I think that I was a little hard on The Shadow Rising in my mind, when I claimed that The Dragon Reborn was the last book in the series that had a solid structure to bring everyone into the same storyline. I mean, yes, some of the characters have fully divergent stories for the first time, and they will remain diverged until the end of the series from here on out. I mean, some people reconverge at certain times, but never everyone all together. (P.S. Still spoilers, for now. Probably not much longer, I’ll be more careful, but they still exist for now.)

But the plotlines in this book constantly mirrored each other thematically in ways that I would be able to describe rather than assert if I had not waited so very long after the book for the review. (This is a real problem that I will try to avoid in the future. Because, pretty embarrassing, right? I mean, even one “for instance” and I’d be satisfied. But my brain is a blank slate on the point, other than having been impressed by it as I was reading. This is one of the upsides of re-reading a book when you know all the things that are going to happen in it. You can get a lot more deeply into the structure of the thing, the themes, the foreshadowing, develop a real appreciation for the craft of writing. When craft exists, at least, which it did here, despite my lack of proof.)

Plus also, some of the coolest scenes in the series, right? Well, at least, the highest concentration of them. Redstone doorframes? Rhuidean? I’m just saying, cool shit went down. Plus… so, this was the first of these books that I read any of. I was at UT for a weekend “come be at our school” trip, in the summer of 1992, and my occasional girlfriend was reading it, and I glanced at what she was reading, a scene where Mat was trying to convince Perrin that they should both ditch Rand, because, crazy channeler guy even if he is the Dragon, right? She explained to me that Mat was less of a dick than he sounded in that scene, and I eventually picked them up based on the recommendation. (Later, I realized that when she sent me through a three-ringed art installment on the UNT campus  hoping I’d have some kind of vision, that was a reference too.) My point is, it will always be special to me not just because I haven’t entirely gotten over the collapse of the Age of Legends and the Da’shain Aiel, but also because it marks the first words I read in the Wheel of Time.

Anyway, good book. But then, haven’t they all been, so far?

It occurs to me that every review after this one will be much harder. Because, see, The Dragon Reborn has a cohesive storyline that weaves its way apart and back together again, although arguably Perrin is barely involved in the climactic action, or for that matter any of the rest of the events, which mostly bring everyone together via traps and/or the whims of fate, and meanwhile Perrin is only being dragged along by Moiraine while causing ripples that will have future rather than current consequences. So I suppose I’ve just made a liar of myself, and the truth is that Jordan was already starting to drift away from everyone being a part of the same grand plan for a book’s arc.

But all the same, this is the last time that was even mostly true, and so it’s still noteworthy. Because Rand is… so, here’s a thing people talk about, why he seems so much crazier in this book as though the taint of saidin was ravaging him, then Jordan took stock and realized how much time was left and kind of backed off that plan for a while. Also, this may be a good time to mention that I’m still not caring about spoilers yet. Good? Good. So anyway, that’s a valid stance to take, authorial error. Whether it is such and I’m being apologist or not, I still think the text, especially the preceding events in the overall story, support another explanation. Which is, Rand is experiencing actual regular psychological trauma based on having just had a prophetic fight in the skies above Falme, taking a magical unhealable wound during said fight, being praised by everyone around him as the savior / destroyer of the world, and still not even being able to control the power he’s supposed to use to do whichever of those things turns out to be accurate. My point being, you don’t need magic evil to explain why he might have experienced a temporary break with reality that reset itself once all his doubts had been erased. Sure, he ended up with the crappy end of the bargain, but at least it was no longer just sitting there, unknown and unknowable. “Am I really really the Dragon? Fine, let’s get to work, then.”

