David Eddings, page 1 of 3

I came to read this, David Eddings’ first novel, via a rather insalubrious route. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but around 2020 the revelation came out that, at the start of the 1970s, both David Eddings and his wife served a year in jail for the physical mistreatment of their 4-year-old adopted son. It seems they’d been keeping him in a cage in the basement, as well as administering physical punishment, seemingly because he was a fussy eater. (As a result, the couple had both the son and a more-recently adopted daughter permanently removed from their care, and weren’t allowed to adopt again.) As I’d read and re-read (several times) Eddings’ first fantasy series, The Belgariad, when I was 13, I found myself being drawn, car-crash-wise, into wanting to know more. A Reddit thread contained links to some of the newspaper articles of the day, but the most insightful piece was one by James Gifford, who’d actually done research in the Eddings archives. One of the things he said was that Eddings’ first novel, the non-fantasy High Hunt (published in 1973), was actually drafted in jail, and that it was “highly autobiographical”. I’m not the sort to demand the writers I read be paragons of virtue, but all the same, I felt the need for a little mental readjustment about Eddings, and ended up reading High Hunt. One thing to say about this case that sets it aside from, say, that of Marion Zimmer Bradley (whose Mists of Avalon I read around the same time), is that David Eddings and his wife were tried and sentenced, and served time for what they did—which is, in our society, supposed to give them a chance of rehabilitation. Perhaps, then, The Belgariad might have been informed by remorse and a greater self-knowledge.

The narrator of High Hunt is Dan Alders, who, at the start of the novel, is just getting out of his stint in the US army. (This is the era of the Vietnam war, but he was lucky in being posted to Germany.) Having no real home to go to (his father is dead, his mother is an alcoholic he’s pretty much cut himself off from, and his last steady girlfriend ended their relationship while he was abroad), he decides to look up his semi-estranged brother Jack. Jack, living in a trailer park with his (I can’t remember if it’s second, third, or what) wife and two kids, sets Dan up with a trailer for the few months before he goes to college, and Dan falls in with Jack’s friends, a collection of mostly dysfunctional males and their generally more functional wives (but also their very much dysfunctional mistresses), who spend their time in drinking and semi-casual womanising.

One of Jack’s friends suggests going on the High Hunt, an early-season deer hunt which takes place high up in the Cascade Mountains—in “some of the roughest, emptiest, steepest, highest country in the whole fuckin’ world”. (In contrast to The Belgariad, High Hunt contains a lot of swearing, drinking and sex. In the fantasy series, there are occasional jokey references to the sorcerer Belgarath’s dissolute ways. The first half of this novel, I think, gives the details of that sort of life.)

The group take a whole lot of baggage into the mountains with them: personal hang-ups, rivalries and resentments aplenty. One of their number, for instance, ex-Marine Lou McKlearey (who Dan describes as “a whole pile of bad trouble, just looking for someplace to happen”) is not only saddled with PTSD, but has been carrying on an affair with Jack’s wife, and has slept once with the wife of another member of the expedition—so, at least two of the group are pretty keen on turning their rifles on him, if he wasn’t already difficult, competitive, and obnoxious enough. Naturally, as well as rifles, they all take pistols, too.

Although High Hunt is mostly described as a thriller, and there’s a lot of tension throughout as the personal issues build up steam, it doesn’t deliver the thriller-type of ending that reviewers’ comparisons to Deliverance (filmed in 1972) might imply. Eddings’ novel isn’t about a shoot-out between supposedly civilised men, but the moral arc each character goes through. Jack, for instance, finally admits how scared of life he is; Lou doesn’t exactly turn his life around, but we at least get a glimpse of the kind of psychological pressure he’s under. Another member of the group, Stan, a somewhat henpecked academic, though he’s revolted by his killing of a deer, plays up the big hunter when he gets home and shifts the power balance with his formerly domineering wife (though Dan can see it’s all a bit fake—not all of the characters have entirely positive stories). Another, Cal, finally admits it’s time to grow up and drop all the drinking and womanising.

Dan’s turnaround, though the least dramatic, is the most explicit in what caused it. At the start of the novel, he has, as he describes it, a serious case of “plain, old-fashioned alienation”. Going up into the mountains—and, yes, killing a deer, poor thing—reconnects him with something authentic:

“There was no way to fake it… If you didn’t kill the damned deer, he wouldn’t fall down… He had too much integrity… He knew he was real. It was up to you to find out if you were.”

