Review - The Eye Of The World by Robert Jordan

Preamble

The Wheel Of Time has been one of those epics that I normally avoid for the sheer time commitment involved with reading them. The longest series I’ve ever read was The Dark Tower. At seven books in length, Stephen King's opus does remain one of the more satisfying reads I’ve experienced. Robert Jordan’s story is twice that length, at least in term of the number of books. The philosophical implications of the story had always intrigued me, though – reincarnation, the nature of reality, more mythological symbolism than you can shake a stick at. I had previously tried to listen to the original audiobook a few years ago, but distractions pulled me away from it. The new fantastic Amazon series coupled with a serious new walking habit saw me burn through the new audiobook version narrated by Rosamund Pike (Moraine from the show) in less than a month.

A note about my reviews: I consider myself an appreciator, not a critic. I know first-hand what goes into the creation of art – the blood, the sweat, the tears, the risk. I also know that art appreciation is subjective and lernt good what mama tell’t me – if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. I’m not a school marm grading a spelling test – I’m a reader who enjoys reading. If a book is entertaining, well-written, and I get absorbed into it, five out of five. I have gone as low as three stars – anything less than that and I will not review a book (chances are I DNFed anyway). Regardless, I wouldn’t even put a star rating system on my reviews but for the reality of storefronts like Amazon.

Take from that what you will.

Review – 5/5

There’s a character who enters the story about halfway through the book, perhaps more. His name is Loial, he’s an ogier (housebroken ogre?), which is to say he’s a plodding nerd with a sense of time that’s completely alien to human beings. He is around 90 years old and he’s still considered an adolescent in ogier society. He takes his time in the grand tradition of the Ents from The Lord Of The Rings, and makes an untold number of references to how he doesn’t like to be hurried. Loial is considered hot-blooded for an ogier, which is an ongoing joke, given how bloody turgid and slow he is about doing things.

I have a feeling that Robert Jordan drew on his own artistic sensibilities when he created Loial.

One of the criticisms that is leveled at The Wheel Of Time is that the prose is dense and long-winded, and it gets worse as the series goes on. I’m still listening to the second book, so I can’t say to what degree it’s warranted overall in the series, but I think there’s a level of charm to that that I can appreciate now, and probably would not have been able to stand when I was younger. Especially on audiobook, during my hour to hour and a half walks that I try to work in each day. Sometimes you can lose focus thinking about other things, and you come back to find out that Jordan is still describing the masonry work on some castle that was destroyed centuries before in the world of the story.

To some extent, I’m kidding. From a personal level, I know that I do not have the patience to write in the way that Jordan does. The pacing is glacial, and I sometimes think on the heavy Eastern influence on the writing. It starts as a classic Western battle of good vs. evil vibe, but it seems to me that there are Taoist themes that influence the book, and not just because there is a yin yang element to much of the magic system and beyond. Even the name of the series, The Wheel Of Time, evokes something circular, and it turns out all of these folks are reincarnating over and over again. In the show, a climactic battle takes place over a yin yang symbol, and I believe the story itself has the symbol on the spine of some of the paperbacks or on the pages (one of the drawbacks of listening to the book is that I miss this kind of thing, as well as the way any of these fantasy words are spelled).

Maybe it’s because my own experience entering into these philosophical realms was coupled with a meditation practice that I picked up seven years ago or so. But it seems that even the writing itself is paced at a steady in and out breathing pace that would fit as one sits in zazen meditation (Zen being a blended offshoot of Taoism and Buddhism, to simplify it to a degree).

That’s a bit heady, so to break it down a bit: the first book is well plotted, the characterization is extremely rich (some of the best I’ve encountered), and you end up caring a great deal for the people in the book. I admit that this might be because of the involvement that the show induced in me – I restarted this book around the same time I started watching the drip feed of the show from Amazon. When I first encountered it, I felt like the big bad might be too Sauron-y for my taste, and it does wear its Tolkien influence on its sleeve. But if you’re going to crib from anyone, might as well lift from the best.

Tolkien’s work is mythological in structure, more so than most modern fantasy, and The Wheel Of Time gets full points here. Only where Tolkien was influenced by Christian and Norse and Celtic mythologies, Jordan’s goes a bit more global in scope. I think I saw something where Jordan was called the ‘American Tolkien,’ and having read this book, I think I get why. Like the country, it is a melting pot of influences, and there are some clear call outs to Arthurian legend as well as the Eastern ideas of the unified duality of the world. And a whole bunch besides.

When I was listening to the book, I was concerned as to whether there was going to be any real pay off at the end of The Eye Of The World, or if it would feel more like ‘Chapter One’ of the story. But I shouldn’t have worried – the ending is satisfying and full, but it does leave you wanting more. I’m invested at this point and have already clocked through several hours of The Great Hunt, book two in the series.

I can recommend this to anyone who is ogier in nature. If you’re more the quicksilver type, it might prove a bore. I don’t consider myself an ogier, but I think the grey hairs on my head are starting to denote a sea change in my own sensibility.

You can check out The Eye Of The World on the 'zon here.