Sunday, January 25, 2015

The Eye of the World

TL;DR – I’m reading Wheel of Time this year, just finished the first one, pretty good but also very annoying in many ways. Here’s hoping the rest are better.

One of the great advantages of having many friends on the same relative level of nerd at which I live my life is the frequency of recommendations I receive regarding various fandoms in which it is thought I would enjoy participating. Grateful as I am for the ever-growing list of sci-fi and fantasy literature/movies/television on my to-do list, it has become quite cumbersome. Like so many pins on pinterest have stated, I have a reading (and I would add viewing) list that is longer than my expected lifespan. Be that as it may, I occasionally do pull an item from the backlog of recommendations and decide to add it to my ever-growing list of familiar fandoms. Late last year was Lost, which I binge-watched from around September through November, with overall satisfying, if infuriating, results. I’m sure any of you who watched the show, especially while it was airing, can relate.

This year’s project, I feel, is quite a bit more daunting, but I also feel like I’m off to a pretty good start. It’s my goal to read the entire Wheel of Time series from start to finish during 2015, having never done so before. I’ve recently finished the first book in the series, The Eye of the World, and will be posting reviews after each one.

I will say first and foremost that my motivations for reading the WoT series are primarily obligation and secondarily morbid curiosity. As a fan of the genre and with Jordan’s opus being so ubiquitous in the fictional landscape of fantasy, I feel like it’s a prerequisite for anyone who calls themselves a fan, which I certainly do. So it is not that I walked past a bookshelf, saw the books and was instantly intrigued. Nor is it that I read a review or read a synopsis and felt a deep desire to dive into the story. I’m just aware of how pervasive it is in the general consciousness, and wanted to check it off my list.

It’s only fair, at the outset of this review process, to state my other experience reading in this genre. So far, I would place the WoT squarely in High Fantasy. I’m not comfortable calling it Epic, because that genre conforms to certain norms that I feel are lacking in WoT, but that’s more of an academic division than anything else. Other series I’ve read which I would place in the genre of High Fantasy are 1) Lord of the Rings - Tolkien (of course, it being arguably the modern foundation for the genre), 2) A Song of Ice and Fire – George Martin, 3) Several Dragonlance cycles – Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, 4) The Death Gate Cycle – Weis and Hickman, 5) The Sword of Truth – Terry Goodkind, 6) The Riftwar Saga – Raymond Feist, 7) The Belgariad – David Eddings.  In compiling this list, there were several other series that I considered including, but they didn’t have quite the over-arching punch of the above-named, even if they otherwise had the feel of the genre, which led me to try and examine some of the constraints of what makes a novel High Fantasy. (Disclaimer: I’m not sure if that’s an actual genre that’s officially designated in any way, but that’s the classification they’ve always had in my mind, to distinguish them from smaller-scope fantasy works)  The elements I include are 1) pre-modern setting, essentially any cultural context pre-industrial-revolution, 2) the existence and use of magic, 3) war, of some kind, 4) some form of quest, though I will argue later on that this is no longer an essential part of the genre, 5) a constructed world, rather than our own, 6) events that have a significant impact on the world in question for change.

In this context, The Eye of the World conformed to all of the above tenets of the genre by itself, promising lots of the same for other characters and other pieces of the world to be explored later on in the series. So it certainly met all the criteria.

My problem is that meeting criteria is not a reason for me to enjoy a book. My reasons for thinking that The Eye of the World is a good book have very little to do with actually enjoying it as a work of fiction. It did a great job at building a world, expanding it with detail upon detail upon detail until it acted on my brain more like a work of poetry is supposed to than a work of fiction, but without the consistently high tone that poetic construction requires. The aggregate of images created a vivid world that I truly enjoyed inhabiting for the space of reading the book. There are intricate mysteries and histories and realms to explore in further adventures, and the story did leave me looking forward to those adventures.

If all of that sounded like there was a huge BUT coming afterward, well, good, because here's the BUT.

My enjoyment of a book, a movie, any kind of story, is in the characters portrayed. And the characters, at least in this first book, were so flat I could have made crepes out of them. The bulk of the book was told from Rand's perspective, and that should have made him the deepest and most empathetic character, by rights. But the construction of the story was such that the reader almost always knew exactly what was going to happen twenty pages before Rand got it through his own thick skull, and that became very tedious to me very quickly. The book only became mildly interesting to me when the companions were separated after the events of Shadar Logoth, and all were forced to interact in ways that brought out individuals more strongly. Even then, though, the narrative force-fed the facts of each situation to you so often that the characters were left as nothing more than pieces of the set dressing. The wheel weaves as the wheel wills, and the attitude of Moiraine Sedai came through strongly as the will of the author. The message of the text is that you, as the reader, are not meant to experience this world through the characters, you are meant to be fed a list of names and facts about the world for your own knowledge by the use of every shoehorned narrative device available. That is not a style of storytelling that I enjoy. Most of the time, it read more like a lecture than it did a story about people.

On the whole, I will say that I do not want however many hours of my life I just spent reading the book back, and I still intend to go forward in reading the rest of the series. Partly this perseverence is based on the recommendations of some of my friends, who insist that the books get better as they go on, and partly because as OCD as I am, once I start something, I always feel a great obligation to finish it.

One down, thirteen and a half to go. Bring it on.

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