Secrets of the Dragon Riders: Your Favorite Authors on Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Cycle: Completely Unauthorized

by James A. Owen

  As we can see, the first point is driven home very clearly: “The dragon rider idea was pretty great the first time I read it . . . when it was called ‘Dragonlance’.” The author is actually wrong; the first time I know of that the idea of dragon riders was used was in Dragonflight by Anne McCaffrey, the first of the Dragonriders of Pern books (it was published first in 1969, while the first Dragonlance book was published in 1987, according to the Library of Congress catalog). But the force of the point is still clear. Eragon is derivative of Dragonlance, which is in turn derivative of Dragonriders of Pern, which is also probably derivative of something else—and I think the something else is actually pony books. Only the first clause of the preceding sentence is the reviewer’s point; the rest is my natural extension. In fact, the reviewer praises Dragonlance to the skies, and I wonder, since he has not spotted that Dragonlance is derivative of Dragonflight, whether he is correct about Eragon’s derivativeness as well, or just trying to find an excuse to criticize it. Can it be that we tend to assume that a book by a child will be more derivative? More dependent on grownups? Is this a way of coping with the idea of a child author?

  The reviewer then follows this swiftly with a point about one thing he likes about Eragon: “I enjoyed the dragon’s growing and coming of age”—the aspect which might owe the most to Paolini’s own age at the time of writing—but then launches another attack on the book, this time on its narrative. I would say that this does have some basis in fact, but all long books have lengthy sections that are just as he describes. It’s always really difficult to explain why you find these boring in one book and gripping in another (and actually boredom in general is very hard to explain anyway). But the last paragraph is the truly telling one. The first sentence is “This book is great for someone who is a novice writer about a subject that he adds nothing to.” It is obvious that the “novice writer” of this sentence is Christopher Paolini, and that by “novice” the author of the review is implying youth and inexperience combined (interesting since the reviewer has several grammatical and spelling mistakes in his review). The final sentence makes it sound as if the whole review has been written in the light of the reader’s knowledge of Paolini’s age.

  Is this interpretation of the novel fair enough? Let’s imagine how it would sound if the reviewer wrote the following:This book is great for someone who is a woman writer about a subject that she adds nothing to.

  Oops. There would be protests. There would be outrage. People would ask Amazon to take the review down.

  Or:This book is great for someone who is a Black writer about a subject that he adds nothing to.

  Oops again. See above for the likely response. Immediately it’s obvious that “this book is great” now sounds really patronizing. Why? Let’s try to think it through.

  Are Children Subalterns?

  Canadian professor of literature Perry Nodelman has said that children are “the last subalterns.”1 Subalterns are defined by another professor, Homi Bhabha, in his article “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism” in Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, as “oppressed, minority groups whose presence was crucial to the self-definition of the majority group.” Children are a minority group with different and fewer rights than the dominant group (adults). The term “child” is often defined in ways that confirm adult power and authority; for example, children are seen not as different from adults but as inferior to them, less competent, less clever. And yet this also means that children who step outside their role—children who write books, perhaps?—are seen as a threat. Homi Bhabha says that “subaltern social groups were also in a position to subvert the authority of those who had hegemonic power.” Maybe that’s why child authors have to be pushed back into place. Negative reviews of Eragon often make a real point of Paolini’s age. You’d almost think they were trying to discourage kids from publishing books, just as women were discouraged in the past. And it must be depressing if you are an adult who has maybe not found a publisher for your own fabulous fantasy to see Paolini walking away with a big book deal as just a teenager.

  But children, apparently, have different brains from adults. It’s been suggested that the frontal lobes do not fully mature until young adulthood. To confirm this in living humans, UCLA researchers compared MRI scans of young adults, 23-30, with those of teens, 12-16. They looked for signs of myelin, which would imply more mature, efficient connections, within gray matter. The researchers concluded that “this increased myelination in the adult frontal cortex likely relates to the maturation of cognitive processing and other ‘executive’ functions.” The careful word “likely,” however, suggests the researchers had a hypothesis, not data, about the function of the frontal lobe. The researchers also found that “[p]arietal and temporal areas mediating spatial, sensory, auditory and language functions appeared largely mature in the teen brain,” but chose to place much more emphasis on differences than on these obvious similarities. A different group of researchers worked on face reading, and also found just what they were looking for: Kids’ brains are immature. “Young teens, who characteristically perform poorly on the task [of face reading], activated the amygdala, a brain center that mediates fear and other ‘gut’ reactions, more than the frontal lobe. As teens grow older, their brain activity during this task tends to shift to the frontal lobe, leading to more reasoned perceptions and improved performance.”2 So children are different cognitively than adults. However, unsurprisingly, this information comes straight from adults. Can we trust adults to interpret the data fairly? And while maybe we can agree that there are absolutes in judgement in driving a car—the choice that avoids an accident is obviously better than the one that doesn’t—is this fair when applied to reading, and writing? In reading, younger readers might be willing to embrace more possibilities without ranking them so strictly. Who is to say that children are wrong to pick out one character to love, or to focus on the story and not on “fine” writing? Maybe it is okay for the amygdala rather than the frontal lobe to rule responses to dragon flights, imagined or real? And how is the amygdala working in adults who write for children? Is anybody testing them to see if their powers are in decline? (Thought not.)

