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Eragon

The Inheritance Cycle, Book 1

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Gerrard Shale's reading turns this magnificent adventure into a thrilling audiobook for fans of all ages.

When Eragon finds a polished stone in the forest, he thinks it is the lucky discovery of a poor farm boy; perhaps it will buy his family meat for the winter. But when the stone brings a dragon hatchling, Eragon soon realises he has stumbled upon a legacy nearly as old as the Empire itself.

Overnight his simple life is shattered and he is thrust into a perilous new world of destiny, magic and power. With only an ancient sword and the advice of an old storyteller for guidance, Eragon and the fledgling dragon must navigate the dangerous terrain and dark enemies of an Empire ruled by a king whose evil knows no bounds. Can Eragon take up the mantle of the legendary Dragon Riders? The fate of the Empire may rest in his hands....

©2004 Christopher Paolini (P)2009 Random House Audiobooks Fantasy Fiction Literature & Fiction Scary Stories Science Fiction & Fantasy Scary Destiny Dragons Funny

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Really great story, gripping and enjoyable. Shame that the voice of the dragon sounds more like a man than I think it should.

Eragon

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This series is just over 100 hours long (not including the Fork, the Witch, and the Worm, although that isn't really part of the Inheritance Cycle), and Paolini has said that he might expand the series to a fifth book or even more, as well as more short stories. Now, this book, the first book, was written when he was a young teenager, but I don't think you'd suspect that if you weren't told that. While he makes improvements as he goes through the series, the general writing style remains the same all the way to the end, love it or hate it.

I avoid major spoilers about events in the series ahead but if you want to go in with no prior knowledge and just experience the series then stop reading here.

The worldbuilding is a little derivative of other fantasy novels. You've got the haughty elves in the forests; you've got the mead-drinking dwarves in the mountains; you've got the orcs (called Urgals here) who have a tribal, competitive society; you've got the humans who are... well, humans; and you've got dragons, who are vain and breathe fire. However, there are additions and meaningful changes to this formula. I can't really go into them here because they would be significant spoilers, but there are additional, albeit minor races and groups of beings that add more depth to the world. The Urgals are much more fleshed out in the later books to avoid the traditional idea of "These guys are the enemy and have no redeemable traits" like goblins or orcs traditionally are thought of, without losing their core identity as tribal and competitive. It's not just the characters that change and grow, as you would expect from even a bad author - the races themselves each develop over the course of the story, so that once you get to the end, you aren't thinking "...well, in the grand scheme of things, what's changed about this world?" that other series may fall fault to. All in all, I think Paolini does a fantastic job of making the world feel like his own.

The magic system in this series is honestly one of the best I've seen in any media.. Again, I can't go too much in detail for the sake of spoilers, but the idea is that there's a magical language that you can speak to do whatever you wish - for example, you could say "Light this tree on fire" in the language and that tree would light on fire. However, the main constraint is that to do that thing, it takes the same amount of energy as it would have taken to do it without the magic, and if you use all your energy doing something, you die (and you also can't raise the dead or other impossible things). Another constraint that the people actually living in the world face is that they don't know all the words in the language - it isn't taught to anybody except magicians, and even then, they might only know a few words. There are other things like wizard duels and sorcery that I won't explain because, again, it's too spoilery.

Paolini was certainly brave to add such a versatile magic system - perhaps one of the most versatile magic systems possible - to his world. The major benefit of it is that it allows tremendous amounts of creativity for the author, bounded only by language to describe what the characters will do with magic, with no need for deus ex machinas. The major drawback is that it adds so many possibilities that you have to be very intelligent and have a lot of foresight, or people will inevitably go "Why didn't Eragon just cast this spell? It would have immediately have solved this dilemma without all the strife he had to go through!", which is where the energy constraint and knowledge constraint come in. Even so, Paolini admits in an interview that sometimes he had to rewrite scenes because he realized that there was a much easier way to achieve the characters' goal. I think Paolini did a good job. There was never any point where I was shouting at the book/screen, going "Just do this instead!" Paolini's deep understanding of his characters makes it so he can always convincingly write what they'd do and say in any situation. Any "optimal" solution would either be too elaborate for the characters to reasonably think to do, or they wouldn't do it because of who they are as people.

The pacing of the series is... okay. There are some chapters that drag on for a while, but there's a healthy splattering of action throughout. I think Paolini might have realized after Book 1 that he was going to need to have some more, let's say, less action-packed scenes as a necessity for worldbuilding and to get his characters from A to B (both spatially and mentally) so they can go do the action, so he has two plotlines going at once between two different characters, where one is more exciting, and the other more cerebral. He uses this technique to good effect. There is very little teleporting of characters to get them from scene to scene - the length of traveling is well-considered and makes sense.

There are strong female characters. In fact, there's quite a selection, and each feels different. Paolini knows how to write women - that is, you write people, and then give them female names. There's miraculously little in the way of character description past the initial introduction, other than when the description is warranted. None of the characters feel (unintentionally) obnoxious.

There isn't really any plot armor. People die, and if they don't die, get very injured or worn down. It's not quite GoT levels of gratuitous death, but people die.

The series has a satisfying ending. It does kinda feel like Paolini wrote himself into a... I hesitate to say a hole... let's say, a divot. But most of the solution was prepared multiple books in advance, so it's not as if he just said "I'll figure out what to do about this situation when I get there." You almost certainly won't be annoyed by how the series ends, if that was a major consideration (as so, so many series fall prey to this that it can feel difficult to invest so much time into one if you're scared that the ending is gonna be terrible).

For the audiobook itself - Doyle's performance is pretty good on the whole. People have (rightfully, I think) criticized the dragon voices he does. It might have been better for there to have been a male and female voice actor, just because of all the characters in this series. And maybe a more technical solution to the dragon voice problem (or hell, maybe a third voice actor who can do dragon voices really well). But Doyle has a great range of voices, so I commend his performance.

Great series!

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absolutely love this story, my only gripe is the narrator's voice for Sapphira. I kept thinking of the cookie monster. I eventually grew used to it though.

love the story!

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You can't go wrong with this series it's a fantastic series of stories that is very entertaining

Love the series and the voices

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i loved this book cant recomend it enough, great time killer and i hope to find more books like this

Eragon

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This book is beautiful written, with interesting plot and believable characters. The narration perfectly matches how I imagine all the voices. I listen to Eragon every day.

Absolutely amazing, one of my favourite books.

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i have the series in hardback already and love it. Thought I'd try listening to it too. Although the characters didn't sound the same as in my head the narrator does a great job and the story rolls along at a good pace

just a darn good yarn

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Start of my favourite book series of all time. Brilliantly read with lots of interesting voices

Brilliant

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I have read this series a number of times before and loved it. Gerrard Doyle does a really good job of narrating once you get I’ve the fact that Saphira sounds like the Cookie Monster.

Mildly biased review

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Loved the book when I read it years ago and thoroughly enjoyed the Audible version. Only downside was the voice of Saphira, the dragon, sounds more like the cookie monster. It's a shame, but all in an still made for a great audio book.

Highly recommend. Blazed through it!

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