He gets almost poetic about it, though in a slightly Hemingway way:

“I slowly squeezed the trigger. When a shot is good and right on, you get a kind of feeling of connection between you and the animal—almost as if you were reaching out and touching him, very gently, kind of pushing on him with your finger. I don’t want to get mystic about it, but it’s a sort of three-way union—you, the gun, and the deer, all joined in a frozen instant. It’s so perfect that I’ve always kind of regretted the fact that the deer gets killed in the process. Does that make any sense?”

As well as interacting with (and shooting at) mother nature, Dan gets a dose of re-parenting, thanks to the two men who are their guides for the hunt: Miller, an impressive, white-bearded father-figure (who “looked a little bit like God himself”), and the older, smaller Clint, who, as he does all the camp’s cooking, comes across as something of a mother-figure. Both come to thoroughly approve of Dan, and Dan gets to feel a bit of self-respect in the process. He goes home, commits to his studies, and even manages to convert his hippie-ish girlfriend into a more conventional wife.

I couldn’t help noticing a few similarities with The Belgariad. The opening, with its reminiscence of a rural childhood, “on the bare upper edge of poverty”, in which Dan’s father tells a story, echoes the opening chapter of Pawn of Prophecy, with the boy Garion’s upbringing on a farm and the storyteller Belgarath’s visits. The narrator’s surname, Alders, immediately made me think of the main god, Aldur, in The Belgariad. And the section in the final Belgariad book where Garion, Belgarath and Silk—just the men, for the first time in the series—set out into country that feels very much like the gold-rush era US, has echoes with the world and characters of High Hunt, if I’m recalling it right.

High Hunt was better than I’d expected. I’d say it’s better written than The Belgariad, and that’s probably because Eddings was writing about people and places he knew, and felt something about. There’s definitely an air of authentic feeling towards the landscape he describes:

“The road out to Miller’s wasn’t the best, but we managed. The sun was up now, and the poplar leaves gleamed pure gold. The morning air was so clear that every rock and limb and leaf stood out. The fences were straight lines along the road and on out across the mowed hayfields. The mountains swelled up out of the poplar-gold bottoms. It was so pretty it made your throat ache. I felt good, really good, maybe for the first time in years.”

There’s also a lot of technicalities about guns and hunting that went over my head, but at least it left me feeling that the author knew his stuff. It’s the sort of novel where someone says “Why don’t you get the horses while I rig up a drag?”—and I have no idea what a drag is, but I’m pretty sure Eddings does.

A lot of drinking goes on. It’s full of scenes where two guys get together and decide to go out for a drink, but first have a few drinks at home to get in the mood, and stop off on the way to buy a bottle to keep things going. Then, once they’re at the drinking establishment, they go from beer to something stronger, then decide to go to someone’s house, and do some more drinking there. (It makes me wonder what Dan was really on about when he accused his mother of being an alcoholic.)

In this sense, it’s a novel about a particularly male sort of toxicity—a lot of the women are treated abominably by the men, and I can’t say the author is particularly sympathetic towards them—but ultimately it’s about rising above this Slough of Despond, connecting with something authentic, and getting on the right path once more.

Which may well be what Eddings himself was doing by writing the novel. I wouldn’t say I detect any regret about the treatment of the Eddings’ son—there’s pretty much nothing about children in the book, aside from references to the narrator’s own childhood, which clearly contained a certain amount of the sort of corporal punishment Eddings himself would have grown up with. (Jack’s kids get barely a mention, and neither adulterous Jack nor his equally adulterous wife seem to take much care of them, which can’t help feeling significant.) Instead, this is about Eddings backing himself out of a moral dead end and (presumably) deciding to live a more authentic, or upright, life from now on. It’s about Eddings himself, not what he did to someone else.

One strike that’s perhaps against it, is that there’s a certain amount of the sort of light but firm paternalistic moralising in High Hunt that I recognise from The Belgariad. Dan’s hippie girlfriend, who leaves off the political demonstrations, starts wearing a bra, and agrees to get married, as though she’s finally come to her senses, is one case in point: Eddings has always had something of the attitude that everyone will one day see the world as he thinks it should be and correct their wrong ways, and this makes me wonder a bit if he was fully capable of the moral self-evaluation you’d expect a year in prison to give him. High Hunt isn’t about regret for what he did, but a recognition of the bad path he was on, which isn’t quite the same thing, but is at least part of the way there.