I, uh, may have gotten ahead of myself there. So, anyway, you have Rand running off to fulfill the one part of the Prophecies of the Dragon he knows about, just so he can be once and for all sure instead of awaiting Moiraine’s pleasure. And you have Moiraine vexedly following, never so angry before or since at her own inability to to make it happen the way she wants to, and you have our three Aes Sedai in training headed off to spring a trap so it won’t get Rand instead, even though they know that’s probably why they know about it in the first place, and most of all you have Mat finally getting to be Mat, which is nice because I will like him for the whole rest of the series, except for the book he’s not in and the book where his voice is wrong, but it’s better than disliking him, which I have had to do now and again.

And this is me considering the reviews still pretty easy. Oy. The one bright side of reviewing books I’ve read lots of times and that furthermore almost everyone reading the review has read lots of times as well is that nobody has much in the way of expectations. Oh, also, Egwene? Totally binty. I wonder if this is objectively true or more a function of me liking Nynaeve so much better in my old age. I think it’s an objective truth that is undercut by her eventually growing into what she wrongly thought she already deserved in this book. Alright, I’m done. The next one may be a while in coming.

So then Rand got this idea about running off and living a hermit’s life in the middle of nowhere, one of very many middles of nowhere scattered throughout the continent because of how humanity is on a long gradual decline ever since the Breaking of the World, some 3500 years ago. This? This is why we don’t drill holes into the Dark One’s prison. Anyway, Rand’s idea made a lot of sense, because in the middle of nowhere he could not kill all his friends nor be gentled by Aes Sedai. The only downside is that, being the Dragon Reborn, he would also fail to save the world, which is probably worse than those other two outcomes. So naturally the plot ta’veren strikes in the form of creepy little Padan Fain stealing the Horn of Valere and riding into the sunset with it, right before Rand could have snuck off into obscurity. Et voila, a book.

This may leave you with the impression that I am meh on The Great Hunt, and really I’m not. (Truth be told, I expect to be meh on few if any of these books when read in one desperate gulp as I am doing. I’ve long had a theory that the problem with the books was two-fold: 1) far more repetition than non-casual readers need, and admittedly the huge gulp will eventually make that a trial, yes, and 2) too much space between books in which not enough happens, whereas the gulp will make that vanish entirely because over the course of the whole series, yep, quite a lot happens. Sure, there are other problems, but I think those are the two biggest ones. If I’m right, even a book that should be far more annoying upon re-read than the first time when I didn’t even know what to expect will also probably seem fine, and much moreso an old standby of basically good like the one from which I have just digressed broadly.) It’s just that I don’t have a lot to say, and even less to sum up, so that’s where my brain went.

It occurs to me that I possibly shouldn’t like this book, just because of the role it plays. The Eye of the World set up the central conflicts of the story, between Rand and Ishamael, between Rand and Fain, between Rand and his destiny, and of course between the entire world and the Dark One. Whereas this book sets up the some of the biggest distractions from those conflicts with the introduction of the horrible and functionally irredeemable Seanchan society and Rand’s debilitating, messianic spear wound. Plus, it introduces someone who should by rights have been an interesting distraction in the form of Lanfear, the original Dragon groupie, only to squander her before the series was even half over. I wonder if her character arc would have made more sense in a much shorter series. That said, her attempts at seduction (both the sexual kind and the “dark side of the Force” kind) were awfully clumsy here, and I wonder if that was about Jordan or about her character?

Am I rambling? Yes, yes I am. So let me leave you with this. Remember that time when they went through the Portal Stone and something went wrong and they each of them in the group lived the entirety of somewhere between hundreds to maybe infinite lifetimes? If you do not, then it is because you’re not aware that I am wildly unconcerned with spoilers for these early books, even though I announced it in front of the previous review. So that probably sucks by now, huh? Anyway, before I was so rudely interrupted, I was making a point. Sure, Jordan described each lifetime in just a few paragraphs, but they were still entire lifetimes. How horrible is it to imagine that you could be a person in the midst of some kind of scientific-magic overload, a dim reflection of someone’s incorrect fate, granted the entire lifetime that everyone gets, yes, but eventually doomed to be only a fading memory punctuated by Elan Morin Tedronai laughing that, as always, he has won again and your faded reflection was an exercise in futility.

