George Lucas meets Anne McTorturedAdolescentCaffrey

It is a fact universally acknowledged that there are just so many plots in fiction. This particular plot concerns a young orphan of uncertain parentage who has been raised by his uncle on an outback farm on the wilderness edge of an empire. An empire ruled by an emperor who was formerly a member in a now-vanished martial order which had kept the peace for generations, but who turned to the dark side of - I'm sorry, who turned to evil, and wiped out his companions to achieve sovereignty. The young orphan finds a mysterious artefact, and consequently the agents of emperor hunt him down and destroy the farm, killing his uncle. The orphan flees, but fortunately falls in with a mysterious but very well informed elderly gentleman, who just happens to have a magical weapon for him, and can teach him how to use it. After fleeing with Obi Wan - I'm sorry, the sage - (who, of course, later dies heroically defending our hero) the orphan rescues a rebel princess, and, with her aid, escapes to the hidden rebel headquarters, just in time to defend it from an attack by the evil empire's forces...

... there are just so many plots in fiction.

And, to be fair, Eragon is not simply a straight blow-for-blow retelling of Star Wars. No, indeed. Eragon does not merely borrow from one plot; it pursues other fantasies down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for hackneyed plot devices. Here - of course - be the elves and dwarves, the orcs (here called Urgals) and other races of sub-Tolkienesque Hy Fantasie. Obi Wan even blows multicoloured smoke rings in best Gandalf fashion. As at Khazad Dum, our heroes battle hordes of orcs - sorry, Urgals - in the ancient undermountain city of the Dwarf Kings, destroying mighty works of craftsmanship that have stood for millenia. Even more perniciously, here be dragons. Anne McMisunderstoodAdolescentCaffrey's dragons, to be exact, complete with imprinting on hatching (here literally) to the first human they see, infeasible growth, infeasible size, jewel-like colours, telepathic back-chat, magical powers - oh, and a positive lust to be ridden.

Of course, there is nothing wrong, in literature, with taking an existing story and retelling it. All through the Middle Ages minstrels and jongleurs took and adapted the Matter of Britain, retelling and adapting it the needs of their audience and their time. That's how a common mythos evolves; how a society evolves a vocabulary of understood allusions and references. There's certainly nothing wrong with taking a story and improving on it; and, when your prototypes are George Lucas and Anne McSelfObsessedAdolescentCaffrey, improving on it should not be hard to do.

So does Paolini succeed?

No.

The minutiae of the plot are just awful. Here is our hero, with a winged dragon just begging to be ridden, with hundreds of leagues to travel and lives at risk if he's slow. So how does he travel? On horseback, or else on foot, always. Why? Well, obviously, so his enemies can keep up and almost catch him in eleventh hour escapes.

Again, Eragon's initial quest is to avenge himself on the ringwraiths - sorry, Ra'zac - who killed his uncle. He catches up with them, he fights them, they win and are only driven off by a convenient hero, and then they just vanish out of the plot never to be heard of again. This is symptomatic of a narrative has no form no clear plan. Eragon essentially drifts, buffetted by events. Instead of character development we have the gradual revealing of secrets: backstory, and dialogue whose sole purpose is to reveal backstory, dominates this narrative like a leaden weight.

In summary, the plot is derivative, the characters poorly drawn, and the story poorly told. This isn't good craftsmanship, not even when set against the mean standards of the fantasy genre. It does not live up to its marketing. On the other hand, it's a pleasant enough read for a day in bed with flu, and I probably shall buy its sequel.