In the piece linked to above, Gifford writes of how the revelation about Eddings’ crime cast a whole new light on The Belgariad, finding it to be “an impossible attempt at atonement, a desperately failed wish put to paper, and a tortuously painful digging out of his and his wife’s shame”. I hope that, ultimately, no atonement is impossible, but the sense I get is that the Eddings attempted to put what they did behind them (they certainly made sure to avoid the limelight once their fantasy novels were so successful, and perhaps part of that was fear of what might be dug up about them), and that any thoughts or feelings Eddings might have had about it would be deeply buried. But it would be interesting to give his break-through fantasy series a re-read, I have to say.

For this re-read of J K Rowling’s Harry Potter books, I bought the series as a single Kindle book (all the better to quote you with, my dear), a side-effect of which was I could see how far, percentage-wise, I was through the series as a whole. And it’s only with this, the fifth (and longest) book of seven, that I passed the halfway point. Halfway points are often major turning points in stories, and I’d say Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (first published in 2003) is no exception.

You wouldn’t think so immediately, though. For a large part of The Order of the Phoenix, the presiding feeling is one of frustration. Harry being so isolated at the Dursleys and getting no news of what’s going on in the Wizarding World; none of the kids being told what Dumbledore’s Order of the Phoenix is up to; nobody knowing what Voldemort’s up to; Harry being disbelieved by everyone at school; Dumbledore avoiding not only speaking to, but even looking at Harry; Hagrid’s unexplained absence; Ron and Hermione’s being prefects, leaving Harry on his own and feeling left out; Ron and Hermione’s constant bickering; the increased homework and revision the trio have to put up with as well as (for Harry) detentions, on top of the burden of their usual extracurricular school project of defeating the forces of evil; Harry’s inability to talk to Cho, or to understand her emotional state (plus the frustrations of early adolescence generally); Umbridge teaching only the theory, not the practice, of Defence Against the Dark Arts; her increasing stranglehold on communications in and out of Hogwarts, and her limiting of everyone’s freedoms, until “It seemed to Harry that Umbridge was steadily depriving him of everything that made his life at Hogwarts worth living: visits to Hagrid’s house, letters from Sirius, his Firebolt and Quidditch.” On top of all this, there’s Harry’s frustrating dreams, which are, he soon realises, only echoes of Voldemort’s frustration. The first half of the book starts to feel like a powder keg waiting for a match.

Another part of the frustration is that Harry is denied the usual sense of coming to his true home that has, so far, begun every book in the series, whether that home is Hogwarts or the Weasleys’. Instead, we get number 12 Grimmauld Place, current headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, but still dominated by the character of the morally dark, pure-blood-elitist Black family who once lived there. Now it’s a sort of prison for the last scion of that family, Harry’s godfather Sirius, who turned his back on his parents’ elitism but now finds himself swamped once more in their prejudicial gloom, as though the house were a living symbol of a repressive childhood lingering into adulthood. (And the family’s house-elf, Kreacher, wandering around muttering darkly, is like the sort of inner voice instilled by such a childhood, and just as hard to get rid of.)

Talking of elitism, this book — and how could it be otherwise with a title such as The Order of the Phoenix? — is full of elites. There’s the Order itself, there’s “Dumbledore’s Army”, there’s being a Hogwarts prefect, and Umbridge’s Inquisitorial Squad that replaces them. People who see Thestrals (those who have witnessed death) form a sort of unnamed elite. There’s Death Eaters, the upper echelons of the Ministry of Magic, Aurors, the Wizengamot, the Order of Merlin, and the Griffindor Quidditch team (the last three being highlighted because major characters are ejected from them — leading to more frustration). All this serves as a reminder that Harry’s adult initiation into the Wizarding World, which ought to have been sealed by his winning the Triwizard Cup in the last book, is still somehow incomplete. The admission, in that book, by both Voldemort and Dumbledore, that young Harry had faced tasks even an adult might fail at, hasn’t taken hold — in large part because the Wizarding World doesn’t want to believe Voldemort is back, so ceases to trust Dumbledore. But even Dumbledore isn’t treating Harry as fully initiated. He’s still protecting him, both from danger and from the truth.

