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Eragon is 15 going on 16, an orphan raised by his uncle in a village by the mountains. He's not completely clueless: he knows about Urgals and has heard of Dragon Riders and Elves, but he's illiterate and poor.

While hunting deer in the mountains, he finds a large blue stone and takes it home. It hatches into a bright blue dragon, and Eragon soon finds that his dragon, Saphira, is hotly sought after.

When his uncle is killed by Raz'zak, creatures in the service of King Galbatorix, the last Dragon Rider (turned evil), and his home burnt down, he and Saphira leave with the old story-teller, Brom (who was a Dragon Rider, long long ago), on the trail of the killers.

Brom reveals he's not just a story-teller and trains Eragon in sword-fighting, magic, literacy, battle tactics and other bits of knowledge. Eragon is revealingly on the cusp between boyhood and adulthood - in his thoughts and perceptions he is starting to lose his self-centredness and think of the bigger picture.

For all that, Brom was unsuccessful in teaching him any manners. Eragon is just one of a number of characters with poor grace and a demanding, petulant air. It makes him a less than likeable character. Saphira is rather two-dimensional, and other characters like Brom and Murtagh and Arya stick to two or three character traits.

Eragon does not mess with the well-worn cliches: it sticks to them faithfully. While Tolkein had relevance - writing against the background of Nazi Germany, prejudice, torture and war - Paolini borrows liberally without seeming to understand the difference. His Urgals are thinly disguised Orcs, but are simply evil. There is nothing frightening about that, and it does not teach us anything new. I am very dismissive of fantasy that treats with the good vs evil trope in such a blind way. The world is so much more complex than that.

Fantasy has such a broad range of possibilities. As an artistic medium, it is most successful when delving into societal, racial, gender and cultural issues and boundaries, exploring philosophies and experimenting with alternatives. I would love to read a fantasy that is more applicable to our own times, that uses the fantastastic to explore the current issues of terrorism, global warming, the war in Iraq etc. The numerous books written in echo of Tolkein have established generic traits that seem to be hard to shake - they also read like fanfic, which I detest.

Eragon is hit and miss. It wears thin in many places, and the cliches and stereotypes are tiresome. Written by a teenager and self-published by his parents before being picked up by Alfred A. Knopf, becoming a best-seller and, just this year, released as a motion picture, Eragon gets both praise and flak. I personally am not a huge fan, and I held off on reading this for several years because I thought it was bound to be really bad, even though a close friend said it was quite good. Paolini has achieved a lot for his age, but his work lacks the experience and maturity that can only come with age, practice, and experience. He has promise, but could get stuck in trying to reproduce this strangely popular work.