David Eddings' fantasy career began with Pawn of Prophecy in 1982, opening his massive Belgariad sequence. This omnibus collects the 1992-4 Tamuli trilogy: Domes of Fire, The Shining Ones and The Hidden City, totting up to 1,429 pages of slick storytelling. Following from the Elenium trio (1989-91), this takes hardbitten knight Sparhawk, his feisty queen and wife and various companions--including a terminally cute Child Goddess--to the hard-pressed Tamul Empire. Here a revolutionary movement is reanimating ancient warriors and horrors, while treason runs riot in the civil service, and at least one of this world's many gods is secretly behind it all.

Sparhawk must recover that all-powerful talisman the Bhelliom, which at the end of the Elenium was hurled into the depths of the sea. Quirky political manoeuvres and plausible battles abound. Eddings is a fluent storyteller whose humour, banter and unfaltering narrative flow conjure entertainment from highly familiar plot devices. The sense of danger is muted, though: spear-carriers may perish in their thousands while villains are sentenced to burn eternally, but major goodies bounce back from fatal injuries (even a stab in the heart) thanks to epic mercy dashes and healing magic. This is cheerful comfort reading and is a long, and undemanding, enjoyable fantasy. --David Langford

2007-09-03 Unintentionally hilarious, forsooth

I really really loved the Belgariad - when I was thirteen. I read it three times back-to-back in the way that a thirteen-year-old will do. The level of humour, the lack of complexity to the plot, the vague comfortableness of it suited me down to the ground - when I was thirteen. I think the fact that it was a "heroic" saga with a massive cast fighting a huge war against supposedly appalling odds but strangely enough not one single central character died (or rather, had the decency to stay dead for more than a couple of pages) was very appealing to a thirteen-year-old.

Unfortunately, I read the Tamuli at the ripe old age of thirty five.

The good thing(s) first. These books are a guilty pleasure, in the way that reading absolute trash can be a pleasure. I read them on a beach on holiday where nobody could recognise me. This is the correct place to read them. They are consistently unintentionally hilarious. The prose is so cack-handed, the conversations so universally dreadful that I was chuckling to myself throughout, often laughing out loud. It's as if Eddings is putting together a beautifully observed pastiche of all the cliches, bad dialogue and utter nonsense that befouls the fantasy genre.
Sadly, he isn't. This is the real McCoy. It's dire.

Every single one of his characters, whether a child Goddess, or a hardened knight, or a sneaky thief, or a king, or whatever, is EXACTLY the same. They all speak the same, with the same clunky turns of phrase, and every single one cracks the same weak two or three very smug, very teenage jokes again and again and AGAIN until you either laugh at how terrible it all is or hurl the book against a wall. I kept on telling my wife that I was desperate for a bloody great meteorite to hit the party and kill a few of them randomly to stir it up a bit, if only to stop the "here's a smug final comment indicating how incredibly tough/clever/sneaky/beautiful I am" converations. All of these characters sound like amiable but slightly irritating teenagers.

It's hilarious to "enjoy" the ruminations of supposedly brilliant warriors whose logical insights and tactical acuity are pretty much those of your average thirteen-year-old. Machiavelli this certainly isn't (although Machiavelli is probably a place name that Eddings has shoved somewhere on one of his silly heroic maps).

I giggled wildly at the recitations of supposedly mesmerisingly exciting legends that sounded like the plot to an episode of He Man.

I was a slightly unsettled at the lack of empathy in some of Eddings' scenes (towards the beginning there's an odd scene with a bunch of sad people stuck in a house in the back side of nowhere, who've all grown to hate each other, and Eddings condemns them flatly without so much as a trace of empathy for what could have made them so miserable and angry - again, rather a teenage perspective).

His "plot" involves a troop of people walking from place to place to have near-identical smug conversations with identikit fantasy stereotypes.

But hey nonny, my liege, it's not worth getting cross about how bad it all is. For those who like this sort of thing, this is exactly the sort of thing that they will like.

My tip of Eddings is that if he really wants to embrace the market for teenage boys he should try a crossover series called "Porn of Prophecy". That could be great.