The Elenium/Tamuli series, you mean? Meh, I'm not sure... I always had a preference for the earlier stories and world setting. What impressed me with Edding's work, though, when reading The Rivan Codex, was that he'd approached the whole thing in a similar way to Lucas writing the original Star Wars trilogy. For the scant few out there who might not know, Lucas based the story arc of the trilogy on the work of Joseph Campbell, an esteemed anthropologist who made a comparative study of mythology throughout the world. One of his masterworks was The Hero of 1000 Faces, which basically claimed that all hero myths could be distilled down to one story - the character archetypes and plot beats in all western legends mapped out exactly the same. Lucas took that theory, and mapped out his own space opera using the same journey - and thus a classic film trilogy was born.

What Eddings did was to write, in the late 20th century, a new version of the medieval romances of 12-14th century France. The main difference between him and Lucas is that, rather than relying on some other guy's research to give him the plot outline, Eddings used his expertise as an English professor to discover the 'rules' of the Romance for himself. The main differences between Garion's adventures and Sparhawk's is that the former begin ab ovo (from the egg - meaning at hte beginning of the story), whilst the latter start in media res - in the middle of the action. For me, I think the problem with the latter was that, having read the first two series, seeing the same person write according to the same rules with a completely new, but very familiar set of character archetypes felt a little... well... famliiar.

I still enjoyed the books, though.

jonthecelt