A few weeks back, the release of the first teaser trailer for Amazon’s Wheel of Time show got me to re-read the first four books of Robert Jordan’s series, which were enormously important to me back in the day, as I wrote about here:
At the tail end of that post, I said that I wasn’t going to re-read the entire series, but might pick up the concluding few books, written by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death. I actually did do that, and with the premiere of the show coming this Friday (plus another trailer released between that post and this one), I thought I should say something about them.
As someone who stuck with Jordan even through the meandering middle bit of the series, I of course read these as they came out, and on the whole, I was very happy with the outcome. Sanderson had extensive notes on plot and character that Jordan had left, and wrapped the story up in a way that felt reasonably true to what had come before. This wasn’t a last-season-of-Game-of-Thrones scenario, it was about as satisfying a conclusion as I could’ve hoped under the circumstances.
That said, I never did go back and re-read these, not even just one of them before the release of the next. This was largely because I had a much busier life when they were coming out than when I used to re-read big chunks of the series prior to any new release. But also, there were bits that were a little… off.
On re-reading these now, my reaction was largely the same. Sanderson fundamentally has a slightly different writing style than Jordan, and he’s concerned with/ attracted to slightly different aspects of the characters and story. Which gives the books a very different feel than those by Jordan. The Seanchan storyline in particular feels like it took a darker turn under Sanderson.
(This is complicated by the fact that the books I re-read immediately before picking these up were the early Jordan books. It might’ve been more fair to first re-read the last of the ones Jordan completed before he died (which I remember as something of a return to form), because a lot had changed by then. I didn’t think of that until I was well into the re-read of these, though.)
Sanderson does a decent job of trying to cover this up, by doing a lot of sections from the POV of people who hadn’t previously been viewpoint characters in the series. That gives him a bit more freedom to tweak or even invent their personalities on the fly. Those sections are very good.
But the nature of the series being what it is, there’s no way to get around the need to write from the POV of the main characters, and when he does that, his success is much more mixed. The character of Rand is going through massive changes, so he dodges a bit of a bullet there, and he does an okay job with Perrin, but Sanderson’s take on Mat is just… wrong. Mat’s adventures always had a comic element to them— grumbling that he’s not a hero while doing ever more heroic things, telling people he’s not a lord while getting more aristocratic in his tastes— but in Sanderson’s hands this takes a slapstick turn that’s really jarring. Those sections get really difficult to read because Mat was maybe my favorite character in the series, but on first read, they were a little off, and on re-reading they just don’t work anywhere near as well as they should.
He fares a little better with the female POV characters (particularly Nynaeve and Aviendha; Egwene and especially Elayne less so), but that’s in part because a number of them had become kind of annoying by the last book or two before Jordan died. Their sections shift in tone and personality in much the same way that the male POV sections do, but the net effect is more positive.
The other problem is pacing, but that’s much more of an inherited issue. Despite running to better than 2000 pages, these feel a bit rushed in places, particularly around the big questions of politics and strategy, where negotiations between nations get resolved all at once. It’s a hard problem, because had they continued at the pace of events in the middle books, Sanderson would still be writing, but there’s an unsatisfying aspect to the “OK, now that we’re all in one room, everybody agree to sign this treaty that we’re making up on the fly. Got it? Good.” plotline.
(Of course, some of those too-quickly-resolved political plotlines were in the “Oh, God, do we have to do this?” bin (Perrin and Elayne, for example), so it’s not entirely a bad thing…)
The distractingly off elements sort of compounded as I went along, to the point where I didn’t end up reading the final volume straight through. I got about a third of the way in, then started skipping ahead to get to the resolutions of various storylines. There’s a big middle chunk that gets to be kind of a drag, and I just wasn’t really feeling it any more.
On the whole, I’m glad these exist. Sanderson did about as well as anybody possibly could with the next-to-impossible task of bringing this huge unwieldy story to a conclusion. I do lament the fact that Jordan didn’t live to complete this himself, though, because I suspect I would’ve liked that version a whole lot more. The actual existing concluding volumes just don’t have the same visceral thrill for me as the first handful of books in the series, though, or quite the same hard-to-place compelling readability.
(This is, of course, very much a Me Thing— for other people, like Timothy Burke (whose re-read post is the other proximate cause of this one), even the first book doesn’t have that, and that’s fine.)
Anyway, I look forward to seeing what Amazon does with bringing this to the screen. The brief clips we’ve seen to this point look fairly promising, but it’s an inherently risky endeavor, especially given the scale of the story. I guess we’ll find out on Friday…
If you find this brief excursion into literary nostalgia interesting, here are some buttons you might click:
And if you want to disagree with my take on these, well, the comments will be open.
All this generally agrees with what I remember. I haven't read the last three books since they came out, but what I remember is that Mat was really grating in the first Sanderson book (Gathering Storm) but got a bit better in the two final books. But he was definitely the character who suffered the most in the transition. It feels like an outsized loss, because he was such a wonderful character in Jordan's hands. I think it wasn't just the humor that he brings, but also his casual, almost accidental brilliance. I hope I don't fall too much in love with his characterization in Season One, as they've recast him for the next season.
Nice to see your thoughts here. These books were a big part of my life, and I'm not sure I know anyone now in my day-to-day life who has read them. Looking forward to the TV series.