Belgarath the Sorcerer

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Belgarath the Sorcerer" is the story of one man's love--for his god, for his wife, for his "brothers", for his daughters, and for people. He came across a young she-wolf in his travels, while traveling in the form of a wolf himself, and she followed him to his errand and back to his tower. I’d not read this one before (and I was very glad the narrator was the same as the one who did The Belgariad and The Malloreon as it means pronunciations and accents were constant. This book revisits battles,conflicts, and political situations, ties the pieces together, and still leaves you wanting more.

Fortunately they retained their writing skills and both the Belgarath and Polgara volumes while clearly afterthoughts are well written and an excellent and entertaining read. Now none of these books I would put on my "I don't care if you don't like the genre, I highly recommend you read these books" list, but I would put them on my "If you enjoy fantasy books and want to enjoy some of the books which made this genre something special towards the end of the 20th century" list. Belgarath admits that he tends to take a fairly long view of history and is thus able to take the loss of others (with the exception of his wife), in stride, thus making him naturally a rather static character.There are some parts - the first few sections in particular - that really are new material and hold up reasonably well, but once we get to the oft-retold recovery of the Orb, it's downhill from there. However, Belgarath was the far more experienced of the two, and so Garion was often happy to let his grandfather do it. My wife challenged me to read the first hundred pages to see if I liked it and it resulted in me reading the whole set from start to finish without a break. Some of these I found mildly adorable in a rather chivalrous way, such as Belgarath’s wonderfully naïve misunderstanding of why his wife would want him to tell her he loved her, or Garion’s continual surprise at how tiny and fragile Ce’Nedra seems given how large she looms in his affections, a view I definitely share with regards to my lady who is also tiny.

While the first part of the book was quite good in revealing the younger Belgarath it wasn’t exactly revelatory and just a rehash of the first 10 books.Nothing, it seems, happens by chance or through free will - everything must happen as per the plan of the Necessity, one of two duelling consciousnesses fighting for control of the path the universe will take hereafter. It is a great story and explains a lot from the Belgariad that the reader did not get in the earlier series. The other part of the problem is that when the writing isn't a tedious rehash of expostion from the first ten books, it's gimmicky fourth-wall-breaking stunt writing. To an outsider, they were continuing wrangling — usually Polgara making comments about Belgarath's appearance, habits, and hygiene, and Belgarath wincing or making dry comments of his own right back.

Eddings is very good at developing likeable real characters and allowing them to have believable character flaws.Sometimes, a couple of (long) chapters were spent on describing certain events that, in my opinion, could have been explored much less thoroughly; while at other times, decades or centuries were skipped in the space of only a few pages. Belgarath looked upon the human condition with a mix of sympathy, amusement, and cynicism, a result of his long lifespan, which in Belgarath the Sorcerer, was about 7,000 years. Bestselling authors David and Leigh Eddings welcome readers back to the time before The Belgariad and The Malloreon series.