. Aww, isn’t that cute? He had a pet!
And many more!
Closing Remarks
There are books that didn’t need to exist, and this one is worse than that. It’s not merely superfluous; it’s insulting. A giant middle finger to Murtagh and Thorn and everyone who loved them. We now have two choices: either do as Anya and several others are doing and declare this crap non canon, or accept that it is canon and bid farewell to any liking and admiration we once had for these two characters, because Paolini did indeed successfully ruin them and everything we liked about them. And quite frankly I can understand why you wouldn’t want to do the latter because it feels too much like giving in and letting that no-talent jackass win, and who wants that?
Join me next time, when I will probably find myself reviewing subsequent volumes entitled Roran, Nasuada and Angela, which Paolini will have written in order to put off having to face up to that goddamn fairytale myth known as Book Five even longer.
Same Epistler Time, Same Epistler Channel!
no subject
Date: 2023-12-15 11:22 am (UTC)The central mystery during this part is certainly a lot more interesting than "duh what is da ebil cult all about". Too bad it never gets resolved, let alone tied in with the rest of what happens in the book.
Well, she certainly wears a lot of revealing clothing so I figured there was probably supposed to be a bit of a femme fatale thing going on.
Ooops, fixed. It was so stupidly cartoonish how the sub villain gloats about how he killed the poor birdie, which would have been cheap pathos if we actually saw it on the page but gets even cheaper since we don't.
And what dragon are they wanting to kill with it anyway? Saphira?
Yeah, that was the other part of what aggravated me so much about Murtagh becoming Morontagh: he keeps getting caught and putting himself in dangerous situations JUST so Paolini has an "excuse" to make him kill people and now it's "justified" so he doesn't have to pretend to feel bad about it.
She was at least much more interesting than J.S.Bach over here.
My stomach turned.
Thanks! I hope you got a laugh out of the Bachel dialogue I made up. It amused me if nothing else.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-15 04:15 pm (UTC)The central mystery during this part is certainly a lot more interesting than "duh what is da ebil cult all about".
Well, could that possibly be the weird being Murtagh keeps dreaming about?
Too bad it never gets resolved, let alone tied in with the rest of what happens in the book.
Indeed... I actually think Angela might have something to do with it, given this description of Silna's cell:
That reminded me of what Angela wrote she did with Elva, where she apparently made a door in the wall of the room.
Also, that whole section underground managed to be considerably more weird and unsettling than most of the stuff in Nal Gorgoth. (What was up with a chamber being built in the ribcage of a dragon, anyway? And how did it even get there?)
Well, she certainly wears a lot of revealing clothing so I figured there was probably supposed to be a bit of a femme fatale thing going on.
I can't help but find that hilarious, really. She needs to be a lot more competent for that.
Ooops, fixed. It was so stupidly cartoonish how the sub villain gloats about how he killed the poor birdie, which would have been cheap pathos if we actually saw it on the page but gets even cheaper since we don't.
And what was that fight with Grieve even for? To give Uvek some personal conclusion? That really should have been built up sooner.
And what dragon are they wanting to kill with it anyway? Saphira?
And why use Niernen when Ithring can cut through wards just as well? And when Ithring isn't possibly cursed, and is actually made in a way that is known? I mean, using Niernen is just incredibly irresponsbile.
Yeah, that was the other part of what aggravated me so much about Murtagh becoming Morontagh: he keeps getting caught and putting himself in dangerous situations JUST so Paolini has an "excuse" to make him kill people and now it's "justified" so he doesn't have to pretend to feel bad about it.
Yeah, I was really divided about that. And the manipulation was also really obvious.
She was at least much more interesting than J.S.Bach over here.
That certainly.
Thanks! I hope you got a laugh out of the Bachel dialogue I made up. It amused me if nothing else.
Oh, certainly! I have to say I also loved her "I have to explain the explanation" line from the book. Like, Bachel, do you really think that giving Murtagh no information will make him trust you?