I first heard about The Wheel Of Time from my older sister when I was perhaps in my early teens. She was a voracious reader of novels well above her age group, and she thought that I would really enjoy it. At the time, I was too intimidated by the size of the books, and I really didn't like the cover of the first book. I was young, and it had the look of an 'adult' book. As I got older, and more of the books kept coming out, the increasing investment of time required to read the series continued to weigh down my interest in the series such that I had decided that in all likelihood, I would simply never bother.
Enter Brandon Sanderson
A few years ago, I discovered Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Series. I loved them. I loved them in a way that I haven't loved a book since I read J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. With both series I would spend whole days reading them, doing nothing but reading, I was so completely ensnared by the words on the page that I would forget to eat. After finishing with Mistborn, I followed up with a Sandersonian binge including Elantris, Warbreaker, The Emperor's Soul, Legion, and his epic fantasy series The Stormlight Archive. I even read his books aimed at young adults, the wonderful Steelheart and The Rithmatist. Each one of them was so enthralling, that they were just as hard to put down. I now had a new favorite author.
Then I discovered a problem. I felt like a junkie waiting his next fix. Apart from some short stories, I had pretty much exhausted my supply of his original works, but I was getting desperate for some high quality fictional literature. As it happened, it was around this time that Brandon had just finished writing the last three books of The Wheel Of Time series after Robert Jordan passed away leaving his story unexpectedly incomplete.
I now had a reason to read The Wheel Of Time. After an eight month long investment, I finished the series and wanted to review it as a whole unit rather than as individual novels. Goodreads, my go-to site for this sort of stuff doesn't have a facility to review entire series of books and it didn't feel right to attach my series review to just one of the books. Somewhere, my internal thoughts about this series needs to be put into words, so here I shall endeavor to do so in as structured a manner as I possibly can.
The First Book vs The Series
After reading the first book, I was quite excited to read further. The Eye Of The World was a rather fast paced action novel following the exploits of a handful of people attempting to flee the danger of some terrifying monsters that were constantly threatening to overtake and kill them. There was impressive magic, conflict, world building, danger, and heroics. All the good things to have in a high fantasy novel, and it seemed to work. Admittedly, I really didn't understand what was going on in the climax of the novel, insofar as I wasn't aware who the hell the Forsaken were, and why they were important beyond the fact that they were evil. The leadup to the climax also felt very sudden, almost as if Robert Jordan realized he was approaching the page count limit, and had to come up with an ending that would sell a second book.
As the series continued, the overall pacing of the story slowed down significantly. The excitement and activity of the first book was replaced more and more with political, emotional, or logistical drama, and the threat of the horde of monsters introduced in the first novel was essentially forgotten, and when they would appear, would be a pale shadow of the threat they were supposed to have been in the first book. The individual novels all follow an extremely predictable pattern of slow, plodding pace for the first 90% of the book, followed by a sudden and extreme jump directly into the energetic and important climax. This structure leads me to believe that in general, the readers would have been much better served if the books had been perhaps 25% shorter.
Sometime around the ninth book, the activity started to pick up again, the monsters reappeared as the threat they were initially introduced as, and shit started getting real again. The political and interpersonal drama started to be replaced with intrigue, suspense and action once again.
This pacing issue is honestly, my largest issue with the series, however, if you've read and enjoyed other fantasy authors such as George R.R. Martin, or J.R.R Tolkien a slower pace can allow further exploration of the story. However, it went to such extremes that I was regularly lacking in motivation to continue, such that I constantly had to check that the end of the chapter wasn't actually getting further away.
Jordan's Writing Style
Every author has their own distinctive style. Tolkien loves songs, poetry, and flowery language. Martin likes putting his characters through hell before killing them. Sanderson excels at worldbuilding, magic systems, foreshadowing, and keeping his readers interested. Robert Jordan is a rather good writer as well (pacing issues aside), however his style did have some annoying elements to it that were impossible to overlook.
One of the characters would constantly "tug on her braid" whenever she got anxious. Jordan would repeatedly use that phrase (or slight variations of it), and it felt awkward every time I saw it written on the page simply due to its frequent usage.
Another similar artifact of Jordan's style is how every single woman in the world would "fold her arms beneath her breasts". I like boobs, but surely it is possible to explain that body language in some other assortment of words on occasion? How about "She folded her arms contemptuously" or "hugged herself". The excessive use of this phrase made me wonder if every woman in the world had such perfectly sized boobs that their forearms were of such exact length to so comfortably support their breasts. It seemed to be a fixation on breasts. Far be it for me to judge a man for that, but it just felt a touch uncomfortable how frequently breasts were mentioned, for the sole purpose of having arms folded beneath them.
