OK, I’ll admit it. My continuing love for the Eddingses is completely perverse and unwarranted, in light of the travesties they later committed upon their own characters, and especially in light of the horrendously bad offerings after The Tamuli.
Which is not to say that everything after the original Belgariad didn’t have its eye-rollingly stupid moments. I mean, really. "We can’t be bothered to come up with a new storyline, so we’re going to blatantly plagiarize ourselves and write the same story again, and then lampshade the whole thing with a moronic tacked-on “philosophical” explanation about being forced to repeat things until the universe is restored.
Then, of course, they had to write the same story again, TWICE, with The Elenium and The Tamuli, only this time focusing on the “let’s whack a God!” aspect. So Sparhawk offed some Gods. And those damned Eddingses had the temerity to reuse lines directly from their earlier works (“In a very real sense, you’re the most important person in the history of the universe…”, etc.)
Infuriating.
I refuse to even speak about The Redemption of Althalus or that goddamned, miserable final series. I know some folks like Althalus, so I won’t comment, other than to say 1) De gustibus, yadda yadda yadda, and 2) please drink a glass of warm milk and go to bed until you feel better.
Sigh. OK. So I read Belgarath the Sorcerer. Yes, they were phoning it in even more by this point, which is remarkable in itself. But it wasn’t horrible. It wasn’t unreadable. They kept Belgarath more or less the same character. He was irascible, slovenly, and circumspect. And he was primal, patient, powerful beyond belief, and as wise as you could expect someone to be after 7000 years. It was a chore to get through the book, but for someone who steeped himself in the mythology of that world when he was 13, the biography of the Eternal Man was a dream come true.
I will never forgive them, however, for Polgara the Sorceress. They ruined Polgara’s character for me. Suddenly, she’s some proto-ultrafeminist. Suddenly, she’s the most important figure in the history of the universe, and her father, the guy who had watched the world in its infancy and carefully guided humanity toward its destiny, was little more than a drunk asshole who likes to stick his ancient dick into things, and really should have just gotten out of the way while Polgara and Poledra fixed everything the right way. Oh, and by the way, Poledra is the most powerful sorcerer in the world now, and sometimes her power dwarfs even that of the gods (see: the revisionist conflict at Vo Mimbre). If that book was a look into Polgara’s mind, then, goddamn, she’s a self-involved, snotty person. She’s like that guy at the party who always has to just slightly one-up you, no matter what you’re saying (“Yeah, that’s cool, but in my opinion, you don’t REALLY know what the Arctic is like until you’ve been there for three weeks, which I was back in 2000…”)
Stylistically, whoo, don’t get me started. The unfortunate habit of doing those little “side-notes” started in Belgarath, and I hated them, but they were used fairly sparingly. In Polgara, goddamn, there was some snotty, snide, insulting, or just plain sophomoric side note, addressed to Silk, Ce’Nedra, Belgarath, or just about anybody else, every other page. It was maddening. It got to the point where I simply skipped the text whenever I came upon a short break followed by a couple pointless lines.
Polgara was a dick.
