Pawn of Prophecy

I never read the Belgariad, or any Eddings, as a kid when these were coming out, so I'm coming to these fresh. returnAre they a kind of formulaic early-ish epic fantasy in style of Tolkein or even Jordan? Sure. Is that a style and a formula I loved and still do? Also a yes. Just because we've moved towards a different style and voice in the genre these days, doesn't mean this can't still also be enjoyed, and I very much am. So harken back to an earlier, and yes, less grim-dark, time in fantasy and read this epic.

I felt like I was “coming home” when reading this. It’s a classic setup, with a young boy with special gifts going on an adventure of epic proportions to save the world from impending darkness. I love the early childhood memories of Garion, or young hero, being in a kitchen with his Aunt Pol’s preternatural eye always catching him in the act of mischief.

And then he goes off on a quest with a group that reads like a classic RPG party: mysterious wizard, knavish rogue, huge barbarian with a sword, and a horse whisperer who is on his own personal quest of getting revenge on the evil people who murdered his family.

But if this all sounds too clichè, it’s actually done with a lot of twists and nuances. First off, the knavish rogue doesn’t just throw knives and pick locks; his actual main form of combat is tumbling / acrobatics, which is something I haven’t seen since, well…I can’t remember ever seeing it. It’s cool.

The other twist is that we have two mysterious wizards who are very much in contrast to each other. Not just different personalities and types of magic, but also the fact that one is a magician who Garion has known his whole life—or at least, he THOUGHT he knew her—his own Aunt Pol. Garion’s relationship with Aunt Pol is a big part of what gives the story an extra umph, because it burns him that the woman who raised him was concealing so much from him his whole life up until this point, and still insists on concealing as much as she can about the magic that she and he both have even though the cat is out of the bag.

But that relationship is also the thing that’s frustrating about the book and my main detractor. Their relationship stays stagnant for so long. Why does Aunt Pol so infuriatingly hide and defer revealing ANY information to Garion for SO long? Information about the magic, the world, what’s really going on, even just basic training for Garion as he flounders about with his magic…this continues into the second book as well and gets really old. That said, it does eventually start to change by the third book and so I’ve grown to forgive it. Mostly.

But seriously, it got old. The Polgara character needed more work. She’s not likable enough and sometimes is downright too nearsighted for a wise magician who has supposedly lived for thousands of years. Sometimes I feel the author was just trying to make her as annoying to Garion (and therefore to the reader) as possible and it was overplayed.

Belgarath, or “Mister Wolf” as Garion calls him, is a much more intriguing (and less infuriating) character. He and Polgara are like yin and yang. He’s the mysterious; she’s the mundane. He’s the visionary; she’s the practical. He’s the indulgent; she’s the restrained. He comes and goes like a vagabond; she is content to settle down as a cook and raise Garion.

Overall, I think it’s a great balancing factor to have the two of them and see their centuries-old interactions with each other. They have a relationship with a looooot of water under the bridge.

The Polgara thing aside…this was a wonderful book to read each night and made me very cozy and nostalgic for the fantasy books I read when I was a kid. This is a fine specimen of the classic high fantasy genre.

I think what makes it shine is the interactions between everyone in the party, the heckling, the idiosyncrasies and imperfections. Not a single character here is perfect, Belgarath included. But they are all endearing in their own ways and I’ll never forget them.

I would have to re-read this book to fairly rate it, and I'm not going to do that. I greatly enjoyed it when I read it as a teenager, but suspect it would not hold up today, and given what we know about the authors today I have no interest in re-reading it to find out.

Being quite interested in fantasy literature, I picked this one up, but found it dull and derivative, belonging to a genre I later learned to call "sword & sorcery". It seemed to be the first of a rather long series, but I wasn't tempted to read beyond this one.