  Some people might also object that children can’t really be subalterns because they won’t always be children; one day they will be adults. To an adult, childhood seems short. But adults forget that children don’t know what it’s like to be an adult. They can’t look forward to it as if it were the end of a short-term stint in jail. They only know their own subjugation. In that sense their disadvantages seem never-ending. Plus time passes much more slowly for children than it does for adults—another big difference for readers. For children, eons go by while reading a long book like Eragon. All this means being subordinate seems endless, even if it isn’t. Besides, what other subordinate group would be willing to be at the bottom of the pecking order now on the grounds that in, say, fifteen years they would be regarded as the equals of their tyrants?

  Anyway, Harvard professor James Wood recently complained that adults are too limited in their literary judgments as well: “A glance at the thousands of foolish ‘reader reviews’ on Amazon, with their complaints about ‘dislikeable characters,’ confirms a contagion of moralizing niceness. Again and again, in book clubs up and down the country, novels are denounced because some feeble reader ‘couldn’t find any characters to identify with,’ or ‘didn’t think that any of the characters grow.’”3 Wood thinks judgments like those of the adult reviewers of Eragon are “foolish” and “feeble,” so such adults are not up to Harvard standards, perhaps? It seems adults are not a happy and harmonious group of brilliant critics who can give a strong lead to young writers. Wood’s criticism of the very rules Eragon falls foul of suggests that not all adults agree about what a good novel ought to be like.

  Another argument against children really being adults (and therefore having the same rights as adults) is that children have less experience
. I can reply in two ways to this. The first is that we do not universally apply this principle; if we did, the oldest people would have the most rights, and that is far from true. This principle is only used against children and is therefore unfair. The other point I’d make is that a person of eighteen has little political experience. According to these guidelines he should then not have political rights. But what happens when he becomes a young person of nineteen, still as inexperienced as he was the year before? The gatekeeping grownups are faced with the same choice and must make the same decision or else they are hypocrites. And so on. He’s twenty and inexperienced. Then he’s twenty-one . . . fifty-nine. And they can never give him any power because of his total inexperience. According to this argument, no one should have political rights. This is clearly not the case. Again we only apply this to children; hence it is useless and unfair.

  Also, in the case of those who write for children, what use is experience if it actually means your mind is crowded with models that can’t work for your target audience? You are busy creating characters that “grow” and “develop” because you have been in a writing course. Meanwhile your child readers are asleep, and so is Professor James Wood. Only the adults of Amazon are listening. Are they the people you set out to write for?

  The Good Reviews

  But what about the good reviews? Here is one of them (again, with any spelling and grammar mistakes left intact):Eragon is a book about a boy who finds a blue dragon egg. The egg hatches into a dragon he names Saphira. Toghether, they travel with a man named Brom, and a fierce warrior named Murtaugh, to find the secret city of the Varden. They feel that they can use Eragon’s fighting and their magic to help the Varden defeat the evil king, Galbotorix.

  One of my two favorite parts of Eragon are when Eragon finds out how Brom knows all he knows about dragons and magic. Brom knew that Eragon would need to know everything about the powers he had possesion of to be able to help the Varden. Also, I really enjoyed the fighting between Eragon and the Shade. It was a difficult fight, but Eragon knew he could win. The only way to kill a Shade was to stab it in the heart.

  Eragon is easily one of my favorite books, and I have read a lot of books. It’s a book you never want to put down. You never stop wanting to read the next part. It’s a great book for people who really like both adventure and fantasy books. Also, it has a lot of great fighting scenes. The battles have great discriptions, and you feel like you’re in it. It’s a long book, but that can be a great thing, because you won’t want to put Eragon down.

  The first thing anyone would notice when reading the review through is the spelling. Not only are basic words like “together” misspelled, but the characters’ names as well! This is surprising, since in my experience the odder a character’s name is, the more likely you are to remember how it is spelled and how you think it sounds. And all the characters in Eragon, Eldest, and Brisingr have odd names. Then there is the unwavering focus on the story. The review tells you that the story is great, but does not analyze the style or sources of the story, or even how the story is told. The reviewer’s favorite thing about the book is part of the story, not a bit that is well described. And this reviewer doesn’t seem to have heard of Dragonlance or Dragonflight and couldn’t care less about them. Even more worrying is the misreading of the only thing the reviewer is interested in: the story. They are not (at least at first) travelling to the “secret city” of the Varden. And the Varden does not have just one secret city (though the one I think the reviewer is referring to is the most important), but many. Murtagh joins them much later, after Brom dies. And the way to kill a Shade will always be the same so “was” should be “is” (this may just be a grammar mistake, but if the author knows their grammar it is an inexcusable misreading of the text)! But the final blow to this review, the sting in the tail, is that it was written by a child. (It says “child’s review,” and in our blithe and trusting way, we are assuming it’s not fraudulent....)

