Classic fantasy series

I didn't do a Friday Art Attack because I was wrapping up for a 3+ day holiday weekend where we went out of town to visit some extended family. I have, on the other hand, stumbled across completely by accident the Belgariad. Now, of course, I've read the Belgariad before. Probably three times before now, but possibly four. I know I read it in high school in the later 80s, I know that I re-read it after coming back home from Argentina in the early/mid 90s and I know I read it at least once more about 10-15 years or so ago. I picked it up on a whim at the library because I needed to pick up something quickly and it crossed my eyes. Now, it comes in this omnibus format in two trade paperbacks that have all five of the original novels included, and I'm just about to finish the third original novel here in the next hour or so I imagine, depending on how busy my morning is. I had long reserved a fair bit of contempt for David Eddings, both for his obvious failings as a writer and as a reflection of what appears to be obvious contempt for his readers that he has—but maybe I'm being too harsh on him. Maybe his contempt for his readers is him trying to be breezy and self-deprecating and just doing it very poorly. More to the point, because I doubt he's really a good guy or even a nice guy (or would have been before his death 11-12 years ago) at all—did you know that he and his wife spent a year in jail for child abuse after losing custody of their two adopted children, by the way?—but again, more to the point: The Belgariad is a fun, breezy read that's well-crafted in most respects. Whether or not David Eddings is a doofus—or worse—I have no problem saying that I'm a fan of at least this work. The Elenium and the Tamuli I never have to read ever again; I wasn't even impressed with them when I first read them, but I'm actually considering re-reading the Malloreon for the first time this time around; I've overcome my reservations about the Belgariad enough, plus I'm hearing from at least a few folks online that they think that the Malloreon might be the better series overall. If I get through it even half as easily and breezily as I'm making my way through the Belgariad, it'll hardly be a challenge. 

To be fair, I've long struggled with reading. When I was younger, I used to read books—even mediocre and occasionally even bad—books by the truckload. When I went to college full time, was working simultaneously full time, and was having my first two kids (to be fair, my wife deserves more of the credit for actually having them) I found that free time to read evaporated. Something happened over the years, and it became very difficult for me to actually get engaged with reading, because I knew that the commitment to any book was going to be a relatively major investment of free time. At least a few hours, even for a shorter, slim novel. All but the most engaging of engaging texts failed to engage me, and the only thing that I read quickly for many years were Dresden Files novels. 

I think, perhaps, that this is turning back around, though. I find the internet puerile and lacking in the ability to maintain my interest anymore. I've completely gotten rid of all of my social media accounts (unless a blogger and YouTube channel count, which I don't think that they do) and I haven't played a video game for months, after going through a brief window where I was really into first Red Dead Online and then Star Wars The Old Republic. I've read through a number of things rapidly, including a mediocre Eberron novel that I'd been wrestling with for a few minutes at a time for months, and then I've breezily read through a number of other things. I think that I'm finding that my old hobby of reading is still one of the best hobbies after all, and will probably stand the test of time as a more true entertainment value than streaming any of the crap put out by Hollywood or noodling around on the internet. The real question is why did I go through a number of years where I wasn't reading fantasy fiction? Probably because I read enough bad fantasy fiction that I was burned out, combined with a kind of schizophrenia about spending my increasingly spare free time on any one thing, but anyway.

I'd like to talk briefly about some of the series of epic fantasy from the late 70s, 80s and 90s; the Golden Age of epic fantasy if you will. Daniel Greene, a prominent YouTuber who talks about fantasy fiction, talks about a split between classic and modern fantasy, and says that while it's hardly a hard and fast kind of thing, it seems to have happened, most likely, sometime in the 90s that the majority if new work switched from one style to the other. While one could say that classic fantasy probably had some pretty predictable story beats to it, as near as I can tell from listening to his classifications of it, the major difference between the two is a change in characterization: characters no longer started from a cozy, idealized and romanticized rural, happy childhood and youth and went out, often reluctantly, in part to save that world. They also could no longer be healthy, normal people but had to be invested with psychological, emotional or moral flaws. In other words, modern fantasy is more appealing to liberals now because they can more easily see themselves in the protagonists. (According to this definition, 70s and 80s series like Thomas Covenant and the Black Company count as more like modern fantasy, but he never pretended that it was hard and fast or that the lines were bright; in fact he was always quite clear about the opposite.) He also talks about the quality of the prose being different in the classic period vs the modern, but again, that's not necessarily a hard and fast one either, nor do I think trends in prose styling are necessarily caught up in trends of the the structure of the stories and characters but are rather probably doing their own things for their own reasons independently. 

