The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan

The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan, 1992

Outside in the darkness, a cock crowed. Mat shifted uneasily and told himself not to be foolish. No one was going to die.

His eyes dropped to his cards--and blinked. The Amyrlin's flame had been replaced by a knife. While he was telling himself he was tired and seeing things, she plunged the tiny blade into the back of his hand.

With a hoarse yell, he flung the cards away and hurled himself backward, overturning his chair, kicking the table with both feet as he fell. The air seemed to thicken like honey. Everything moved as if time had slowed, but at the same time everything seemed to happen at once. Other cries echoed his, hollow shouts reverberating inside a cavern. He and the chair floated back and down; the table floated upward.

The Ruler of Flames hung in the air, growing larger, staring at him with a cruel smile. Now close to life-size, she started to step out of the card; she was still a painted shape, with no depth, but she reached for him with her blade, red with his blood as though it had already been driven into his heart. Beside her the Ruler of Cups began to grow, the Tairen High Lord drawing his sword.

Mat floated, yet somehow he managed to reach the dagger in his left sleeve, and hurl it in the same motion, straight for the Amyrlin's heart. If this thing had a heart. The second knife came into his left hand smoothly and left more smoothly. The two blades drifted through the air like thistledown. He wanted to scream, but that first yell of shock and outrage still filled his mouth. The Ruler of Rods was expanding beside the first two cards, the Queen of Andor gripping the rod like a bludgeon, her red-gold hair framing a madwoman's snarl.

He was still falling, still yelling that drawn-out yell. The Amyrlin was free of her card, the High Lord striding out with his sword. The flat shapes moved almost as slowly as he. Almost. He had proof the steel in their hands could cut, and no doubt the rod could crack a skull. His skull. ---- (page 71)

I have read many better authors than Robert Jordan, and many better books than The Shadow Rising. At best, Jordan's writing is workmanlike; at worst, it's absurd. There is not a page of Shadow that isn't goofy in some way, or a little bit dumb, or derivative of other, better novels. The Wheel of Time books are not good books, to put it bluntly.

But it's been a few days since I finished the latest tome, and I still miss it. I've moved on to other books, but I still keep turning to pick it up again, and I feel nothing but disappointment when I remember that I won't be reading the next one for a while.

I think it's the sheer force of Jordan's storytelling that makes the books so much damn fun. He's not poetic like Tolkien, or brilliantly complex like Martin. The Wheel of Time series is extremely enjoyable, and I'm not saying it has nothing to say, but it doesn't come close to some of its peers in scope or import. What it is is pure storytelling goodness. Like Christopher Paolini's Inheritance cycle, the Wheel of Time draws you in by wedding tried-and-true fantasy tropes to solid world-building and fun character development. Shadow may be the longest, messiest entry yet in an already long and messy series, but it's my favorite so far.

The Dragon Reborn ended with our heroes all reunited once again inside the impregnable Stone of Tear. No longer running from his identity, Rand must shoulder the burden of being the Dragon, pulled in different directions by competing factions. Making the unpopular decision to journey into the uncharted Aiel Waste, Rand has to face a nation of hostile, alien people who may not want him as their new leader--as well as more than one deadly enemy hiding in plain sight.

Meanwhile, Perrin and Faile travel back to Emond's Field to help the villagers in their war against a horde of bloodthirsty Trollocs (and an equally dangerous force of Whitecloaks), Nynaeve and Elayne hunt the Black Ajah in the troubled city of Tanchico, Egwene learns more about Dreaming from the Aiel Wise Ones, a shocking schism occurs among the Aes Sedai, and Mat--well, Mat doesn't have a lot to do, but he's still awesome.

There's a lot of plot crammed into Shadow, and dozens of plot threads and characters being introduced and reintroduced. Other than a ponderous, saggy stretch at the very beginning, the book is rarely boring, and although the pace is not exactly breakneck (the book is a thousand pages, after all), events unfold at a pretty good clip. Jordan is not a world-class plotter, but he's more than competent at winding up tension and some of his clue-dropping is downright sly.

Jordan has never been very good at evenly distributing storylines, and the intersection of the various narratives and character perspectives is choppy, to say the least. However, every main story in the book is solid. After being largely MIA for Dragon, Rand gets a decent chunk of Shadow to himself, though his motivations tend to be murky even when we're sharing his head. Jordan has so far been doing a nice job of showing his slow descent into semi-madness, which could be as a result of the Dark One's taint or just because he's lonely, isolated and has no one to trust.

Perrin's story is the longest in the book, and probably the best overall. I will go on record as really disliking Faile at the beginning of the novel, and hoping to hell that she and Perrin wouldn't fall madly in technicolored Wuv. Naturally, they do, and by the end of the book I was actually enjoying their relationship. Perrin has grown a lot as a character, and seeing him inadvertently take command of the Two Rivers is a blast, even if it is Fantasy Cliche 101. It's also fun to see some of the Emond's Field characters that we haven't seen since The Eye of the World, as well as getting some genuine forward movement with the Whitecloak storyline, which has been snailing along for a while now. The final battle between the villagers and a massive army of Trollocs is one of the most viscerally satisfying sequences in the series so far, for my money. Even a rather tepid mystery subplot can't stop this storyline from being a standout.

The Nynaeve/Elayne/Egeanin story in Tanchico is choppier, but still worthy. Elayne gets her largest amount of character development since her introduction, and Egeanin (a character who had one brief scene in The Great Hunt) emerges as one of the more nuanced figures in the series so far. Jordan is not known for his brilliantly depicted character interactions, but the different-worlds friendship between Elayne, Nynaeve and Egeanin is one of the more interesting and effective dynamics in the book. And let's not forget Thom, who is emerging as one of the best, but least-used, characters in the saga.

Even though it's arguably the most important storyline in the novel, the White Tower schism gets only a few chapters. This surprised me, since Jordan is usually fond of stretching out key events, not abridging them. Still, it's an exciting development, and one that promises to bring an interesting conflict to the later installments. The Aes Sedai are arguably the largest and most powerful group in the WoT universe, and seeing them turn on each other is going to be exciting.

Throughout the novel, the classic Robert Jordan flaws are all very much in evidence (almost endearingly so). The man cannot write a compelling villain to save his life. Shadow is overflowing with baddies, all with the complexity of cardboard. Okay, Liandrin is a little creepy, but she's the only one I can think of. Several Forsaken show up over the course of the book, and they're all almost comically toothless. For all of her supposed power, Lanfear does nothing but sneer and Nynaeve singlehandedly defeats Moghedien with little trouble (granted, this is a very satisfyingly badass moment for Nynaeve). Jordan's device of throwing in a Trolloc attack whenever things get dull is getting very old, too. Not to mention his gender-politics motif, which can be utterly exhausting in its tenacity.

But there are flashes of something else in Shadow; brief moments where Jordan truly shines. The sequence in which Rand relives the history of the Aiel is almost certainly the best piece of writing I've seen from Jordan so far. Those two chapters are almost exquisite in the way they fit together like a backwards puzzle, providing a jaw-dropping glance at the Age of Legends. It is moments like that when you can truly see the staggering scope of what Jordan has created. It's moments like that when you see the Wheel of Time for what it is: a true saga, one that sucks you in and holds you spellbound, even for a thousand pages. And goodness knows, there's a lot more to go.

NEXT UP: The Boy Next Door, by Meg Cabot.

The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan

The Dragon Reborn by Robert Jordan, 1993

Mat swung the staff with all his strength. The thick wood smashed into the man's head, the hood of his cloak only partly muffling a sound like a melon hitting the floor.

The man fell across the tiller, shoving it over, and the vessel lurched, staggering Mat. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a shape rising out of the shadows by the railing, and the gleam of a blade, and he knew he would never get his staff around before it struck home. Something else that shone streaked through the night and merged with the dark shape with a dull thunk. The rising motion became a fall, and a man sprawled almost at Mat's feet.

A babble of voices rose belowdecks as the ship swung again, the tiller shifting with the first man's weight.

Thom limped from the hatch in cloak and smallclothes, raising the shutter on a bull's-eye lantern. "You were lucky, boy. One of those below had this lantern. Could have set the ship on fire, lying there." The light showed a knife hilt sticking up from the chest of a man with dead, staring eyes. Mat had never seen him before; he was sure he would have remembered someone with that many scars on his face. Thom kicked a dagger away from the dead man's outflung hand, then bent to retrieve his own knife, wiping the blade on the corpse's cloak. "Very lucky, boy. Very lucky indeed."--- (page 371)

The Wheel of Time series, at least its first three books, is not something that can really be examined from a critical perspective, because it would fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. It kind of reminds me of the original Star Wars trilogy: no one is going to hold it up as an example of great writing, but it's a work of uncommonly good storytelling. The Dragon Reborn, like its predecessors, is great storytelling, whatever its other faults (and they are many). It's a big, goofy, apocalyptic sword-and-sorcery saga, replete with battle scenes, sage mentors, grade-school romance, nasty monsters, heroes with hidden and awesome powers. You can't help but love it a little.

After pronouncing himself the Dragon Reborn in The Great Hunt, Rand al'Thor finds himself thrust into a life he never wanted, as leader of an army. When he begins having dreams of an ancient sword hidden in the city of Tear (which will be able to confirm that he truly is the Dragon, or something), he runs from his new responsibilities to go after it on his own.

Meanwhile, Nynaeve, Egwene and Elayne are enlisted by the Amyrlin Seat to track down the group of Black Ajah that menaced them in the previous book, Perrin finds himself torn between wolf and man while hunting for Rand, and Mat attempts to get the hell out of Dodge, while dealing with a mysterious new power of his own. Everyone, however, is inexorably drawn to Tear for another confrontation with the Dark One.

The really strange thing about Dragon is that Rand barely shows up, except in brief snippets. The other main characters are the real focus here. It's an unusual move on Jordan's part, especially considering what a conventional Bildungsroman the first two books were. The book suffers a little from not having a central figure, but it's also a good way to flesh out characters like Perrin, Mat and Elayne, who have gotten marginalized in favor of Rand in the past.

Mat is really the book's breakout character; he's much more fun to read about than Egwene or Perrin. With so much craziness going on, it's nice to have a character with a sense of humor (if there's anything that annoys me about Jordan's style, it's his straight-faced approach to everything, no matter how nutty). His rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold characterization is nothing new, and Jordan deals with it in a characteristically over-obvious way, but it still works. Perrin also gets some good development, as he evolves from being just a taciturn Rand-clone. The last third of the book saddles him with an annoying love interest, though, which is kind of a drag.

It's the trio of Nynaeve, Egwene and Elayne (known to fans as the Supergirls) who are really aggravating in this volume. Jordan's gender-wars angle is one of the worst things about the series so far, and his female characters so often come off as dumb, petty or shrewish. Admittedly, his male characters sometimes do, too, but he commits some pretty egregious errors in characterization with the Supergirls. Egwene is too bland, Nynaeve too belligerent and Elayne too underwritten. Some of their segments do work, but overall I'd much rather be reading about Min or Moiraine.

Dragon's plot is remarkably similar to The Great Hunt's in a lot of ways: a basic quest narrative with a bunch of plot threads all leading up to one climax. The final chapters where everything converges are a lot of fun, but not really worth a whole book's build-up, since none of the surprises are really that surprising. Jordan takes a lot of shortcuts on the way and downright cheats in order to make the story fit together. His huge over-reliance on dreams is worse here than in the previous two books; he uses them to either make the plot work or to make already obvious thematic points even more overt. I've said it since the first book: he's much better at grounded, real-world action/adventure than airy-fairy metapsychics (that's not to say that his action scenes obey the laws of physics; his heroes routinely take down dozens of baddies singlehandedly).

And I must say, that if there's one thing that the series is missing so far, it's a decent villain. Fantasy series usually have memorably nasty bad guys (Gollum, Voldemort and Cersei Lannister are three that leap to mind), but Jordan hasn't produced even one. Padan Fain, who was just creepy enough to be passable, only makes a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in this one, which leaves us with a bland assortment of generic mustache-twirlers. Like Lanfear, who's too transparently and uninterestingly eeevil to work, or the book's main Big Bad, who is only revealed at the end, and sitting here right now, I honestly can't recall anything about him. And Ba'alzamon just makes me think of Buffy: "Yeah, we get it, you're evil. Do we have to talk about it all day?"

Maybe it's just me, but I think that Jordan's writing may have dipped in quality between the last book and this one. Descriptions are more repetitive (how many identical wharfs are there in this universe?), dialogue is hokier and more contrived, the plot points more belabored. The pacing is also off, and the multiple narrative threads don't fit together as smoothly as they should. In a lot of ways, Dragon is a rather rough novel. But then, so were the others, especially The Eye of the World.

The fact that Dragon is something of a mess is beside the point, though. It's not really supposed to be good, it's supposed to be fun. And it is, pure escapist entertainment. There is not much going on under the surface here, not much by way of truth or beauty or insight. It resembles George R. R. Martin's series in the same way a donkey resembles an elephant. Dragon is shambling and ungainly, but it's a treat, too, the kind of book that you're eager to jump back into, much as you may criticize it. If the Wheel of Time continues to be this entertaining, I'm along for the--very, very long--ride.

NEXT UP: Elizabeth George's A Great Deliverance. Yes, I know. Another British mystery. What can I say?

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan

The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan, 1990

The Eye of the World was a fun book, comfortingly derivative of The Lord of the Rings and highly readable even when it was a bit goofy or stale. The Great Hunt, the second part of the enormous Wheel of Time series, retains its predecessor's charms (and some of its faults), but it's also weightier, darker and more original It's a whole new ballgame.

While Eye was a little awkward and relied too heavily on cliches, Hunt sees Jordan becoming more comfortable in the world he's created and branching out a bit with his concepts, characters and creatures. Actually, make that branching out a lot, since there are more races and societies in this saga than you can possibly keep straight without the help of a glossary.

After discovering that he can channel the One Power at the end of the first book, Rand finds himself forced to embrace or reject his destiny as the Dragon Reborn, a figure who will stand against evil during the impending Armageddon. To complicated matters further, the all-powerful Horn of Valere has been stolen and it's up to Rand and his friends to recover it. Meanwhile, Nynaeve, Egwene and Elayne travel to Tar Valon to study with the Aes Sedai, only to find themselves in as much danger as Rand.

Eye's main plot followed a fairly straightforward quest pattern. Hunt has multiple narrative threads, several different narrators and a far more nuanced, complex storyline. Jordan is definitely ramping up the intensity and putting his characters through a lot more pain and hardship.

Rand's journey from farm boy to leader of men is expected and a somewhat overly classic device, but hey, bad stories don't become classics. Jordan does a fairly subtle (for him) job of turning Rand into a hero, Bildungsroman style.

The book's second main thread (following Nynaeve and Egwene) is less successful, although still good fun. I've found Egwene chronically dull since Eye, but Nynaeve and Elayne are interesting enough to make up for it. The fact that the Aes Sedai remain a morally ambiguous group also adds a nice layer to the story.

The fact is, Jordan is a good storyteller, maybe even a great storyteller (note that I didn't say writer). Despite his many flaws, he manages to really draw you into his world. It doesn't hurt that he's a deft pacer who keeps the action and adventure coming at all times.

Okay. Now for the bad. Much as I have enjoyed both Wheel of Time books that I've read, particularly this one, there can be no denying the fact that Jordan ain't Shakespeare. His writing tends towards the clumsy at times and there's the odd flash of banality, too. His dialogue is not routinely awful, but it's not his strong suit. Don't even get me started on Bayle Domon, the sea captain who never uses contractions of any kind ("the sea do be rough").

Jordan does better with action scenes or really, any scene in which there isn't too much human interaction:

Saidar was a torrent racing through her. She could feel the rocks around her, and the air, feel the tiny, flowing bits of the One Power that suffused them, and made them. And she could feel Aginor doing. . . something, as well. Dimly she felt it, and far distant, as if it were something she could never truly know, but around her she saw the effects and knew them for what they were.

The ground rumbled and heaved under her feet. Walls toppled in front of her, piles of stone to block her way. She scrambled over them, uncaring if sharp rock cut hands and feet, always keeping Aginor in sight, A wind rose, howling down the passages against her, raging till it flattened her cheeks and made her eyes water, trying to knock her down; she changed the flow, and Aginor tumbled along the passageway like an uprooted bush. She touched the flow in the ground, redirected it, and stone walls collapsed around Aginor, sealing him in. Lightning fell with her glare, striking around him, stone exploding ever closer and closer. She could feel him fighting to push it back at her, but foot by foot the dazzling bolts moved toward the Forsaken. ---(pages 286-287)

Jordan also has a very 1950s-sitcom view of gender relations (Men! They're so bull-headed and dumb! Women! They're so shrill and shrewish!) that wears on you after a while. He has no understanding of female relationships; the all-female interactions in the book tend to be eye-rollers.

And then there are the logical errors. Jordan constantly bends logic and dumbs down his characters to make the plot work. Oh, sure, Nynaeve, follow the woman that you hate blindly on a dangerous journey. She isn't going to betray you or anything (hint, hint)! It's a loophole-closing device that a lot of authors use, but Jordan definitely relies on it too much.

I could get into some of the other problems--such as the fact that Jordan still has yet to write one really creepy villain--but that would give the impression that I didn't enjoy the book, which was a blast to read. In this case, pure storytelling trumps the writer's other flaws. The story of the ordinary boy with a great destiny is a very old one, and it's been told a thousand different ways, but it's still compelling.

Even though I'm not far into the series yet, I don't yet see the faults that many fans have accused Jordan of in later years: being dull, slow-moving and ponderous. So far, the books have seemed anything but, especially Hunt, which easily tops Eye in all ways. Eye was a fine introduction, but Hunt gets into the meat of the story and ensnares the reader in its flawed, but enormously entertaining, web.

NEXT UP: A rather lighter piece of fantasy fiction: Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan, 1990

Though my reading tastes are wide and varied, fat epic fantasy novels are not high on my list of favorite genres. I mean, I love The Lord of the Rings as much as anyone, but hardcore fantasy books with huge mythologies and complicated, apostrophe-filled names are mostly virgin territory for me.

But when I heard about the late Robert Jordan's massive Wheel of Time series, I knew I had to check it out. The series currently spans two authors, twelve volumes and over 11,000 pages (and it's not even done yet). The first book, The Eye of the World comes complete with three or four maps and a detailed glossary in the back. The series is a pleasingly daunting prospect; entering it almost feels like an enormous homework assignment.

After eagerly devouring Eye, I am assured that the Wheel of Time is anything but a homework assignment. The first book is an old-fashioned, red-blooded adventure, complete with rampaging monsters, ancient secrets and battles over the fate of the world. It's a zippy, utterly engaging read.

The story is nothing new. Three unrelated farmboys (Rand, Mat and Perrin) living an insular life in a rural village are suddenly thrust into prominence when an army of monsters targets them. On the run with an assorted group of allies, the boys must evade the ancient, reawakening evil that threatens their world-- an evil that they alone may be able to stop.

The journey is dangerous and colorful in the grand tradition of quest literature. Jordan isn't reinventing the Wheel here (ha ha), but what his universe lacks in originality, it more than makes up for in detail and scope. Yes, the Lord of the Rings parallels become a little excessive, but so many lesser authors have pillaged from Tolkien, too, that it's hardly noticeable.

To a large extent, Jordan is working with archetypes. The story is familiar and generic--I'm sure you could find several dozen titles in the 'Fantasy' section that follows the same basic narrative pattern. What Jordan brings to the novel is energy, verve and enthusiasm. You get the sense that he really enjoyed creating a world and the characters who people it.

