“Do you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?” — Steven Brust, Dzur
Way, way back in October, when I was annoying you all with DonorsChoose fundraining posts, I offered to sell post topics for $30. I’ve paid off most of these, but I have three left, one of which was for something more regarding Robert Jordan.
As I noted at the time, the Wheel of Time books were ridiculously important in my life– because of them, I got involved with the Robert Jordan group on Usenet (I take obscure pride in being there from before the founding of rec.art.sf.written.robert-jordan), and through that, I met a great many people, a number of whom are still friends, and some of whom are hanging around here leaving the occasional comment. And, of course, I met Kate through r.a.s.w.r-j, so it really had a huge impact on my life.
Of course, I haven’t had anything to do with Usenet since late 2001, and I haven’t read the books in years. Which makes it a little difficult to pay off the DonorsChoose request from Hohn. Then it occurred to me: I could re-read the first book or so, and comment on how they appear to me now…
So, some weeks later, having re-read the first book (The Eye of the World), and the second (The Great Hunt), and, um, the third (The Dragon Rebordn), and oh, yeah, the fourth (The Shadow Rising), here are some scattered comments. These will contain spoilers, so if you’ve been held in a secret prison since 1990, and haven’t read any of these, you might not want to continue with this post.
First and foremost, the man was no prose stylist. The writing is rarely more than workmanlike, and the storytelling is very straightforward. The one real attempt at literary flair is a two- or three-chapter flashback sequence in the first book, and that was done clumsily enough that generations of nerds on Usenet thought it was either a continuity goof or something sinister and magical going on.
That said, though, there’s something compelling about the storytelling. Yeah, it’s a farm-boy-with-a-Destiny story, but there’s a reason why hoary old plots get to be hoary old plots– they work, and this one works, at least for me. The first book starts moving pretty quickly, and that carries through to the end. It’s really not until book six or so (as I recall) that the momentum starts to fail in a comprehensive way. There are bits in the early books that flag a little, but there’s a reason my lark of a re-read kept going through four 800-page books.
The first four are what I remember as the very best part of the series, and they still work well on a plot level. The third book is probably the best constructed of the lot, with three different plot lines all converging on Tear, and a minimal number of scenes from Rand’s POV. The fourth book contains my favorite sub-plot of the whole thing, Perrin’s return to the Two Rivers, which still works as well as it did back in the day, at least for me. I hadn’t remembered how abrupt the endings to the other two plot lines are (Elayne/ Nynaeve in Tanchico and Rand/ Mat/etc. going to Rhuidean)– those feel rushed at the end, but the Perrin story is still terrific.
The one bad thing about re-reading these years later is that all the flaws of the later books are really there from the beginning. The first book isn’t too bad, because it doesn’t really contain any sections from the POV of any of the female characters, but those start showing up in the second book, and they’re annoying right from the start. Any scene set in Castle Anthrax the White Tower is excruciating, with the werid fixation on spaking and nudity.
The most unfortunate thing about the books is that they feature a fairly obnoxious view of relations between the sexes, and this is never clearer than in the female POV sections. There are occasional attempts at nuance, but they never really touch the female leads, and that makes those sections really annoying. This is one of the reasons why the Perrin sections of The Shaodw Rising are so good– it’s the one time in the books that he presents a non-toxic male-female relationship (and, unfortunately, I know that he screws it up again in book six or seven, which lessens my enjoyment somewhat)
It doesn’t help that the women’s sections of the plot are so lame. The same bad relationship stuff is there in most of the male POV sections, as well, but there’s enough action in most of those to carry them past the worst of it. The women’s sections, on the other hand, involve a lot of drudgery and corporal punishment, and long rants about how stupid all the men around them are, which wears thin really quickly (again, knowledge of the plots of books 7 and 8 only makes this worse).
In the end, on re-reading, I can still see the virtues that I found captivating back in the day. I can also see where the books eventually go wrong. I suspect they hold up better for me than David Eddings did for Kate. On balance, they were still a fun read, and still managed to get me to stay up later than I should a few nights in the past couple of weeks. It’s a pity, though, that the later books don’t deliver on the promise of the first four.
(Though my recollection is that there were finally some good bits again in the last one (Crossroads of Twilight), after a book or two that flirted with self-parody. I may have to leaf through that again…)