The frustration finally loosens its grip when this new generation starts to take action for itself. Denied proper Defence Against the Dark Arts instruction, they form Dumbledore’s Army to learn it for themselves; at Hermione’s suggestion, Harry gives an interview to The Quibbler (the wizarding version of The National Enquirer) about what really happened to him at the Triwizard Tournament; and then, at the end, the kids launch their own rescue mission into the bowels of the Ministry of Magic, like a full-on assault on the adult establishment.

In previous books, Harry being likened to his father — even mistaking himself for his father at one point — could be taken as a sign of his growing up, but here it’s his starting to notice how he’s unlike his father that reads like a sign of maturity — certainly, of individuation. And this book has an increasing moral complexity throughout, with almost all of the main characters revealing vulnerabilities and weaknesses, or having them highlighted to a greater degree than before: the fact that Sirius is trying to relive, through Harry, his lost youthful friendship with James Potter; Molly Weasley’s “mollycoddling”; Harry’s “weakness for heroics”, and his “saving-people thing”; his father being revealed as an arrogant bully; Ron’s klutziness being put on display before the whole school in Quidditch; Neville’s secret about his parents being finally admitted. I like to think another pair of weaknesses revealed in the final fight section is that not-so-clever Ron is trapped in the tentacles of a living brain, while too-clever Hermione is felled by a wordless spell. Even Professor McGonagall gets Stunned. We glimpse something of the weakness behind Voldemort’s power — his belief that “There is nothing worse than death” — and Dumbledore admits, at the end, his own weakness: the fact that he cared too much for Harry’s happiness to carry out the plan he’d initially conceived.

And that leads to the final part of Harry’s “initiation” I spoke of in my mewsings on the previous book. As well as tests and trials, and a public recognition, initiation requires education. In a traditional society, this means teaching a child, in its passage to adulthood, the myths of the tribe. (And of course this is the book where Harry & co. sit their exams, which is our modern-day version of this stage.) Here, Harry gets told the full truth about himself and Voldemort — or, the full truth as Dumbledore knows it, anyway:

“It is time,” he said, “for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything…”

The link between Harry and Voldemort is, I think, one of the most satisfying aspects of the series. It’s not just that Harry is “good” and Voldemort “evil”, and that there’s some sort of prophecy that says one will defeat the other (as there is in my childhood’s equivalent of the Harry Potter series, David Eddings’ Belgariad) — though there is, in this book, a prophecy, it turns out — it’s that Voldemort’s evil actions by themselves created Harry as he is, so evil planted the seed of its own downfall. This becomes clearer as the series moves on, but on this re-read I can’t help wondering at how restrained Rowling has been in revealing just a little at a time to what is, by The Deathly Hallows, a thoroughly well-thought-out reasoning for why Harry is who he is.

Another thing that stands out about The Order of the Phoenix is that Rowling really starts bringing on the interesting female characters. We’ve had teachers (McGonagall), parent-figures (Mrs Weasley), and two minor villains (Aunts Marge and Petunia), as female characters before, but in this book we get a wider range and deeper characterisation. We get two new female “hero” characters, in the shape of punky Auror Tonks (who “never quite got the hang of these householdy sort of spells”, though her mum could “even [get] the socks to fold themselves”, making me think her mother may have been Mary Poppins), and Luna Lovegood (a sort of antithesis to Harry in his truth-seeker capacity, in that “she’ll only believe in things as long as there’s no proof at all”, which means she believes in all the Wizarding World’s versions of conspiracy theories). Even better, though, are the female villains, Dolores Umbridge — passive aggression personified, a living version of the “smiling no” by which you can spot a psychopath — and deliriously unstable Bellatrix Lestrange. Both of these female villains are so much more emotionally provoking than the series’ main male villain, Voldemort. Voldemort is coldly arrogant, but both Umbridge and Bellatrix have a way of needling their victims’ (and the reader’s) most emotionally vulnerable points. Perhaps that’s because we expect Voldemort, a sort of “Dark Father” archetype, to be remote, but the viciously nasty “Dark Mother” behind both Umbridge and Lestrange can’t help hurting that much more.