Having grown up reading R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt novels, I became used to a very exacting and precise descriptions of every sword thrust, footstep, and maneuver that took place in a sword fight. I was used to this, and I liked it because I felt that I had became part of the fight. That isn't to say I saw in my mind's eye what exactly each of these movements did, but I was simply able to absorb the impressiveness of the melee by appreciating the smaller details. Jordan uses a very different approach to swordplay that it took me a long time to get used to, and in fact irritated me beyond belief for quite a while.
Jordan uses forms to represent actions within a fight. Forms like "willow in the river" or "dances on boulders" are used to represent distinct actions that master swordsmen would use in some sort of rock-paper-scissors-esque duel. Unfortunately, very very few of these forms are ever explained in any depth, and it becomes very evident that he is simply making up pseudo-impressive names, and listing them out in sequence with barely any further explanation of the fight.
Eventually, this stopped bothering me. I realized that since I know nothing about sword fighting in the first place, I'm not really missing out on much and I was still able to follow the general flow of the swordplay anyway. So, although it wasn't impressive in the same way, it was oddly comprehensible and enjoyable. I do however think it ironic that an author so verbose in his writing would find swordplay the one place he decided to truncate his narration.
The Characters
I didn't really like the characters at first. That isn't to say they were unlikable or all that annoying, they just didn't seem to be all that interesting or appealing at first. Eventually I became quite attached to the events surrounding the main characters in such a way that I looked forward to seeing more of them. I would look forward to the next chapter with that character's point of view, just to see how things would continue to unfold, and as the characters developed a little more depth, and actually impacted the world in significant ways, I really did start to like them.
Unfortunately, that cannot be said about some of the supporting characters who are seen so infrequently or are referred to by different names that they, or their importance, becomes entirely forgettable. More than once I had to check the internet to remind myself who the hell this or that Aes Sedai or politico was and why we care about them at this particular moment.
The Story
Besides being very slow at some places, I really did enjoy the vast majority of the actual plot. It didn't feel particularly original at times, but honestly, does everything have to be original? I found myself feeling a wide variety of emotions in response to the events of the story. There were times where I felt that Jordan was too aggressively herding the plot points in certain directions, notably when two characters were conversing, and both had secrets the other needed to know, but neither of them tried to actually explain themselves, but would instead just shout about how the other should just do as they are told, stop being stubborn, and grow up already. There were times where this sort of thing worked for the story, but other times that it just felt like a lazy method of delaying the story and injecting false conflict that seemed to just distract from the larger plot.
Somehow, the story worked very well. Each individual event that made up the plot was logical given the world and the characters involved. Everything about the story felt like it was intricately interwoven into a complex working machine where we were seeing just a small (but important) part of a living world. Since I want to avoid spoilers, it is best to just say that I found the story very satisfying, yet not terribly inspired.
The Ending
Since Brandon Sanderson wrote the last three novels, the nuances of Jordan's writing that irritated me were essentially no longer an issue, either because I had gotten used to them, or Sanderson merely avoided them, or used them much more sparingly in ways that felt more like an homage to Jordan. Sanderson did a remarkable job of conforming to the rest of Jordan's style, and managed to keep the characters voice almost completely intact.
Unfortunately, he didn't have carte blanche with the story, as I believe that left to his own devices, he would have produced a significantly stronger ending than he did. I respect that this was Jordan's story, and that Sanderson was writing from Jordan's own notes, so the ending we got was more or less as Jordan intended, and I wasn't all that disappointed to be honest.
There was a remarkable feeling of everything coming together in the end, and I feel like almost all of the implied promises made to me by the author were followed through on by the end, and I feel satisfied that it is indeed an appropriate conclusion to the story.
There were however, two particular loose threads that I would have liked to have seen concluded in a stronger manner. Firstly, the darkness within the Waygates never gets directly dealt with. I had assumed that the darkness there was somehow related to Shai'tan, but we never get confirmation one way or another on that. Secondly, near the end of the book, a few characters get to see visions of the future following the events of the final battle, yet we never really get any firm indication whether or not those events actually happen. I was happy that there was no real epilogue Harry Potter style, but some sort of stronger implication that this future would or would not come to be would have made me a touch happier.
Conclusion
The Wheel Of Time is a series that I am glad I read despite the issues I had with it. I would not recommend it to someone unless they were very much a fan of epic fantasy, and had read and enjoyed similar slow-paced fantasy novels, and knew what they were getting themselves into. If you cannot see yourself finishing all of the 12,000+ pages of the series, don't bother starting it, you'll just end up half way through and frustrated.
- Once Again Forgotten
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