sweet-indigo's Full Review: David Eddings and Leigh Eddings - The Redemption o...
If you want to read a David Eddings Book, I'd recommend strongly that you don't start with this one. It's disappointing. (I started with The Diamond Throne, and it starts at a good pace, so is probably a good place to begin Eddings type reading.)
Now whilst David (and Leigh) Eddings have usually managed to provide adequate excuse for his (their) formulaic plots in witty dialog, politics, subplots, jokes, tactics, intrigue and fantasy sections, for some reason they saw fit to leave those nice touches out of 'The Redemption of Althalus'.
Summary
Althalus is a thief, who has been amazingly lucky, and also has an awesome wit. According to Eddings, unfortunately this incredible wit is never seen at work throughout the entire novel. One day, after several weeks of suddenly having the worst luck ever, Althalus finds himself in a house where he's meant to be stealing a book for a rather suspicious looking man he met in a pub. In the house is a talking cat he calls Emerald, and shortens to Emmy. Their relationship is a bit like Sparhawk and Aphrael in the Tamuli... but cornier.
Emmy teaches him lots of things, and then takes him out to pick some other people for their great quest. The quest is the usual 'take magic item and kill evil person'. In this novel, the evil person is the god Daeva. The other gods are Deiwos (the creator) and Dweia, who's a goddess and so just has to turn up in person. If you know Eddings, you'll have worked out where she's hiding within the early stages. Although to give Eddings credit, he (they) doesn't/don't make Althalus too stupid to work it out for himself.
The magic item in this book is indeed 'Books'. Each god has one. Using Deiwos's book (and Dweia's, but we'll get to that later on), they fight against the man otherwise known as 'shifty stranger in pub from earlier' who is using Daeva's book. This for some reason reminds me of the Mallorean. There's a massive war, and some time-travel and teleportation involving the aforementioned house. Handy.
My opinions on style
You've met the characters before, except they were better (you can find hints of Polgara, Ehlana, Silk, Ce'Nedra...). The only real subplots are the romances between the characters (which are rather predictable) and all the various battles, not to mention the problems with the religious orders. I found the religious orders conflict quite interesting, but the various battles, as is a habit with Eddings, are lathered in tactics involving the various metaphysical powers the characters have at their disposal, which start out fascinating and end up boring me into tedium.
The dialog definitely could have been better. There's much banter between the sexes that will look familiar to the established Eddings reader. As I read in another review, the women are all very similar in many ways. They're beautiful - Eddings doesn't have ugly women (if you want to find an ugly heroine, 'Dragonsbane' by Barbara Hambly might be a good choice. Yay for Jenny Waynest). They're powerful. They outwit men. The men are dominated, clever in their own way but strung along by the women in their life. The possible exception being Gher, who is a child so his maleness is partly forgiven. The dialogue between them is essentially very samey. And colloquial, which is all right if it adds local colour, but not when it just stinks of sloppiness. Althalus must have said 'sort of' on just about every other page in which he speaks. Some of it still retains that good old Eddings wit, and did get a few laughs out of me.
The characters, as I have mentioned, are all old Eddings favorites weakly rehashed. Part of the problem wasn't that the relationships weren't there, it was that they weren't developed properly. There were romances but they were choppy and obvious. There's a time when Althalus tells their little group of fantasy heroes that they're all family, creating some interesting issues which could have been explored much more. However, it only really becomes an issue when Leitha, the telepath in their little group, is in need of support and Althalus has to be the one to give it. After that, it's pretty much ignored for more pressing matters. It was frustrating, seeing as the more pressing matters was the plot Eddings readers have seen before. At the end of the book, the characters seem to simply say 'nice meeting you!' and go their separate ways.
One last point - the fantasy sections. The bits that were written a little more whimsically than the main plot, shall we say, where the gods directly intervene. As Arissa... no Beldin... no, Arissa... once said in the Elenium, no, the Belgariad, 'If this gets any more cloying, I think I'll vomit.' Because whilst they were written nicely in some places, the general pattern is an extremely exaggerated form of what Eddings calls 'High Style'. All thees and thous and verilys. Well, maybe not verilys. For some reason, the gods, when they intervene, not only like to straighten out people's grammar, they like to make it more archaic. There are a few attempted jokes about this - a couple are funny but most are not. What happens is, Eddings decides to make his characters act like badly written Arthurian legends for a few pages, and then they go back to normal. It's contrived, even with gods involved.
So to sum up, I'd say that the Redemption of Althalus is good if you have a lot of time for light reading. The end plot twist is probably Althalus's best redemption. This story is certainly not the worst in the world, but it's transcended by far by the rest of Eddings' fantasy. If you like intense tactical thinking, you'll probably find that attractive, and if you don't mind reasonably shallow characters, you won't be disappointed.
Not bad. Not good - but not bad.
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