Say what you will about Robert Jordan, but the man could be incredibly evocative. Which reminds me that, as a devotee of the post-apocalyptic, I’m disappointed that the dimming light of humanity which persuaded Ingtar to sell his very soul[1] has kind of fallen away from the story. At least, my memory of the latter books is that the land is never so vastly empty as it is right now. Probably I’m wrong objectively and it only seems thus because of Travelling. But it was tragic and beautiful, and I miss it.

[1] What, you’re still here complaining about spoilers? Seriously? I thought I had made myself clear! (I’ll start trying to keep track of them somewhere in the book 7 range or so, I reckon.)

It is likely that I’ve read The Eye of the World more often than any other book. But not in the last eight years or so, I guess? Hence this review, which is kind of difficult to put together. What can I say that hasn’t already been said extensively? In any event, the book is over twenty years old, so expect spoilers from here forward, and I can’t promise there won’t be spoilers of future books. But certainly not of the last several.

One thing is that I watched the Lord of the Rings extended trilogy on blu-ray last weekend, and there are large swathes of the book that feel a lot like The Fellowship of the Ring, far beyond the opening hundred pages with black-cloaked riders invading the idyll of the Two Shires, only to be turned away by a wizard and a ranger. Still, given the length of the series and only one aspect truly remaining similar throughout the series (I refer here to the Padan Fain / Gollum connection), it still basically feels like the first few pages were written to be familiar, rather than that a full-scale rip-off occurred. Still, I’m surprised I didn’t see more people saying that it had back in the day. (Until I remember I didn’t pick up one of these books until 1993, by which time four had already been published, so I suppose those cries had already echoed their way out into the void.)

As usual, the biggest tragedy of the book is Rand’s innocence, so soon to be shattered. I also notice that Perrin’s broodiness here matches his future multi-volume obsession with being the guy from Taken, and that Nynaeve is by far the best female character in the series (except maybe Moiraine, but it’s not really fair to count her, because she spends so much of her time as a cipher, mostly to be observed with only the barest of glimpses into her head). There is little that has made me so happy of late as her current position on the board.[1]

Otherwise, I only have two things to add about the kindle version and my current re-read. One is that through some quirk of odd fate, every instance of the word ‘whatever’ was capitalized. I really wonder whose search and replace thought that was a good idea? The other is a thing that I need to compare against a physical copy, so just a moment while I do that. (You can pretend while reading this sentence that the sentence isn’t here, and there was a pause while I hopped into the other room to dig through my bookshelf and make sure whether the copies are identical or not. This pause is also a good time to stop if you are worried about future spoilers somehow, because I take a lot of knowledge as self-evident in the rest of this paragraph.) And what hey, they match! So, here’s the thing: The grave is no bar to my call, right? The Horn of Valere? Here’s what is actually written on the Horn, though: Tia mi aven Moridin isainde vadin. Based on the rest of what I’ve seen of the Old Tongue, which tends to be pretty consistent, the literal translation is ‘To my call, Death is not a bar’. Unless, of course, one were to notice that a newish character has taken the name Moridin, and then one were to wonder why bother to capitalize that one word there, and then one were to notice that the Horn of Valere has been absent for pretty much the entire series, and having it just being Heroes of the Horn out again after all this time would feel kind of anti-climactic, and anyway, here’s my newest loony theory[2]: the Horn is going to somehow affect Ishamael reborn, directly, as has been prophesied for the duration of said Horn’s existence. And if the Horn is older than the Age of Legends (I wonder if we know that either way?), it is also an indication that this is the actual Last Battle after all, not just one such along the turning of the Wheel.

[1] Because that would be a spoiler for recent books.
[2] not obviously addressed in the current version of the FAQ, though my searching was not exhaustive by any means, and of course if someone has said it on rasfwrj in the past 8 or 10 years, I wouldn’t be in a position to know that.