Pawn of Prophecy

[sawyl]

Carrying on my current theme of revisiting much-loved childhood favourites, I've decided to revisit David Eddings' Belgariad novels, starting with Pawn of Prophecy. The series is a bildugnsroman following a scullery boy from his humble origins on a small farm to a pre-destined meeting that changes the world forever.

The book begins with a short excerpt from The Book of Alorn, itself many thousands of years old, which tells how the Alorns, the chosen people of the god Belar, and the Angaraks, the chosen of Torak, came to hate each other after Torak stole a magical stone from the god Aldur and used it to crack the world, burning himself horribly in the process. No longer able to touch the Orb of Aldur, Torak spent many centuries brooding over in his great fortress until Belgarath the Sorcerer, one of the disciples of Aldur, led the great Alorn king Cherek Bear-shoulders and his sons Dras Bull-neck, Algar Fleet-foot, and Riva Iron-grip, to recover the stone. With the Orb in the hands of Riva, the only person it would tolerate, the Alorns returned home, with Riva heading west to an island off the coast and each of the others creating a separate kingdom to better defend the stone against the coming of Torak.

The prologue essentially serves as a big info dump which bootstraps the mythic framework that surrounds the core quest story. It sketches out the reasons for the racial antagonism between the Alorns and the Angaraks — the series is prone to using race as a shorthand for individual characterisation — and establishes Belgarath as a pivotal figure who has lived through almost the entirety of recorded history. Also by providing the names of Cherek and his sons, it establishes the origins of the various separate Alorn kingdoms and uses this to suggest something of their character — although I'm not quite sure how having a bull-neck might make someone adept at espionage!

The plot proper opens opens with Garion and Aunt Pol living on a pleasant but unimportant farm in the middle of Sendaria. As a boy, Garion gets into various scrapes, most of which end up with him being scolded by his aunt and/or dosed up with one of her noxious tonics. Occasionally Garion's life is enlivened by a visit from Mister Wolf, an itinerant storyteller, who updates him on much of the world's history and sketches in some of the great wars between the Alorns and the Angaraks. When Garion is 14, the storyteller arrives unexpected and turns his life upside-down, telling Aunt Pol something so important that she decides that they have to leave the Faldor's Farm to help Wolf search for something that has been stolen.

Eddings excels at the domestic, creating a pleasing vision of a medieval farm ruled over the a kindly and benign Faldor. Aunt Pol's kitchen is drawn as a place both of great activity and of great peace, where Garion is able to grow up safely under his aunt's watchful eye. His friends, Doroon, Rundorig and Zubrette are characterful and frequently get themselves into and out of the sorts of trouble that children always have, while Durnik the smith is a solid presence who acts as a surrogate father to Garion, teaching him the virtues of a solid, stoic, Sendarian upbringing. Wolf's visits inject a little anarchy and humour into what might otherwise be an over-sweet scene, encouraging Garion to filch, persuading him to stand up to his aunt a bit, showing him the nearby village, and filling in some of the gaps in his knowledge with tales from the mythic past.

The relationship between Wolf and Pol is rather charming and also very characteristic of the male/female relationships in the rest Eddings' writing. Pol pretends to disapprove of Wolf, criticising his dress and his manners and his passing on his bad habits to Garion, while Wolf similarly resists Pol's offers of food and drink only turn around and steal that which was offered as soon as her back is turned, merely in order to give her something of which she can disapprove. This pattern of gender essentialism repeats itself again and again throughout the series: the women exhibit a sort of feminine mystique that leaves the men baffled, while the men are simple and straightforward and enthusiastic about things — sometimes fighting but principally ale! — that the women then complain about, where the complaining and bad behaviour are the tokens each side uses to express affection.

In company with his Aunt, the storyteller, Durnik the farm's smith, Barak, a huge Cherek warrior, and a weaselly little Drasnian who calls himself Silk, Garion finds himself travelling across Sendaria in a wagon caravan, trying to avoid the attention of spies from Cthol Murgos, one of the vast kingdoms of the Angaraks that lies to the south. Rather to Wolf's annoyance the group are eventually captured by their own side and brought before the Sendarian King, who insists on ferrying them to Val Alorn, the capital of Cherek, to attend a conference of the Alorn kings. In the process Garion learns a couple of shocking truths which shake his world to the core: Mister Wolf is Belgarath, the eternal sorcerer of the myths, and Aunt Pol is his similarly ancient daughter Polgara.

Eddings' handling of Garion's crisis, which also marks his growth from childhood into something approaching adulthood, is skilfully done. When Garion first realises that his aunt can't be his flesh-and-blood aunt, he childishly believes that his means that his whole life is a lie and she doesn't really feel anything for him despite years of evidence to the contrary. This isn't helped when Pol casually denies him for expedient political reasons, which she fails to explain — for reasons that may relate to the feminine mystique thing — possibly without realising the harm this could do to someone who is already uncertain about his origins and the strength of his family relationships.

In Val Alorn Garion mopes about the palace a good bit, chancing to come across a man behaving very suspiciously. When he sees the same man talking to a Murgo in an inn and later, on a boar hunting expedition with Barak, encounters the man in a forest and overhears him discussing treason with an exiled noble, Garion finally realises that he can't keep the information to himself. With the help of Barak, he puts a stop to the Earl of Jarvik's coup against King Anheg only to get caught up in the subsequent fighting when Asharak the Murgo decides to take a personal interest in him. With the council wrapped up and the Alorns preparing for war, the company leave Val Alorn for the city of Camaar in Sendaria to resume their search.

While the trip to Val Alorn may feel a bit like a diversion, it introduces the various Alorn kings and queens and gives Garion his first taste of a country that isn't Sendaria. And Cherek, with its arctic weather and hardy warriors, comes across as the sort of culture the vikings might have created had they remained stuck in their medieval period for a few thousand years, making it very different to honest, industrious, peaceful Sendaria. The ancient city is place where signs and portents abound. There are Bear-cultists, fanatical worshipers of the god Belar dedicated to reunifying the kingdoms of Aloria; there is a witch who greets Garion with a line that seems to have been cribbed from Macbeth; and there is Queen Islena, who is devoted to magic of the sleight-of-hand variety and who is flummoxed when Polgara carries out one the first truly explicit bits of magic in the book.

Despite the title, Pawn of Prophecy doesn't actually involve a great deal of either prophecy or magic. For although Eddings' prose is assured, his characters well realised, and his ability to conjure up a sense of place excellent, it sometimes feels as though he hasn't entirely decided where he is going with the series and is hedging his bets somewhat. Or, I suppose, it could be that he simply intended the book to be a gentle introduction to the series. If you're willing to give some of the dodgy elements a free ride — the casual othering of the Murgos, the gender essentialism, the unpleasant off-hand suggestion that Barak has raped his wife — as I probably did when I first read it, it's an light, enjoyable and often very funny book with a lot going for it.