Words are inadequate

David Eddings, Domes of Fire

Or rather, "The Mirtai Show."

Mirtai was introduced in the last book of the Elenium. She's a slave from the Other Continent, and she bullies Queen Ehlana into submission. Which was nice as far as it went: Ehlana had a tendency to run roughshod over everyone (probably due to Eddings not having had a chance to write a strong-willed teenaged girl for the previous two books), and she needed some restraint.

Mirtai is bloody irritating, though. She has /no/ flaws. Everything she does is perfect. If she decides on a course of action, no one can do anything about it. She's an inconsiderate bully, and perhaps the worst possible character to base an entire book around. She would have been fine as just another supporting cast member, but everything that happens in the book has to take her wishes into account. It's not like any of the other characters can do anything without her permission, after all.

It's really a shame. Both Ambassador Oscagne and Emperor Sarabian showed a lot of promise as potentially interesting and likeable characters. Between Mirtai taking over every scene and the need to squeeze in the characters from the previous trilogy, they get very short shrift. Too bad.

And o yes: Kurik, perhaps the best character from the previous books, was killed off. How do we get back a good character? Make his eldest son his exact duplicate! Bah. The dead should /stay/ dead, otherwise their deaths serve no purpose.

---

David Eddings, The Shining Ones

In the Elenium we were introduced to the Styrics. They're a displaced and dispersed race, hated and feared by the Elenes. They're rumored to know dark magics and consort with strange Gods (okay, so the rumors are true), and they refuse to eat pork. I imagine that Elenes also believe that they kill and eat babies.

_Domes_ gave us our first view of a Styric city. It's far nicer-looking than any Elene city we've seen, thus generating resentment. The Styrics in it are just as xenophobic as any Elene, thus justifying the hatred. And they're completely vulnerable to manipulation by the characters, thus making them look stupid and stuck-up.

All of which leads into _Shining Ones_ and its obsession with humanizing / demonizing the Styrics. I can handle the utterly unforeshadowed betrayal by the Wise Old Knows-Everything character: someone had to, and he works well enough. His reasons would almost be believable if we hadn't met him before. But Sephrenia goes completely off her rocker a third of the way into the book. /Sephrenia/, for pete's sake. "They're evil! Don't trust them!" This is not the Sephrenia of the previous four books. This is a caricature.

Maybe that's my problem with the series as a whole. There's no real consistency between the Elenium and the Tamuli; Eddings is rewriting the ground rules simply because he can. Bah.

---

David Eddings, The Hidden City

In which everything comes entirely apart.

At the end of the previous book, Ehlana and her maid were kidnapped. The obvious response to this state of affairs is for everyone to split up and travel to various different places all over the continent. This means that instead of a consistent viewpoint and a constantly building story, we get two or three pages at a time of seven or eight different stories. In the hands of a better storyteller, this is a fine device. It just doesn't quite work out for Eddings. None of the episodes are interesting enough on their own to keep my attention, and they're too fragmented to bring any sense of cohesion and overarching plot.

What plot there is is also utter crap. Twenty pages into the sixth (and final) book about this world, the heretofore silent and unheralded Big Bad suddenly appears. There's a bit of metaphysical infodumping, and then everyone runs around in a panic. The Obligatory Eddings Blue Rock is discovered to have been manipulating events all along. Things happen. A Big Final Conflict occurs. Everyone goes home happy. Bah.

Even the clever dialog felt phoned in, as though the characters were saying these things because it's what Eddings characters do, not because they're actually clever. Crap, crap, nothing but crap. For the love of Gord don't waste your time on these.