Despite its air of frustration — no, because of its extended initial frustration — Order of the Phoenix is the most satisfying piece of Rowling storytelling yet, particularly when that frustration breaks and the action’s unleashed. My favourite part of this book (and perhaps of the series) is the scene of that final unfolding, the Department of Mysteries. Harry & co.’s wandering through the dark, surrealistic bowels of the Ministry of Magic’s strangest division remains one of my favourite fantasy sequences, both in the book and the film. The rooms they pass through (in the book, anyway) are a sort of gallery of Symbolist scenes (reminiscent of the sort of non-commercial painting Michael Whelan does). This department of the Ministry is looking into the fundamentals of human existence, at such abstracts as Time, Death, Love, and Dreams, but Rowling captures them with a moody weirdness I’d really love to see more of — or perhaps it’s there throughout, it’s just so easy to miss amongst all the wizard-school-romp stuff.

From Order of the Phoenix on, the series is about the now-publicly-acknowledged war with Voldemort. The gloves (and the blinkers) are off… Or are they? We’re not at the final book yet, so we’re not at the final confrontation. What can possibly hold that final moment off? We’ll find out in the next book, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Asked what he and his co-author wife Leigh had brought to the fantasy genre (in an interview by David J Howe for Dreamwatch magazine in March 1999), Eddings’ reply now seems about 180 degrees off target:

“Quite probably, our major contribution has been gritty reality. Our people get hungry; after a week of strenuous activity, they stink; they do argue with each other; the boy-people do notice the girl-people (and the girl-people notice them right back.) We tried our best to ignore Alfred Lord Tennyson and Tolkien and to return to Malory—which is where the good stuff is.”

Compared to the likes of Game of Thrones, “gritty reality” The Belgariad most certainly ain’t. Its characters may sweat and bicker, but none of the main ones die, and nor are they ever in any serious danger of doing so. All the good characters, though lightly flawed, are clearly good, and basically get on with each other. Only the clearly-telegraphed villain-types ever stab anyone in the back, and they get their comeuppance right away. Even the comparison to Malory is stretching it, as The Belgariad has nothing like the moment in Le Morte Darthur when King Arthur dies and suddenly all that’s good and noble goes out of the world, leaving it nothing but a bloody battlefield strewn with dead or dying knights being looted by opportunistic peasants. In The Belgariad, things go wrong only to be, at the end, set right back to how they were at the start — if not better.

Eddings admired Tolkien (fondly calling him “Poppa Tolkien” in interviews, and including The Lord of the Rings on the syllabus of a lecture course on “The Modern Novel” he gave while teaching in the 1960s — see this article for some interesting insights into Eddings’ teaching days), but — particularly now we have the Peter Jackson films, whose success and style paved the way for Game of Thrones — it’s hard to judge The Belgariad as “gritty reality” compared to Tolkien’s harrowing epic of endurance in the face of overwhelming despair, or his insistence that power can corrupt even the noblest of souls. There are no serious betrayals in The Belgariad, and the series’ five book quest is hardly harrowing, its central character, the boy Garion, being pretty much constantly in the company of his super-sorcerer guardians, along with a solid cadre of highly capable helpers, to protect and guide him every step of the way.

What Eddings probably meant by “gritty reality” is that his characters, far more than Tolkien’s and Malory’s, come across as very ordinary. They bicker, they complain, they have a sense of humour, they make friends with one another, and they remain friends. The thing that really powers the books is the gentle everydayness of their emotional lives — in particular the boy Garion’s relationships with his Aunt Polgara and Grandfather Belgarath (both, in fact, age-old sorcerers whose relationship to him, though genuine, is far more distant), and his mostly comic romance with the Tolnedran Imperial Princess Ce’Nedra. Garion is, perhaps unlike any prior teenager at the centre of a world-saving fantasy epic, a real-seeming adolescent, given to moodiness, sulks, and stubbornness, as well as occasional bursts of good sense.

(The same goes for Ce’Nedra, and if The Belgariad does have a claim to have made an advance in the fantasy genre, it may be that it contains more interesting, active, and real-seeming female characters than the commercial fantasy epics that came before it. It’s no feminist landmark, but it certainly outdoes Tolkien and Malory, as well as Donaldson and Brooks, in this respect.)