  Is my analysis of the review negatively biased because of this? If I had not known that it was by a child would I have read it differently? I am not sure. I am now beginning to veer close to the slightly odd position that not even a child can review a book or piece by another child without at least a tiny bit of bias against the author. Why? A great Victorian woman writer who wrote under the (male) pseudonym George Eliot once wrote a vicious attack on other women writers called ”Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” Why was she attacking her own kind? Well, to show they weren’t her kind, of course. All subalterns tend to identify with the values of their masters, and I am no different. Part of me wants to show my maturity by ripping into this reviewer and then Paolini.

  Children and Taste

  So there is a division within me as a child author between the adult values I’ve learned and my reluctance to accept values that leave me in an inferior position. And there’s also a division among the Eragon reviewers on Amazon. Assuming reviewers are describing themselves truthfully, just under half of the top reviews are by children. All of the bottom reviews are by adults. But the most interesting thing is that children either review it favorably, or don’t review it at all. Or at least that appears to be the case. Are the children who dislike it (for there must be some, not all children will like it, I know some who don’t) so upset about this that they don’t review it? Could it be because a child will simply give up on a book that s/he doesn’t like? Or is it the more fearsome notion that children can’t review critically?

  I would not say it was the last, or indeed the first, of those points. I am not sure about these worrying facts. For worrying they are: Eighteen adults reviewing a child’s book? What happened to adult fantasy fiction? Can it be that some of the hostile adult responses are warning kids off what has become a bit of an adults-only playground, children’s fantasy writing? Take Harry Potter. The biggest Harry Potter conference, Lumos, held in Las Vegas, actually forbids children under fourteen from attending. Most Harry Potter fansites are run by adults and for adults. So it’s not very surprising that the same is true of Eragon fansites. Is there any room for child readers, let alone child writers, in fantasy fiction anymore?

  It would be a sad day for Paolini if children were shut out completely, because the Amazon reviews show one thing very clearly. Children generally like the book. What are, in fact, children’s views on the Inheritance Cycle? Do they all like it? Probably not. But if so, why aren’t they saying so? Let us try and answer the first question.

  In general, as readers of any and all books, children appreciate story the most. They tend to overlook the style, at least on their first reading, and try to be swept up, and into, the story. They often don’t want the kind of stylistic flourishes that adult readers like, and give prizes to, because they can jolt you out of the story and into an awareness of reading, of what critics call texture. As a child, I don’t always want texture. I want to be carried away and to forget that I’m reading at all—mostly, anyway.

  An interesting question arises about why a book’s style sometimes gets in the way of the book being absorbed and why it sometimes facilitates it. For lots of Paolini’s adult critics, his prose seems clumsy, and a longing to criticize and correct jolts them out of the story; some adults have the same experience with Harry Potter. But kids don’t mind Paolini’s use of words like tenebrous. There has to be a first time to hear big words like that. Child readers might get just as drunk on them as Paolini did. And we’re more used to meeting words we don’t understand, and don’t feel offended in the way adults seem to be.4 When I meet a word I don’t know, I don’t think the author is trying to show he’s cleverer than me. I can look it up, or I can just ignore it, or I can guess it from the context. Or just enjoy the sound. Children probably have this experience more often than adults, unless the adults read James Joyce all day.

  Anyway, what children want is to get on with the story, damnit, and never mind the prose style. This means that reading, for them—or should that be us? After all, I am a child—is
about expecting things to happen. If the book promises a fight with the big bad they expect it to occur, and will be disappointed if it doesn’t have a fight with the big bad. And since he’s the big bad, they, urm, expect there to be a big fight with him. Lasting several chapters, of course, and not just three pages. In other words, if the author makes a promise, they expect him to keep it, and if he doesn’t, they become very disappointed. Paolini is very good at fulfilling his promises, and so children like his books. Some adults find the pace too slow. But this is because Paolini is thorough. He does what he says he will. Children appreciate that. So do children have different aesthetic criteria? I am not sure, and I would not like to say since I am veering close to a view that suggests “children are different and special,” which is not helpful for anyone, least of all children.

  Children are also, because of the fact they bury themselves in the story, more held in suspense. So even though an adult may sit there wisely noting that at the end of every third chapter Eragon faints, children eagerly press on without noticing this, at least when they read it the first time. This also means children can sometimes second-guess the author, when very well read in the sort of book they are reading. This can be very upsetting and disturbing for child readers, and may cause them to become disillusioned with the book. As well, it means that in a series children usually have a lot of ideas about what is going to happen in the next book and if they are completely wrong, then they will often turn against the book. It’s therefore really upsetting when wiseacre adults can’t resist pointing out what’s obvious to them in a fantasy book; the adult takeover of Harry Potter fandom is a case in point.