Eye of the World

Robert Jordan

I'm a big fan of humungous fantasy series, where every book can be used to prop open a different door in your house. Specifically, I'm a big fan of Terry Goodkind (okay, I was for the first five Sword of Truth books), and I kept hearing people comparing those to the Wheel of Time series. Thought I'd give it a go. After all, it's impossible to have too many huge fantasy series competing for one's precious reading time, isn't it?

Well, I found out it is. I'll give it this, the book got off on the right foot; heroes and magic and trollocs, oh my. Skullduggery in Emond's Field. Great quests afoot. Darkly mysterious helpers (okay, did anyone else get a huge "Strider" vibe from Lan?). A trio of lads off to save the world! This is the stuff epic fantasy is made of.

Then, suddenly, it stops being epic. In fact, it gets downright mundane. Now, there are some authors who can do this sort of thing extremely well (Steven Erikson and Elizabeth Moon come immediately to mind). Robert Jordan is not one of them. Three hundred pages of tramping through the woods do not a rollicking high adventure tale make. For that matter, they don't even make for good drama here. Now, I understand that there needs to be a lot of setup in any long-running fantasy series, but the best authors can integrate the setup into the action. Goodkind, on his better days, is very good at this. Michael Moorcock is a master at it. Jordan takes the approach of "okay, let's tramp through the woods, meet some more folks who will become Important a few books down the road, then split the party up so they can meet draft picks to be named later at twice the speed." I've been told skipping chapters is a good way to get through the middle part of this book, but I've never been big on skipping chapters. (I learned the hard way with Anna Karenina, where if you miss one sentence, the entire book doesn't make sense. Since I can't remember the sentence... eh, you get the idea.) I'm even less big on tramping around in the woods. Eye of the World went down to feel the dustbunnies, after which I'll use it to propl open a random door somewhere. At least I'll get some use out of it.