Letting the Plot Thicken

So I was watching television a few weeks back and this movie trailer came on. It looked like movie of the week from the Sci-fi channel, made with the second-hand costumes from the Lord of the Rings and the special effects from someone's laptop. It turns out that this swords and dragons adventure is based on a recent novel, Eragon, written by a 17 year-old kid.

Really? I was a creative and bookish kid whose interest in stories and communication has only grown as an adult. I communicate stories and history every week and read a lot of classic literature (my elbow is actually resting on a copy of Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice as I write this). I would even like to be an author, of both fiction and non-fiction, in the future. But at 30, I just don't think I'm there yet.

My theory about young people (and adolscents especially): they always think they are far more advanced than they really are. But teenage angst is almost always overshadowed by the realities of life just a few years later. Death, disappointment, love, commitment, betrayal, etc. are all things that need to be experienced and reflected upon. We need perspective to be able to interpret life wisely, a perspective that most teenagers just don't have quite yet.

So can a 17 year-old write like CS Lewis or JRR Tolkien (or JK Rowling for that matter)? Almost certainly not. Writing and story-telling is based on understanding the human experience. The best an intelligent young person can do is skillfully re-arrange what other great writers have produced.

As one reviewer writes:

If no one has told you yet, Eragon is one of the greatest stories ever told. Seriously. The story is absolutely amazing, a classic tale full of archetypes, intrigue and magic. You see, it’s about this young, blond farmboy, who has been mysteriously left with his uncle by his mother - who discovers that he is the last of specially chosen group of warriors. Those warriors, long ago, were betrayed by one of their own and slaughtered – leaving only the betrayer (now the king of a vast empire), an old Hermit, and the young boy, to carry on the traditions. The hermit takes the young boy under his wing and begins to train him in the ways of magic and they set out on a mission to venture to a rebel base which struggles against the empire – and along the way he picks up a young rogue and together they have to save a princess from a dark fortress. I'm not making this up!

Um… haven't we seen this before? It turns out that Eragon doesn't just look like a ripoff of the Lord of the Rings, but it has stolen its plot, point by point, directly from Star Wars (Episode IV to be exact). Other people have noted strong similarities to the Neverending Story, Shrek, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Dragon Riders of Pern. How's that for variety?

To be fair, I've heard that the book, weighing in at almost 600 pages, is leaps and bounds better than the movie, but it was still written by a very precocious teenager. Lewis and Tolkien were both experienced scholars and veterans of the trenches of World War 1. Even Rowlings, whose story telling is not as advanced as the others was a divorced single mom, who struggled to make ends meet. But the author of Eragon is just a smart kid that graduated high school early and whose parents published his book.

I hope that if you haven't read the books written by Lewis and Tolkien that you would give them a shot. These are true classics of modern English literature that capture the heart and sweep the reader into fantastic adventures.