When I was growing up, one of my favorite authors was David Eddings. I really looked forward to his books, and I reread his series multiple times. The Belgariad, the Mallorean, the Elenium, and the Tamuli were all great, though I liked the first two more. However, I’d never really returned to those books. At first it was just because there were so many other things to read, but then revelations came out about Eddings’ past (he and his wife/editor pled guilty to 11 counts of child abuse back in the early 70s, and that wasn’t something that ever really came to light until after his death), and that made me even more reluctant to really seek out the books again. It wasn’t a moral stand, but I didn’t have a lot of incentive in me to go try them again.
I honestly don’t know what changed. I think I was talking to a friend about the series, and I realized there wasn’t a lot about them that I remembered at this point, and I became increasingly curious to go back and see if they stood up as well as they did in my memory. That question stuck with me, and I finally broke down and gave them another shot a few weeks ago.
It was interesting reading them with fresh eyes. I remembered feeling like a lot of the series started to feel a bit like a mad lib, where you can generate a new one just by swapping out the names of the people and places in the old one. That came across even within the Belgariad, which is the only series I reread. I loved going back to Pawn of Prophecy (the first volume), remembering the characters and the events in them. But by the time I got to the fifth book, I was decidedly underwhelmed. It felt like Eddings was just going through the motions to get his plot to keep moving forward, and what should have been a climactic finale just fell flat.
That said, it was also intriguing to see what sort of an influence Eddings has had on fantasy as a whole. I think you can see a lot of the roots of Robert Jordan in the Belgariad, and that in turn also leads to the works of Brandon Sanderson. Yes, they all ultimately go back to Tolkien, but Eddings felt like a real stepping stone along the path to present-day fantasy. I’m not saying Jordan based his books around Eddings or anything like that, but it makes sense that the Belgariad (which came out in the early 80s and was very successful) would have an impact on what ended up being successful in the early 90s.
In any case, I think I’m through with my desire to revisit the works of Eddings. It was fun, and rewarding in some ways, but also disappointing in others. Anyone else out there re-read these lately?