It’s a bit late, but I have a very good reason. The same reason, in fact, that has led me to only make a handful of posts since last year’s Summer Reading List. The wedding is a little more than two months away, we just signed the apartment lease today, and reading has to take a back seat to all of that. But I did get one finished, so here we go.
Fantasy
Title: The Eye of the World
Author: Robert Jordan
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Year: 1990
I’ve read a lot of fantasy novels, and a lot of series. Many of them are good: Sanderson’s Mistborn and the Stormlight Archive series; Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Some hooked me early, but faded as they progressed or stalled: Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. And there’s even the occasional one that I tried but gave up on, like Anthony Ryan’s The Draconis Memoria series.
I’ve never read the Wheel of Time.
I have heard of it, of course. You couldn’t walk into a bookstore in the 2000s without seeing at least a full shelf of Robert Jordan’s books. But I never gave it a shot. The cover art didn’t grab my eye. The descriptions and blurbs felt kind of opaque. The Wheel of Time, to me, struck me as a series intended for Wheel of Time fans. Since I wasn’t one, I didn’t bother.
Lately, fantasy has left me feeling a kind of burnout. The most popular entries are female-focused, and little more than softcore porn…when they stay softcore, anyway. What little remains once all the shades of gray and sparkly vampires and self-insert Mary Sues are taken away is mostly mediocre. Half of it is the same recycled assassin tropes, and I have half a dozen "loner assassin" books in my pile already. So I decided to go back to what’s considered one of the classics.
Let me just say that now I understand. Not why Robert Jordan is considered a classic, but why he’s seen as so divisive. The Eye of the World, the first in a 14-book series that had to be completed by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death, is a book that’s very hit or miss. It has many flashes of brilliance mired in a sea of meh.
The setting itself seems like a fairly generic fantasy world to start. You’ve got your small villages somehow fifty miles apart, a population density more like 1800s Canada than medieval England. There’s a cosmic struggle between Light and Dark, with Dark starting to win. A shadowy cabal of mages serves as the power behind the throne, while most of the characters start out not knowing there’s even a throne in the first place.
The characters themselves also seem generic, although part of this can be attributed to the Tolkien effect: Jordan did, in a way, invent a whole new kind of epic fantasy. His characters are generic because they’re archetypes. Rand is the farmboy turned unlikely hero; never mind that his heroic transformation doesn’t occur until the penultimate of the book’s 50-plus chapters. His friends run the gamut from love interest to comic relief to token healer.
What’s good about the book is that worldbuilding. While the vast stretches of wilderness are very out of place, and some of the names are plainly ripped from real history—there’s a King Arthur, for example—what we get of the world does make it feel like something someone put a lot of thought into. Rand’s home village feels like a village, and its remoteness allows for a plausible explanation as to why he and his friends are so ignorant of the world. Which also gives the author a good excuse to explain it.
The overarching story is also interesting. Once again, it might seem plain and bland in 2026, but there wasn’t a lot of epic fantasy 35 years ago. The snatches of history, the glimpses of fallen empires, the brief meetings with other races, the perils of the Blight, those are genuinely interesting. I’d love to explore them in more detail.
But that’s where things start to take a turn for the worse. The Eye of the World just doesn’t do that. It’s around 900 pages in my astigmatism-friendly EPUB version, but it very often feels rushed despite its length. Most of the story happens on the run: Rand and the party are bouncing from village to town to wilderness, chased by the Dark One’s legions. They split up—Jordan clearly forgot the cardinal rule of a GM—and reunite after a brief chance to give multiple POVs a chance.
In the decade I’ve been writing Prose Poetry Code, I’ve often lamented my lack of skill in pacing a novel, but nothing I’ve written has ever felt as plodding, yet also as hurried, as The Eye of the World. It’s a literary sort of punctuated equilibrium, but with an odd inversion: the chase scenes are the ones that feel slow, while the respites in towns leave me out of breath.
Part of this, I think, is that there’s so little internal exposition. Moiraine, the wise witch you’d expect to be the lore-dump character, mostly keeps her mouth shut, except when she’s barking orders. Lan, who is totally not an Aragorn ripoff, trust me, often goes entire chapters without saying more than a single sentence. The rest of the group has no idea what’s going on, where they are, or even why they’re being chased. They’re villagers plucked from their rural homes and thrust into the wider world, and they’re utterly lost. So is the reader.
But they are the narrative characters, so their ignorance is ours. I do the same with my own books, so I can’t complain too much. On the other hand, I rarely write characters who refuse to inform. That’s an issue I had here. You mean to tell me that these seven or eight people were on the road together for weeks, but never once did the one leading them deign to say why? Yes, you can use worldbuilding as an excuse—there’s a cultural taboo against even naming the enemies—but that’s all it is. It doesn’t explain anything.
It’s also a serious clash between what the author is telling us about his world and what he’s showing us through the lens of the characters. Despite being so far out in the middle of nowhere that they don’t even realize they’re part of a kingdom (or the matriarchal equivalent), Rand and company have enough contact with the outside world that they know common songs, legends, and histories. It’s hard to square that circle.
So, to sum up, The Eye of the World is a seminal work of epic fantasy, one that deserves praise for kickstarting the subgenre. Yet it’s also a deeply flawed tale. It gives me the sense that Jordan didn’t know what he was writing as he wrote it. There are vast swathes of pages that could be left out with no harm done, while crucial details, things you would expect the characters to say or do or ask, are only mentioned in passing. Add to that a generally abrasive, know-it-all elitism from those who are supposed to be helpful, and a worldwide lack of empathy, and you’ve got a setting that makes me want to learn more about it, but puts me off reading anything else that takes place in it.
The Wheel of Time can keep on turning forever. I’ll just make sure to keep out of its way.
