Review: Murtagh

Murtagh by Christopher Paolini
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was never the biggest fan of Paolini or the Inheritance Cycle. Hell, I didn't even finish the first book when I was in grade school, and my sister enjoyed the video game a hell of a lot more than I did when I got it as a Christmas present. (I didn't watch the movie, because as I understand it, there is no Eragon movie in Ba Sing Se.)

The only reason I read the books was because my roommate a couple of years ago was a big fan of them when he was a kid, and he convinced me to give them a try. I didn't like them much even then, but I did at least finish the series. Now, maybe this book (plus the hints that Paolini is going to help write and produce a TV series adaptation for Disney+, in much the same way that Rick Riordan is doing for Percy Jackson) is what'll finally convince me to really truly reassess the entire series, knowing that as Paolini matures, so does his writing.

And this book really makes that maturity clear, with a significantly darker and grimmer tone than the original series. Which makes sense, because while the original series was super derivative of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, following Murtagh, one of the characters who feels like he transcends his genre trappings more than any other Paolini has written, helps this book stand out so much more. Okay, so there's definitely still a bit of some Star Wars in the DNA of this one - the first part in particular makes it look like this book will be Paolini's equivalent of The Mandalorian, a grittier Lone Wolf and Cub takeoff with a grizzled and traumatized lone traveler and his tagalong kid, and there's a lot of greying of the previously black and white mysticism reminiscent of The Last Jedi. But while the first two parts are pretty episodic and feel like short stories taken from a collection like The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm, it's when we get into the long and harrowing third part (which takes up the vast majority of the story) that this book finds its own identity more than any other work Paolini has written in this series to date.

While Paolini indicates that this isn't necessarily the fifth Inheritance novel (contrary to how Goodreads lists it), it feels at least like Book 4.5, setting up a potential existential threat bad enough for Eragon and Saphira to need to come back, while still working very well as a standalone novel in the World of Eragon.

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