Anyway, this was a period in which a few series of epic fantasy dominated the readership of the genre, and almost everyone read the handful of series that were out there, giving them a kind of almost mythic quality; thy were in large part, the common language of the 80s fantasy fans (and a few years on either side of it.) These include stuff like Terry Brooks original Shannara novels (I'll admit that I only ever read the first one, and later when I tried to re-read it, I could get more than a few pages in), the aforementioned Belgariad by David Eddings, the Riftwar Saga by Raymond Feist (my personal favorite, although after losing my original 80s printing, I've struggled to care as much; the more recent printing "restored" text that the editors wisely cut out, and the overall effect is jarring to one who was a fan of the series before), the Thomas Covenant books (I checked out in the middle of the third book, giving up on the thoroughly unlikeable protagonist character and the tawdry, nihilistic worldview that he brought to the table), and the Weis and Hickman Dragonlance Chronicles, and a few others really defined the genre in a way that nobody in print today can do because the market is too fragmented now.

Because I'm re-reading the Belgariad now, let me talk briefly about that one. I don't know that it's fair to call it a "Tolkien clone" as many do, because it has plenty of significant differences, but it also is a good example. In some ways, it's almost quintessential, but the way that it does so is pretty contrived; we have to have this big fellowship, and the only reason that most of the people are involved is because of a prophecy that says that they have to be involved, and fulfilling the prophecy is like a checklist, a big to-do list that gets boxes ticked, and then largely forgotten about because they've been ticked. This, along with the "every character is a caricature of his racial personality" are the weak points of the book. They aren't too bad, though, because the charisma and chemistry between the true main characters: Belgarath, Polgara, Garion and Ce'Nedra, is sufficient to carry the plot along and make it charming rather than tedious. And even some of the minor characters are likable too. Some of them, of course, are not. I've never heard of anyone saying that they thought Relg was a great character, for instance. 

One of the things that I like quite a bit about it is that the antagonists are treated, in some ways, as similar to orcs; unremittingly unsympathetic and evil by nature. But they're people, not some kind of monstrous humanoid, and come in various tribes. The Thulls are among the first to be treated with something akin to sympathy, when they seem to merely be the chattel and victims of the Grolim in particular, and hated and treated with contempt by the other Angarak tribes. The Nadraks later come to be seen as sympathetic, leaving the service of Torak and joining with the West; they're already treated as a kind of pseudo-Drasnian by this point, foreshadowing their move over. 

In the sequel series to the Belgariad, the Angaraks are given much more definition and personality, and it is revealed that their position as antagonists is mostly due to the fact that they were chosen as the people of Torak, the "bad guy" god who opposed everyone else. Since Torak is killed at the end of the Belgariad (oops, spoiler alert) the Angaraks are a people now without a god, and in fact, the whole point of the Malloreon is that it turns out Torak being created or born and his taking on of a people was the "mistake" in the grand plan for the universe, and the forking point for the two prophecies. According to the original design, Torak was never to have been born, and Aldur would have been the god of the Dals (a part of whom become the Ulgos.) At the end of the Malloreon, Eriond, who should have been the god of the Angaraks all along, becomes so in truth, and the Angaraks and Dals and the rest of the godless peoples of the eastern continent are all integrated, kinda sorta, into fellowship with the peoples of the West. 

This idea that the evil race are just the tribes of a great race of people, not monsters, and that after serving that role they eventually can be integrated into the same civilized fellowship that the peoples of the other gods enjoy, is one of the most interesting things about the Belgariad. While the Belgariad is by no means a low fantasy of any kind—it's very certainly high fantasy—its inherent humanocentrism is an important point. The reality, of course, is that non-D&D fantasy usually is much more humanocentric than a lot of people think; elves and dwarves and orcs and all that aren't really all that common in fantasy. Mostly, fantasy is the story of just people.