Murtagh: The World of Eragon

Character: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆

Plot: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

Prose: ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ (I always forget how much Paolini loves making people tttrot~)

OVERALL: ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆ ☆

My ridiculously long essay about this book, hosted on Substack, can be found at the URL at the end of this review.

Let it be known that, just like Eragon, Murtagh is not very bright. It must be from Mum’s side of the family.

I wanted this to be more than it was.

This was one of my most anticipated books of the year, but I’ve had mixed feelings on the whole affair since the announcement. Like many, The Inheritance Cycle was my all-time favourite series from when I was about nine to somewhere in my early teens, and Murtagh left such a huge impression on me as a kid that his archetype (the angsty, angry, yet tragic bad boy loner with parental issues) is still one of my favourite things ever; I cannot stress how much the one proper chapter he has in Eldest drove me feral between the two years of my reading it and Brisingr’s release. That being said, I think the magic for the series started fading in my eyes with the release of Inheritance, which I didn’t love, and my admiration for Paolini as a writer dulled with his other novel To Sleep in a Sea of Stars, which I thought was pretty … meh; the only thing I could and can really say about it was, “yup, that was indeed a book I read”.

So I was excited to revisit my OG bad boy, he has so much potential from where we last saw him, but I was worried about Paolini’s ability to deliver a *good book*. And mixed feelings is a good way to put it now that I’ve finished.

Firstly, I adored getting to see Murtagh and Thorn’s psyches seventeen years after being introduced to them and deciding that these two would be my favourite poor little meow meows/blorbos (or whatever the kids say nowadays) forever. My throat did all the closing up and my heart ached whenever I read the passages about their experiences in Urû’baen at the hands of Galbatorix and his court. A shining beacon throughout the novel was in watching the two of them struggling with and addressing the trauma they experienced, most notable in Thorn’s fear of confined spaces and the ugly consequences that follow.

The book is very good at making me feel emotions for Murtagh and Thorn. But I wanted to feel, well, more. I wanted Murtagh to be a book about them navigating a post-Galbatorix landscape where they must deal with the fact that they’ve committed these atrocities, willingly or not. I wanted the main conflict to be centred around the fact that people don’t trust Murtagh and Thorn. I wanted a character-driven piece of storytelling.

Instead, the book is mostly a plot-driven sequel-setter. I’ve not been left a happy camper as it stumbles into the age-old sequel problem of oh shit, we need to escalate the stakes, and it’s decided to do this by introducing a Deep State, cheese-morality, Satanic Panic influenced, Westboro-fire-and-brimstone-esque Cthulhu cult that Murtagh and Thorn need to take out. But oops, we ran out of pages please buy the next book.

Man, when this was announced back in March, I thought was going to be a character study standalone D:

So, it’s an action-adventure book, it’s a book with all the swords and gore and magician duels of the previous books. It’s a winning formula, but, this time around, not for me. The characters stumble about from one plot point to the next through blind luck and by making strange (stupid) decisions, and I struggled to find a solid, motivational throughline for the events going on other than “we need to get the book to happen”. I found the main conflict centred around Bachel and her cult to be underwhelming at best, and downright boring at worst, and I just … I wanted more, and not in the way that more sequels! can fix.

In summary, Murtagh feels like a book teetering on the edge of having something to say, but never quite succeeding because instead of delving into what made Murtagh and Thorn so interesting in the first place, it’s more focused on doing, to be blunt about it, boring, tired, ill-thought out, and done-better-elsewhere plot things for later books. How can you have characters like Murtagh and Thorn, who have long been those with the most potential in the Cycle, and decide that this was the story that needed to be told about them? Setting them up to save the world isn’t why I found them interesting.

——

Criticisms from the original books that have been addressed and I am super happy about!

• The Empire is given more substance to it from the flat, evil entity it was in the previous books, hooray! The soldiers are talked about, the social classes are given more stage room, the economies and governments in cities and towns do exist; it was more than I was expecting upon coming into the book. Good job, I would like more, please.
• Murtagh is also, unlike Eragon, not ridiculously bloodthirsty. Sure, he is dangerous, but he’s not going about punching people so hard their hearts stop and coming away with the conclusion of “huh, I should change my knuckles to kill people even harder”, or “man, I wish I could kill a few more people for my literal murder mountain so I can have an even headcount of two hundred”. Murtagh and Eragon may be equally stupid, but at least Murtagh (mostly) escaped the psychopath gene that Eragon and Roran have.

However …

• Murtagh and Thorn’s relationship feels very much the same as Eragon and Saphira’s in that the Rider is definitely in charge and the dragon is, at best, a flying sidekick. Very frustrating. There are nice scenes between Murtagh and Thorn which show them as equals in the relationship, don’t get me wrong, and I love how they’re in each other’s corners, but Murtagh’s the one making the big decisions and calling the shots, with Thorn always going along with what Murtagh wants to do. So I’m not really sold on this being an equal partnership.
• We also return to the weirdly worded pseudo-medieval speak, and I’m still not a fan. Pls Chris. And whilst we’re on the subject of dialogue, can we stop with the written accents please. It’s so frustrating to read these “not-quite-Cockney-but-aping-on-something-vaguely-East-London”, are-youse-’avin-a-laff-at-me accents and I wish the trend would die. Just stop.
• Paolini still cannot write poetry and verse beyond the first two-ish lines of a stanza. I automatically skip these now because they’re the reading equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.
• There is still a looot of filler going on here. Flying around filler, random musings filler, random worldbuilding filler, descriptions that are so lengthy that they become, for me at least, ineffective. This book could have easily been 100 pages shorter if the filler was either cut or strictly edited down. This is something I always forget is a thing when I pick up a Paolini book until I’m like, “Oh…. Yeah.”

I will read the next book because Murtagh and Thorn are my favourites, but can it reach the heights of its potential? Well, that’s up to Chris and his team at Knopf Books, now.

If you would like to read an utterly exhaustive, in-depth analysis on this book that dissects the plot, characters, and writing, you can find my heinously long essay on Substack below.

Also who decided that the world map at the front of the travel book would be in made-up runes? Sir, I just want to talk to the art department.