In many ways The Belgariad was a Cold War story. The good guys were on the western edge of the world, a band of loosely-linked autonomous nations that competed and sometimes warred against each other, but were bound by, would always come together against, a common foe in the east. The foe in the east was of course an evil, almost completely inaccessible empire, a collection of vassal states being slowly crushed under the boot-heel of a malevolent dictator (in this case a god, genuinely wielding supreme authority, rather than simply pretending to). Women were chattel, slaves were bought and sold, humans were sacrificed at burning altars. It’s kind of a nightmare caricature of the old Soviet bloc, a regime that, though certainly bad enough in its own right, was nothing compared to the Angaraks under Torak. But still.
At the end of The Belgariad, the wall came down, so to speak, when Belgarion killed Torak in the City of Endless Night. The Angarak nations found themselves in tremendous religious, social, and economic turmoil. Kings and emperors found themselves more or less on the verge of ruling over failed states. I said in my last post that The Malloreon repeats much of The Belgariad, but of course it does so with variations. As Belgarion travels through the lands of the east this second time, he learns about how similar the common people are to those in his own homeland, how the evil in the east depended heavily on the cult of personality surrounding the god-king Torak. The Angarak people and their leaders are human beings. Flawed human beings, of course, who have often committed heinous acts in order to survive in the world created by Torak, but human beings nonetheless. And human beings can be redeemed. The Malloreon takes the same society as the first five books did, and recasts them in a different light as more than simply a collection of nameless, faceless henchmen and evil doers. In many ways the conflict becomes more about perspective than about absolute morality. Eddings is careful to frame “the bad guys” in terms that we will find morally repugnant, but he’s also careful to make sure that we see that they do what they do, not because they love being amoral (or immoral), but rather because they believe they are doing the correct, moral thing. It’s a complicated lesson for many of us, in large part because we ourselves can be terrifying in our certainty. One need only watch the news. With this shift of perspective (I hope I won’t spoil anything by saying the “good guys” win again), Eddings seems to be signaling that the repetition is nearly over. His world will soon be able to move on.
Next up: Demon Lord of Karanda, by David Eddings.
