The Guardians of the West

The Guardians of the West, by David (and Leigh) Eddings.

Guardians of the West is the first book of Eddings’ five-volume “The Mallorean”, the sequel to the five-volume “The Belgariad.” I read the Belgariad at some point in 1987 when I was first introduced to Sci-Fi/Fantasy, and I wanted more.

I don’t think I found out about Guardians right away - this was pre-internet, and I wasn’t exactly attending the book circuit - but I remember being very excited about it when I stumbled upon it. It must have been 1989, so I was what, 15? It was a tough time for me, what with the being 15 and all, and my parents were FORCING ME TO MOVE. I was going to have to move to the hinterlands of Missouri and leave civilization… and truth be told, girls, whom I had finally started to notice. (And who noticed me noticing.) I was fairly sure there weren’t any girls in Missouri. My life was LITERALLY OVER.

(Give me a break, okay? I’m sure there are stories about you at that age you’d rather not tell. This was fifteen years ago, and I’m happy to report that there were girls in Missouri. And other places, too. So much for teenage angst.)

In the middle of all that teenage drama, I remember finding that David Eddings, bless him, had written a sequel to my second-favorite fantasy series of all time.

I got Guardians in mass-market paperback, like most books I got in those days. This would prove to be a major mistake on my part, as “The Mallorean” was the first series I ever bought/received as it was being published in hardback. As soon as I read Guardians I made sure that The King of the Murgos was on my Christmas list, and I remember lugging that hardback around in the car when we drove from NYC to St. Louis in a freezing-cold December.

Anyhow, the mistake was that by getting the paperback I had driven a wedge between Guardians and the rest of the series just by virtue of the format. Hardbacks and paperbacks do not mingle on my shelves, especially not on my Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelves. This irritated me for years before I finally found a nice paperback copy of the rest of the series somewhere — maybe Michael’s Books in Bellingham? — and sold off the hardbacks. That would have been in 2002 or thereabouts, so I endured a dozen years of moving those damn hardbacks.

The Guardians of the West is a little bit of an odd book. It has a tough job to do (restart a series that had been brought to a satisfying final conclusion) and does it adeqeuately well, but I remember being overwhelmed by the new plot elements. It was only years later, after many rereadings, that I could feel the same sense of easy familiarity with Guardians as I did with Pawn of Prophecy, the first book of “The Belgariad.”

There’s a lot I like about this book. I enjoy watching the grown-up Garion playing superhero in the Kingdoms of the West and grumbling about how when there’s something no rational person would even attempt, they send for him. There’s a lot of the familliar ease between the main characters which made the first series so successful, and that’s one of the reasons I love this book. The weak points will actually come to a head in the next book; the party gets larger and larger until finally I want to stop and take attendance, the plot grows more complex (with no hope of resolution until later books, a pet peeve of mine) and the gyrations the plot goes through to explain why we’re doing all this again are excessive. The first series could handle it by having 7000 years of backstory leading up to the novels; this series has less than 10 years, and has to contradict elements from the first series to even have a chance. So there’s a pretty big disconnect there, and one that I wasn’t ready to deal with as a teenager.

However, as an adult, I can unabashedly not care about that. I don’t read this book for the plot; I read it for the characters, for the old familliar banter between Silk and Belgarath, for Aunt Pol and Durnik and all the rest. As long as that characterization remains strong, I ultimately will enjoy the story and recapture the excitement I felt when I found out we got to do it all over again.