Even Eddings’ millennia-old sorcerers — on the good side, at least — make sure we know that, deep down, they’re basically ordinary folks. After every grand gesture or (brief) moment of high poetry, someone says something to deflate the situation, to bring it back to normal, to let us know the characters know they’re putting it on:

“Dost thou question my word, Sir Knight?” Mandorallen returned in an ominously quiet voice. “And wilt thou then come down and put thy doubt to the test? Or is it perhaps that thou wouldst prefer to cringe doglike behind thy parapet and yap at thy betters?”

“Oh, that was very good,” Barak said admiringly.

If it’s comparable to anything, I’d say The Belgariad is most similar to Star Wars. Begun in about 1979, and published between 1982 and 1984, its five books came out mostly in the years between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and Garion’s learning to harness his burgeoning sorcerous abilities is strongly reminiscent of Luke Skywalker’s coming into his powers as a Jedi. The Belgariad’s “Will and the Word” is pretty much identical to the Force: only a few (Jedi/Sorcerers) can do it, and it’s all about imposing one’s will via mind-force on the world. Even the way Belgarath teaches Garion to do it — by having him move a big rock — is similar to Yoda’s getting Luke to try levitating his beswamped X-Wing.

But the main thing that makes the two so similar — apart from their huge success, of course — is the way both made no bones about their blatant reliance on basic templates from myth and fairy tale. Both Luke and Garion start out as orphaned farm-boys who come to learn that they have royal/Imperial connections and sorcerous power, and that their family history is deeply tied up in long-term world/galactic conflicts between good and evil. As Eddings says in his introduction to The Rivan Codex:

“I planted more mythic fishhooks in the first couple of books of the Belgariad than you’ll find in any sporting goods store.”

Inevitably, The Belgariad has come under a lot of criticism. One man’s archetype is another’s cliché, and anyone who didn’t fall under the series’ spell tended to be affronted by its commercial success and accused it of being nothing but a cynical rehash of genre clichés. (As also happened with Star Wars.) And it’s hard to argue against this, The Belgariad is so nakedly archetypal. Its fantasy world is nothing but a grab-bag of characteristic historical eras (in an interview with Stan Nicholls, Eddings called it “dropping three or four aeons of western European culture into a blender”), with its equivalent of Imperial Romans (Tolnedra) peacefully coexisting with Norman-era French (Arendia), Vikings (Cherek), Cossacks (Algaria), and a sort of overheated Weird Tales version of Ancient Egypt (Nyissa). (The ghost-haunted land of the Marags, presided over by an eternally-mourning god, is perhaps its most original and quietly powerful touch, in this respect.)

In addition, so that none of Eddings’ world-building goes to waste, the quest for the vaguely super-powerful Orb takes our heroes on a convenient tour through every land on the map. But to say this is contrived is to miss the point. The quest, in The Belgariad, is like a Hitchcock Macguffin — an excuse to get the story started, and to keep it going, while the real stuff happens. The search for the Orb isn’t really the point about The Belgariad, and all the time it’s going on you, as reader, if you’re captured by the series at all, don’t actually want them to find the Orb — not in the same way as, when you’re reading The Lord of the Rings, you really, really want the One Ring destroyed.

What I think The Belgariad is doing while you’re following its characters on their vaguely world-shaking quest, is casting a readerly spell of gentle enchantment for the duration of its five books. It’s not a particularly forceful or wildly magical spell. Perhaps the best word for what it does is the simplest and least magical of all magical terms: it charms. Its charm is in the easy humour of its characters (sometimes belaboured — Eddings has a tendency to underline his punchlines not once but twice), their low-scale emotional ups and downs, and in the quiet but lasting development of their friendships, loves, and companionship. All this is leavened with a generous smattering of lightly thrilling adventure, and an evenly-paced uncovering of the series’ mysteries — about Garion’s identity, and the true nature of the quest they’re on — drip-fed at just the right speed.

The Belgariad perhaps only works if you come to it at the right age — Garion’s age, early adolescence. Fortunately, I did, and I have to say the books certainly worked their charm-spell on me, as well as convincing me of the undeniable power of a simple, fairy-tale coming-of-age narrative — and, perhaps only because I came to it when I did, it continues to work the same spell whenever I re-read it.

The Belgariad may not have the grit of Game of Thrones, it may not confront the darker forces that The Lord of the Rings does, but I’d certainly miss its charm, its air of comradely companionship, and its gentle fairy-tale power, if the genre were ever wholly given over to nothing but “gritty reality”.