Pawn of Prophecy by David and Leigh Eddings
(Is this book forgotten? No. It has a shit-ton of reviews and ratings on Goodreads. But even after David Eddings repeatedly said his wife was an uncredited co-author, her name is absent on reprints. So what's forgotten here is Leigh Eddings. She helped write this book and deserves recognition. Also, ngl, I was tired and the thought of reading something new overwhelmed me.)
I knew I'd like Pawn of Prophecy—I don't think I've re-read any other book as much. That's not to say it's my favorite book, but there's something easy and accessible about the Belgariad series. It's like comfort food in book form.
And this is really the mashed potatoes and (shitake) gravy of the fantasy world. We have all the staples:
A child born to greatness but raised as a nobody
A mischievous but wise and loving old vagabond of evident power
A no-nonsense and competent woman of great beauty
A journey of unknown distance or duration, picking up charming friends that could not be more different along the way
An ancient evil, total in its corruption, on the brink of dominion over the earth
Total shovel-it-up-with-a-spoon tried and true fantasy, that.
Told exclusively from the child's—Garion's—POV, you feel all his wonder and amazement as his everyday farm life melts away. You fall in love alongside him when new charming and mysterious friends join the party.
I wouldn't say you know what to expect so much as you know what not to expect. There's not going to be shocking twists or gruesome violence. One moment is going to lead naturally to the next until the book is over. And those moments are, on average, going to be charming and homey with just the right about of action and intrigue.
When I first read this series, I was 12-ish I chuckled at the impracticality of Eddings' adherence to that old trope of "everyone of a geographic region has very similar traits."
A kingdom of nothing but spies and merchants? One natural disaster limiting the food supply from neighboring Sensible-Farming Region and the whole Spy and Merchant Kingdom would starve.
That's a pretty tame take, though. On my second, third, and fourth re-reads—which covered all of my teens—I couldn't help but feel how deeply icky that is. Take the Murgos. They're a race that is generally considered flat-out evil. One of the kingdoms we visit in Pawn of Prophecy mentions that their oldest rule is that no Murgo shall step foot on their soil on penalty of death.
Now, this shit goes back to J.R.R. Tolkein and his oversimplification of the people of Middle Earth. (Yeah, I said oversimplification. I love The Hobbit, as the more childish story matches the childish world, but I am not a fan of The Lord of The Rings. :shrug:) The difference here is that in J.R.R. Tolkein's world, the "evil race"—the orc race—was depicted as not-really-human and explicitly created by someone evil for the express purpose of doing evil. Orcs don't, like, settle down and raise a family. The Murgos do. And they look wholly human, with their only distinction being some physical characteristics.
So, yeah, racism—even of a fantastical variety—is no bueno.
Even as a teen, though, I realized these shorthand approaches to characterization on a national level are part of what made the series so easy. You very quickly get a feeling like you understand all the major players, and as the party moves around the world and more players join the fray, it's easy to keep up. It also makes for a delightful pop when someone does step outside their stereotypes. There are few things more heartwarming than watching someone usually cynical and detached show genuine warmth for another human being.
That's not to excuse it—I feel like the Eddings' both could have and should have known better—but it does take some of the maliciousness out of it. Pawn of Prophecy is more nuanced than Lord of the Rings (I'm seriously going to end up on some shit-lists for all my bagging on LOTR) and thus the "evil race" cannot be more-or-less mindless monsters of apparent evil. They riffed on a classic yet dicey fantasy trope in a way that seemingly inadvertently became even dicier.
This topic has been covered a lot elsewhere, though, so I don't think it bears more discussion. Racism bad. End of story.
Something I don't tend to see mentioned, however, is the ableism. The first "villain" we meet has a lazy eye and poor personal hygiene. The ultimate evil has a facial scar. There's a cruel old blind lady.
You get the picture and can probably guess that the "good guys" are mostly strong, healthy, attractive, and without disabilities.
There are two exceptions, but their physical characteristics and abilities still seem tied into their personality in a way that others them.
There is a king who has paraplegia. He has a quiet dignity, though, and is portrayed as wise—serious FDR vibes.
There is a king who is fat. He's also king of the Spy and Merchant Kingdom. He's not portrayed as a villain—he comes across as quite likable and even seems more progressive than the other kings—but he's not the traditional brave, noble, sensible, and/or stoic king of lore. Think if The Penguin from Batman were a good guy.
Ableism to highlight differences between people—especially good versus bad—is another common shorthand in ... well, pretty much any fiction. Here it feels a little more prominent, though. It's their one defining quality. I can't tell you anything about the foul-smelling villain with the lazy eye other than he's a foul-smelling villain with a lazy eye.
One other quibble, and I'm done picking on this book.
Barak, of the Viking Region, is in a bad marriage. He's very likable, while his wife is portrayed as vain and petty and someone who delights in making Barak suffer. There's even a significant implication that she only became this awful after they wed, thus essentially "trapping" Barak.
I was on board with this narrative—husband good, wife bad—until the wife comments on how "even her locked bed-chamber door didn't keep [Barak] from making her perform her wifely duties," or something like that.
So Barak raped her.
Cool, cool.
His response to that is, "Yeah, you're right, that was a mistake."
Uhhh, that's not a mistake, that's a 'morally repugnant, go spend some time finding yourself because who you is is ugly' situation.
The narrative clearly backs up Barak though. Barak is a good guy of high moral fiber who made a rather inconsequential mistake.
This is a problem because I distinctly remember reading this as a young girl and thinking, "yeah, he maybe shouldn't have done that, but at the same time, she did have it coming."
Ooof.
So Pawn of Prophecy has some problems. Even big problems. They shouldn't be excused—the normalization of these types of bigotry in fiction has wide-ranging effects—but at the same time, I have a hard time damning the whole series for these sins.
As I mentioned, I read these books because I was worn thin … and my 70-something mother catching COVID-19 and her husband landing in the hospital over it certainly didn’t help. I wanted something that pretended that the world made sense, that good and evil are easy to differentiate, that people can come together despite their differences to fight for a better world. I wanted good friends supporting each other. I guess I wanted hope.
But I couldn’t have these be Big Emotions, either. Push that idea too earnestly, and my cynicism kicks in. See The Fluger where people literally throwing their lives at a monster to save children only made me comment on how that would never happen in today’s world.
Pawn of Prophecy was the perfect reading for the early nights of what has been an incredibly long two years, even with the problematic themes.
Back to my stupid analogy: most comfort foods are bad for you. There are about six sticks of butter between my shitake gravy and the mashed potatoes that go with it. Cholesterol city. But I'll keep eating it—in moderation, fully aware of its shortcomings so I don't overdo it and end up with clogged arteries and blood pressure through the roof, because it has something special to it that other foods don't have.
David and Leigh Eddings' Pawn of Prophecy and the books that follow it are a Thanksgiving dinner's worth of comfort food.
Cover art by Laurence Schwinger:
