I’ve been trying to think of a good way to start this review. I could say: it’s taken me three years, but I finally finished The Eye of the World, the first book in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series. I could say: if not for Rosamund Pike as Moiraine in the Wheel of Time TV adaptation, I would probably never have finished this book. I could say: in about 2004 I read Robert Jordan’s From the Two Rivers, only to discover it was actually only the first half of the first book in the series and decide I just didn’t care enough to keep going. I could say: The Wheel of Time series are probably my husband’s favorite books. I could say: The Eye of the World is my second experience with The Wheel of Time, after the prequel novel New Spring, which I read a few years ago.
these starting points each suggest something about my relationship to this book: that I found the book incredibly slow going; that my relationship to the book is mediated by the TV show, which I watched first; that I am typically uninterested in long epic fantasy series; that I am under a certain amount of (loving) pressure to have good things to say about the book; that I just really, really love Moiraine. all of these things are true, though ultimately they tell you very little about what I actually thought about the book. what I thought about the book is: it’s fine! it is true that I am typically uninterested in long epic fantasy series, and so without a confluence other motivations I would almost certainly never have read this book, but I think that, for a long epic fantasy novel that’s the first in what ballooned into a fourteen-book series, it’s actually pretty good. I should also note that “three years” is a bit misleading: I had stalled about a quarter of the way into the novel, but when I found out there’s a version of the audiobook that’s performed (and it is very much a performance) by Rosamund Pike, I decided to see if that would help me make any more progress. and it worked, although your mileage may vary if you’re not already obsessed with Moiraine.
in any case: the novel follows, broadly, Rand al’Thor, a young shepherd from the Two Rivers, as he and several of his friends are pursued across their world by the minions of the Dark One. the Dark One wants Rand and company for reasons that only their guide, the fiercely protective but singleminded and enigmatic Aes Sedai — a female magic-user — Moiraine and her Warder (bodyguard) Lan understand, which Rand only comes to grasp — to his horror — at the very end of the book, during a final confrontation at the Eye of the World. it is a classic quest fantasy, and it shows clear influences from a range of older works, not least Tolkien, but also, I think, some post-Tolkien genre fiction, especially C.J. Cherryh’s Morgaine series and Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry. I don’t say this to disparage Jordan: I think he does some interesting new things within the space he’s operating in, as I’ll discuss. I think the novel’s greatest strengths are the areas where it diverges from the formula of epic fantasy, and its greatest weaknesses are the places where it conforms to that formula.
let’s talk strengths first. epic fantasy is often associated with a certain tyranny of plot: the characters are basically archetypes dragged along their quest to defeat the Dark Lord — Diana Wynne Jones parodied this kind of fantasy in her The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, with entries for figures like the “Dark Lord” and the “Gay Mage” (absent here, for better or for worse, although I note that New Spring does explicitly portray Moiraine as queer). it’s true that The Eye of the World has plenty of archetypal elements, from a farm boy with a destiny (Rand) to a traveling bard (the “gleeman” Tom Merrilin) to a wise magic-user guide (Moiraine) to, of course, the Dark One (aka “Shai’tan” aka “Ba’alzamon”). two things, though, make The Eye of the World more interesting. the first: this book has only the bare bones of a plot, and I think that this is, on the whole, a good thing. there are a handful of set-piece episodes, but most of the novel is devoted to character interactions and character introspection while they travel. we do, of course, learn things about the world — it’s still a quest fantasy — but, with the exceptions of the escape from the haunted, ruined city of Shadar Logoth and the final confrontation, the novel is much less interested in any given event within it than it is in how Rand deals emotionally with his best friend Mat’s declining mental state as Mat is, slowly but surely, overwhelmed by the cursed dagger he picked up. even the Trolloc (= orc) attack that initiates the novel happens mostly off-screen, and I would say the narrative places more weight on Rand’s roiling anxieties as he drags his wounded father into town than it is in the actual attack. I would describe this book as character-driven rather than plot-driven.
and the thing is, I think Jordan is actually pretty good at characterization! my only real complaints are more about me than it is about the book: first, their ages are not entirely clear, but Rand and his friends feel more like maybe 15-year-olds than like young adults. one of many good choices the TV adaptation made was aging them up; second, I am way more interested in Moiraine than anyone else in the book, but she only gets about a page worth of focalization. all in all, though, I think Jordan does a good job both balancing character interiority with offering glimpses of a wider, deeper world — including, in some cases, glimpses of wider, deeper character relationships. one of Jordan’s strengths is — ironically for a book of this length — knowing when to shut up and let something lie unexplained, whether that’s a mysterious structure on the horizon or characters referring to “that time with the frogs”. in this respect it reminded me of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonquest, the second Pern book, where very little “happens” for the first three-quarter of the novel and then a whole lot happens in the last quarter, the emotional impact of which is only possible because McCaffrey has spent the first three-quarters letting you sit with her characters and world.
while the book is long and slow, the only part where I really felt that it dragged was the sequence of Rand and Mat — having been separated from the rest of the group — making their way across the country to the city of Caemlyn, which ended up feeling quite repetitive, with a series of encounters with / attacks by “Darkfriends”. this section is also marred by some failures of editing — there’s one very confusingly structured chapter, so much so that I had to go consult the fandom wiki and then reread it to make sense of what was going on, and also a scene that’s repeated almost verbatim in two different chapters, seemingly unintentionally, with some repetition within the scene itself (there’s also some repetition leading up to the climax). still, in a book that’s more than 800 pages long in hard copy I think that’s pretty good.
the second interesting divergence here is the entire concept of the “Wheel of Time”: not only is this setting one where reincarnation is an objective fact but also this doesn’t only mean that individual souls return (every few thousand years) but also that history writ large literally repeats — or, rather, repeats-with-variation. while the plot of the book / series superficially resembles The Lord of the Rings, then, the premise here differs in that the rise or return of the Dark One isn’t (exactly) a continuation of a previous conflict — suppressed for, in this case, three thousand years — but rather a new iteration of the same conflict. through a historical accident last time around there are some consistent actors (aside from the Dark One, who is both person and cosmic force), but this is both an old story and a new one: the Third Age, whose ending the series narrates, has come around before and it will come around again. other versions of Rand have lived before and made their choices, sometimes similar and sometimes different.
this gives the book a very different relationship with questions of destiny and choice than a lot of epic fantasy. Rand is — we eventually learn — the prophesied Dragon Reborn, and as a result he is enmeshed in a particular Pattern that the Wheel has set in motion. at the same time, because the cycles of history do not simply repeat but iterate, repating-with-variation, Rand is also free to make his own choices, to reshape the Pattern around him. maybe his soul made the same choices the last time the Third Age ended, however unthinkably long ago that was; maybe his time he will make unexpected ones. we don’t know, and neither does he. Rand is a farm boy with a destiny, but for all that he is supposed to have the power to either save or break the world he’s also just one man in an endless cycle. even if he breaks the world — as his immediate predecessor, Lews Therin Telamon, did at the end of the Age of Legends which preceded the Third Age — the Wheel will turn round again. whatever his destiny is, however central he may be to this part of the Pattern, however much he may be able to reshape the world, the Pattern will continue, indefinitely, after his death. this first book doesn’t get the chance to fully dig into this, and I also fear the follow-through may not be as cool as the premise, but it is a conceptually cool premise.
but there are weaknesses. aside from the section where the plot drags, the biggest flaw here is that unfortunately I just don’t think Rand is that interesting, or at least not interesting enough to carry the majority of the narration solely on his shoulders. for a large part of the middle of the novel Rand and his friend Mat are separated from the rest of their party – Moiraine and Lan; another boy from the Two Rivers, Perrin; Egwene, the girl Rand has a crush on; and Nynaeve, the “Wisdom” of the town of Emond’s Field — and there are a few chapters focalized through Perrin and Nynaeve, where Perrin discovers he has an uncomfortable affinity for wolves and Egwene and Nynaeve come to terms with the fact that they are capable of “channeling” the “One Power” (= magic) like Moiraine is. these were the parts of the book that most gripped me, particularly Perrin and Egwene’s journey overland, which features an encounter with the “Tuatha’an”, who are clearly based on Irish Travellers and Roma people and who are portrayed with perhaps-surprising depth and sympathy centered on their philosophy of absolute pacifism. in addition to finding Perrin’s and Nynaeve’s interiorities more engaging than Rand’s, I think letting other characters have a little more narrative space would give some useful external perspective on Rand. I think he as a character would benefit from being a little bit inscrutable sometimes, and it would make the revelation that he’s the Dragon feel a little bit less obvious.
the gender politics are, of course, unhinged. part of the conceit of the series’s world-building is that the One Power is divided into two complementary halves, the “male” half and the “female” half (Daoism is clearly an influence here: the taijitu is used as an “ancient” symbol of the Aes Sedai). the “male” half of the power has been “tainted” by the Dark One, and as a result male channelers either go mad and kill their loved ones and themselves or are forcibly cut off from the One Power by a subset of the Aes Sedai whose job it is to prevent men who can channel from going mad and breaking the world (again). this has some knock-on effects in the broader world-building, namely that in a number of countries women hold political authority — Rand in fact meets both Queen Morgase of Andor and her daughter and heir, Elayne, who goes on to play a major role in the series. the Aes Sedai, trained female channelers, are both mistrusted as witches — particularly by the “Children of the Light”, a fanatical religious movement who believe all channelers, male or female, are servants of the Dark One — and feared and respected as representatives of an extremely influential political organization. there is lip service, then, to a more egalitarian society, one where women are able to hold positions of power.
obviously this is wildly essentialist, though it does avoid certain specific kinds of essentialism — the Aes Sedai are not a reflection of some uniquely spiritual quality of women, for example, and men who can channel ultimately play major roles in the overarching narrative. there are, I think, some faultlines in this resolutely binary conception of gender and magic, at least based on this and New Spring, but I also think the faultlines are probably not the intended readings of either the books or the show (where they are also present).
this bit of the world-building also, unfortunately, doesn’t really extend beyond the aristocracy and Aes Sedai; certainly Rand, though he respects Moraine as an Aes Sedai and Nynaeve as a Wisdom, continues to hold onto a basically patriarchal world-view and to see Nynaeve and Egwene as needing his protection, as better off not participating in the final confrontation, and so on. the novel does, I will say, have both Nynaeve and Egwene reject this view, but it feels to me less like a considered stance on women being as capable as men and more like an affirmation that these specific women, because of their magical abilities and entanglement with Rand in the Pattern, (should) have agency. it is notable that this is reflected in the structure of the narrative, as well: Rand, Mat, and Perrin are revealed to be “ta’veren”, individuals of particular importance to the Pattern — hinges of history, to borrow a phrase from Laurie Marks’s Elemental Logic series — who warp reality around them even as the Pattern pushes them towards their (cyclical) “destiny”; Egwene and Nynaeve, though they are part of the Pattern and both apparently have the potential to be powerful channelers, are, in the end, just tagging along. (another good choice the TV adaptation made was to make women more prominent in general: making Egwene and Nynaeve ta’veren also; making the leader of the Tuatha’an a woman; introducing other Aes Sedai right off the bat in season 1; ...)
also, and this is a small and petty thing, but I hate when things that are set in what is in effect a far future (if a cyclical one) throw in little ~fun references~ to the ~distant past~ (our known history) — “Materese the Healer, Mother of the Wondrous Ind” can fuck off. it’s a small thing, but it comes up early, and it was in the back of my mind irking me the whole way.
with such a long book there is, inevitably, a lot more to say about it; to that end, I encourage you to check out Sean Guynes’s review, which goes into a lot more detail. all in all, though, I enjoyed the book well enough to make it through it at last — assisted by Rosamund Pike’s dramatic reading — but I will not be continuing with the series. even just the next two books that Pike read would be another 60 hours or so and that’s simply too long for me.
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