Review: Demon Lord of Karanda, by David Eddings

[Russ Allbery]

Demon Lord of Karanda
by David Eddings

Series:    The Malloreon #3
Publisher: Del Rey
Copyright: September 1988
Printing:  February 1991
ISBN:      0-345-36331-0
Format:    Mass market
Pages:     404

This is the third book of the Malloreon, which in turn is a sequel
trilogy to The Belgariad. Eddings, unlike most series authors, does a
great job of reminding you what's happening with prologues in each
book, but you definitely do not want to start reading here.

When we last left our heroes, they had been captured. (This is arguably
a spoiler for King of the Murgos, but it's not much of one, nor one
that really matters.) This turns out to be an opportunity to meet the
Emperor of Mallorea, the empire from which their adversary Zandramas
(and, from the earlier trilogy, the god Torak) comes. This goes much
better than one might expect, continuing the trend in this series of
showing the leaders of the enemy countries as substantially similar to
the leaders of the supposedly good countries.

This sounds like open-mindedness on Eddings's part, and I suppose it
partly is. It's at least a change from the first series, in which the
bad guys were treated more like orcs. But the deeper I read into this
series, the more obvious how invested Eddings is in a weird sort of
classism. Garion and the others get along with Zakath in part because
they're all royalty, or at least run in those circles. They just
disagree about how to be a good ruler (and not as much as one might
think, or hope). The general population of any of the countries is
rarely of much significance. Zakath is a bit more cynical than Garion
and company and has his own agenda, but he's not able to overcome the
strong conviction of this series that the Prophecy and the fight
between the Child of Light and the Child of Dark is the only thing of
importance that's going on, and other people matter only to the extent
that they're involved in that story.

When I first read these books as a teenager, I was one of the few who
liked the second series and didn't mind that its plot was partly a
rehash of the first. I found, and still find, the blatantness with
which Eddings manipulates the plot by making prophecy a character in
the novel amusing. What I had forgotten, however, was how much of a
slog the middle of this series is. It takes about three quarters of
this book before there are any significant plot developments, and that
time isn't packed with interesting diversions. It's mostly the heroes
having conversations with each other or with Zakath, being weirdly
sexist, rehashing their personality quirks, or shrugging about horrific
events that don't matter to them personally.

The last is a reference to the plague that appears in this book, and
which I had completely forgotten. To be fair to my memory, that's
partly because none of the characters seem to care much about it
either. They're cooling their heels in a huge city, a plague starts
killing people, they give Zakath amazingly brutal and bloodthirsty
advice to essentially set fire to all the parts of the city with
infected people, and then they blatantly ignore all the restrictions on
movement because, well, they're important unlike all those other people
and have places to go. It's rather stunningly unempathetic under the
best of circumstances and seems even more vile in a 2021 re-read.

Eddings also manages to make Ce'Nedra even more obnoxious than she has
been by turning her into a walking zombie with weird fits where she's
obsessed with her child, and adding further problems (which would be a
spoiler) on top of that. I have never been a Ce'Nedra fan (that
Garion's marriage ever works at all appears to be by authorial decree),
but in this book she's both useless and irritating while supposedly
being a tragic figure.

You might be able to tell that I'm running sufficiently low on patience
for Eddings's character quirks that I'm losing my enthusiasm for
re-reading this bit of teenage nostalgia.

This is the third book of a five-book series, so while there's a climax
of sorts just like there was in the third book of the Belgariad, it's a
false climax. One of the secondary characters is removed, but nothing
is truly resolved; the state of the plot isn't much different at the
end of this book than it was at the start. And to get there, one has to
put up with Garion being an idiot, Ce'Nedra being a basket case, the
supposed heroes being incredibly vicious about a plague, and one
character pretending to have an absolutely dreadful Irish accent for
pages upon pages upon pages. (His identity is supposedly a mystery, but
was completely obvious a hundred pages before Garion figured it out.
Garion isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer.)

The one redeeming merit to this series is the dry voice in Garion's
head and the absurd sight of the prophecy telling all the characters
what to do, and we barely get any of that in this book. When it wasn't
irritating or offensive, it was just a waste of time. The worst book of
the series so far.

Followed by Sorceress of Darshiva.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-06-20

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-345-36331-0.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>