Those characters appear to be stereotypes at first, but all of the main characters deepen as the book progresses. None of them is exactly three-dimensional, but they're engaging and likable. Rand is our hero and while he's not the most exciting protagonist I've read about, he carries the book ably. Mat, his snarky best friend, is widely considered the series' breakout character, and I'm curious to see where his storyline goes in the future. His wit and pessimism is a nice counterbalance to Rand's stoic positivity.

If nothing else, Jordan is a master of pacing, keeping things propulsive, switching viewpoints before any one becomes stale. There is an exhilarating feeling of danger at every turn, and villains pop up to confront our heroes at regular intervals. It's too bad that most of them are a little cheesy; the series could use more compelling bad guys.

The villains may be generic at best, but the broad scope of The Eye of the World helps inject more nuanced conflict into the story. Mercifully, there is no politicking, but there are multiple factions in play, some of them trustworthy, some of them less so. One of the novel's central questions is whether our three heroes are being used by everyone around them, even their allies. These questions aren't answered fully, though there's certainly plenty of space for them to be addressed later on.

Jordan is not the world's greatest prose writer, nor does he try to be. For the most part he's competent, with the odd flash of excellence or mediocrity. He does have a propensity for awkward word choice that sometimes slows down the narrative, but his dialogue is lively and smooth, rarely slipping into the overblown Middle-Ages patois that some fantasy writers use. His descriptions are serviceable, too, sometimes even slipping into a sort of dreamlike lyricism:

The stone hallway was dim and shadowy, and empty except for Rand. He could not tell where the light came from, what little there was of it; the gray walls were bare of candles or lamps, nothing at all to account for the faint glow that seemed to just be there. The air was still and dank, and somewhere in the distance water dripped with a steady, hollow plonk. Wherever this was, it was not the inn. Frowning, he rubbed at his forehead. Inn? His head hurt, and thoughts were hard to hold on to. There had been something about. . . an inn? It was gone, whatever it was.

He licked his lips and wished he had something to drink. He was awfully thirsty, dry-as-dust thirsty. It was the dripping sound that decided him. With nothing to choose by except his thirst, he started toward the steady plonk-plonk-plonk.

The hallway stretched on, without any crossing corridor and without the slightest change in appearance. The only features at all were the rough doors set at regular intervals in pairs, one on either side of the hall, the wood splintered and dry despite the damp in the air. The shadows receded ahead of him, staying the same, and the dripping never came any closer. After a long time he decided to try one of those doors. It opened easily, and he stepped through into a grim, stone-walled chamber.

One wall opened in a series of arches onto a gray stone balcony, and beyond that was a sky such as he had never seen. Striated clouds in blacks and grays, reds and oranges, streamed by as if storm winds drove them, weaving and interweaving endlessly. No one could ever have seen a sky like that; it could not exist.---(pages 168-169)

One of Eye's main elements is the lofty cosmic struggles going on between the Light and the Dark One, a struggle that involves the Wheel of Time,something called the One Power, a group of magic-users called the Aes Sedai and a lot of other stuff that's difficult to understand. I'm sure this will all have much significance later on down the road, but I prefer the more grounded adventures to the metaphysical elements, which bog down a slightly anticlimactic climax. Jordan is more adept at describing the grime and toil of being on the run than he is at painting broad, century-spanning spirituality.

What makes the novel so much fun is ultimately Jordan's obvious love of an old-fashioned kind of storytelling; the kind that's more concerned with magical swords and sentient wolves than with deep meaning and social criticism. Not to say that Eye has no observations to make, or themes to put forth, but story is clearly king in Jordan's universe. He spins a very good story, which is probably why I'm already eager for Book Two. I know that the WoT encounters many problems later down the road, especially the untimely death of Jordan himself (the series will be completed with the help of another author). Later volumes have also been roundly abused for being slow-moving and dull, causing many fans to abandon the books altogether. Frankly, all the controversy just makes me more interested in where things are going. I have a feeling I may end up addicted to this series.

NEXT UP: China Lake by Meg Gardiner, a lesser-known author of California-set thrillers.