I’ll probably watch the upcoming adaptation of Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, but not with any great feeling of anticipation, mostly just because I think Rosamund Pike is a good actress.
I don’t have fond memories of the series—it’s one of two absolutely interminable book series in that era that I eventually gave up on out of annoyance with the writer’s blatant padding and indecision. (The other was David Wingrove’s Chung Kuo books, where the publisher apparently felt the same way I did and told him to wrap it the hell up when he was inclined to just keep going.) I know from a lot of friends and online conversation that the books written by Brandon Sanderson to wrap it all up are actually good, so maybe I’ll eventually get around to those, but when an author shakes me loose despite my wanting to know what happens next, that tends to be a lasting judgment for me. There’s too many other things to read.
What I did want to know is whether my memory of the first book being pretty good was on target. So that I was willing to re-read over the last week.
The answer? It’s one of the better Lord of the Rings emulators, and to some extent, it was one of the last of them. That’s faint praise, or at least I mean it that way, since I truly dislike the Shannara books and many other Tolkien imitators. It’s hard to miss now as it was when I first read it how much it follows the plot structure of The Fellowship of the Ring: innocent community of yeoman farmers set upon by mysterious agents of a Dark Lord, young people led by wise and powerful people into danger against a reawakened evil, a secret destiny that carries a heavy responsibility and draws the attention of sinister powers. An ancient world, dotted with ruins. Armies of misshapen minions chasing the heroes. The farming community at the beginning might as well be called the Shire, honestly, it’s that close.
Plus some generic fantasy tropes thrown in: names with apostrophes to slightly exoticize a character and so on.
On the other hand, a couple of twists that I rather liked. First, that we aren’t just in the world after the legendary age, where only a few characters have accurate knowledge of the importantly determinative past, but that Jordan directly tells the story of some of those past events in a contemporaneous mode. That means we’re not in suspense about whether Lews Therin, aka the Dragon, went mad or not, or whether the Wheel of Time is just a metaphor—which makes real tension around whether Rand al’Thor, aka the Dragon Reborn, is destined to go mad as well, once we get it confirmed that he is. (Which seems very likely by the end of the first book, but it’s a while before any of the characters but two hear it or are sure of it.)
Second, the gendered basis of the magic and world-building is interesting. I think more recent readers of genre work might not care for it, and I suspect the upcoming series is going to bungle badly because of a fear that younger viewers might dislike it. But basically there’s a female magic and male magic and the male magic is tainted by cosmic evil and prone to drive those who wield it into a lust for destructive power. In the end, the emphasis on gender in the series is its major shortcoming—there’s a lot of really irritating portrayals of women even though women are powerful, autonomous, and important to the story. But when it works, it adds some distinctive feeling to the grand-scale magical battles and cosmic struggles in the series. (It’s often a strikingly desexualized gendering, too—there’s romance in the series, but it’s often quite chaste, and there are the requisite evil women who sexuality is part of their menace.) Also, nobody’s circumspect about magical power in this universe, though that’s the tension around Rand al’Thor and him alone—everybody else uses power if they’ve got it and tries to get more of it.
Some long-running fantasy series have pretty tight casts of characters and narrative action in the first volume where it’s reasonably easy to stay focused on the action and people that matter. But re-reading this, I’m really struck that the bloat that made these books absolutely impossible to tolerate around Book 6 or 7 is already extremely visible here. Places are tediously overdescribed. Minor characters abound and they all get dialogue and physical descriptions. When the key protagonists have to flee their bucolic farming town after it is attacked by the evil minions of darkness, it’s not just four hobbits and a ranger, it’s four villagers (all with capital-D Destinies awaiting them), two powerful strangers who’ve come looking for these secretly important young people, a former court bard, and a bit later, another villager who has nascent magical abilities herself.
I’d remembered the book as moving along at a fair clip, and I suppose it does in its way (certainly by comparison to later in the series) but it still felt pretty interminable because of the level of indiscriminate detail in dialogue, description and narrative. It’s also kind of astonishing to me in re-reading just how much stuff gets larded on to the characters right away, and how much Jordan digs in from the start on the idea that every single character we start with once the action begins is going to have something important happen to them. So we’ve got young women who will wield magic, a male villager who will become sort-of-a-good-werewolf, another who has prenatural luck and becomes a military leader, and the one who is the reincarnation of the all-important Dragon, destined to lead the fight against the Dark One. Nobody here is Pippin Took, whose major achievement ends up being buried underneath a troll that he stabbed in the foot. (Though if I remember right, Mat Cauthon does get overlooked somewhere in the middle of the most bloated period of the series.) The villagers move up pretty quickly in the world—Rand is making friends with princes and princesses mid-way through.
Still, I didn’t hate it on re-reading. I suppose it’s a bit like people in the book feel about the Dragon Reborn: they have the dread of foreknowledge from prophecy. In this case, the bad memories of getting drowned in oceans of static narrative and bloated prose in mid-series kept coloring how I read this less bloated beginning. But it wasn’t a good enough experience to make me want to push on and experience the first few books again.