CHRISTOPHER PAOLINI HAS no problem trying to convince his readers of a world where baby dragons spring from abandoned eggs and young boys rescue elves from monsters. But he finds his own story more fantastical.
Four years ago, still in his teens, he had barely ventured from the remote Paradise Valley in Montana, where his parents had moved when he was a toddler as fugitives from a doomsday survivalist cult. He had never been to school.
Much of his time was spent roaming the hills, lost in a fantasy world of his own creation, until one day he decided to write it all down. Every day since has been a wild ride, from the moment that he and his family set out on the road to promote the self-published fantasy adventure Eragon in bookshops and schools, to the day that it knocked Harry Potter off the top of the bestseller list.
And so to the night, now just a few days away, when he will join the stars of the Eragon movie (who include Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Robert Carlyle and Rachel Weisz) on the red carpet in front of the Empire Cinema, Leicester Square. “If I wrote about what had happened to me, nobody would believe it,” Paolini, now 23, muses in wonder.
To meet Paolini, I fly to deepest Montana and brave the wind-battered road to Paradise Valley. Paolini still lives with his parents and younger sister amid the mustard-coloured meadows and snow-capped Beartooth Mountains in a shingled farmhouse, where he is writing the final instalment in his trilogy, after Eragon’s successful follow-up, Eldest.
Every night during dinner, as for the past two decades, the family gathers around the television to watch a movie — although, thanks to Paolini’s success, they now view on a huge plasma screen. He still visits the library in nearby Livingstone to borrow reading material.
His was a lonely upbringing in a lonely place, save for his family, who moved here to escape the cult that preached nuclear apocalypse and built the world’s largest civilian fallout shelter in a mountainside. His mother, Talitha, wanted to protect her children from outsiders and schooled them at home. By 15, Christopher had graduated from high school by correspondence but his parents were not ready to let him leave for college.
He began to dream up a story of a boy named Eragon who discovers in a forest a stone that turns out to be a dragon’s egg and who, after the death of his uncle, discovers his warrior legacy and embarks upon a quest to save his people from an evil emperor.
Had Paolini been a Los Angeles teenager, Eragon might not have become a publishing sensation. He originally conceived it as a film but, not knowing how to take it down that route, sketched it out as a book in his head. “That’s how I tend to write,” he explained to me, as we met in a hotel near the home that is now off limits to visitors because of his success. “I see a movie inside my head and I try to describe it.”
Paolini wrote his book in a year and spent another revising it. Only then did he show it to his parents. His father is not a fan of fantasy but was blown away when he read it. He and his wife ploughed all their resources into publishing the book, then packed up the family to hit the road in an ad-hoc marketing campaign.
They began in bookstores and moved to schools where, dressed in medieval regalia, Paolini would read to bewildered teenagers. He was still only 19 and it was a life-changing experience. “I was very secluded — we had friends and family of course but we weren’t thrust into a social life in the same way that you would be if you were in a public school,” he recalls. “So to go out to promote Eragon was kind of like what Eragon has to go through. He gets kicked out of his home and it’s like, OK, now, you have to grow up and learn to deal with it.”
While on the road in Seattle, a call from Random House offered a six- figure sum for the book, brought to their attention by the author Carl Hiaasen, whose stepson had picked it up on holiday. Since then, Paolini’s life has been every bit as extraordinary as Eragon’s, whizzing across the globe to promote his novels.
Now the film is being made, an experience Paolini is unsure of. “It’s like seeing your own dreams filtered through someone else’s mind,” he explains. “However it ends up, I hope it’s a good movie. But it’s a very strange experience. I can see why many authors aren’t sure what to make of it.”
Strange too for another reason. It has been a long time since Paolini picked up the book. “Reading Eragon is torture for me. It’s not because I think it’s a bad book, but if I were to sit down now and pick a story to write, I wouldn’t pick Eragon’s story any more. At that age, that was the story I wanted to tell, the coming-of-age story. It was what I was living. Now I’m in a different place in my life.”
Paolini does not read reviews, good or bad, for fear that they might skew his writing. So he may not be aware of the backlash that followed the “Wunderkind” tag, with accusations about the derivative nature of his plotlines, described as Star Wars by way of The Lord of the Rings.
He says that when writing Eragon, he saw his age as a liability, but it has been a selling point. Now, however, at 23, the prodigy tag is all but spent. Paolini has travelled the world, and recently met Quentin Tarantino on a plane (at the director’s instigation when he overheard Paolini and his sister playing a film association game) but he seems little different from the geeky teen who exploded on to the publishing scene four years ago.
On breaks from writing, he still likes to indulge in the other-wordly pursuits of his childhood, from building a hobbit hut near the Yellowstone River to practising swordfighting. But he can now choose between a reproduction Viking blade bought with his first royalty cheque and the hefty replica of Eragon’s steel that adoring fans had made for his 21st birthday.
Slightly built and dressed in an anorak, he pushes his glasses up his nose as he enthuses on the qualities of dragons. At one point he pulls out a sheet of chain mail and shows me how he makes it. He calls his family his “best friends” and one wonders how he will fare in the world outside, should he ever enter it.
He has no plans to go to university; he listens to college courses, he explains. I suggest that there is more to college than that, a social life perhaps, but he seems uninterested. Paradise Valley might seem otherworldly to outsiders, but it is his real world.
“The life of a writer is the life of imagination,” he says. “But you need the skill of empathy. If you can’t understand the life of the real world, you’ll have trouble with another.”
Eragon opens on December 15
