The butler did it.
Of course, as everyone who's followed the 15-book, 20-year saga of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series knows, there's no butler. Well, actually, the four million plus words put to paper by the late Jordan and his successor, Brandon Sanderson, probably do have a butler or two tucked in them someplace. But not as any kind of major character.
WoT is an Empire State Building in modern fantasy writing -- whether you love it, hate it, know it inside and out or have never been there, it's pretty tough to find too many places in Manhattan where you can't see it. It represents some of the better and worse elements of genre fiction, modern publishing and fantasy world-building. Almost any discussion of a multi-volume fantasy series will include some reference to it, either in praise or disparagement, and an honest view of the books will have to admit the truth of the praise and the criticism. Praise it for its creativity and coherent view of its own magic, culture and society and you'll be on target. Dog it for its ever-decreasing narrative pace, explosively bloated story and cast and frequently careless writing and you've nailed it as well.
L. Ron Hubbard produced a 10-volume sci-fi blob called Mission:Earth just before he passed, with the last nine volumes published after his death. A couple of Harry Turtledove's alternate history series hit the nine- and ten-volume mark, although neither Hubbard nor Turtledove come close to Jordan's word count. Only George R. R. Martin's ongoing A Song of Ice and Fire seems to seek the scale of WoT. Which is kind of interesting because Martin and James Oliver Rigney Jr. -- Jordan's given name -- became good friends and because a number of Martin's fans see his series with its royal incest, brutality, betrayal and whatnot as a grimy "corrective" to the much more PG-13 world of WoT.
Wheel of Time began with the 1990 publication of Eye of the World, but Jordan had already written several new adventures of Robert Howard's Conan for Tom Doherty of Tor Books. He began what would become EoTW in the mid-1980s after pitching the idea of an epic fantasy trilogy to Doherty, who accepted it but made the contract for six books, having had experience with Jordan going a little bit long. He had, of course, no idea just how true that would be. Although Jordan would take almost six years to finish the final version of EoTW, he would also complete much of the second book, The Great Hunt, soon enough after that one for them both to be published in the same year -- something that might astound series latecomers who became used to Jordan's two (or so) year gaps between volumes. In fact, the first six books of the series came out in just more than five years. After that, the pace slowed. And Jordan tucked in a prequel and a sort of guidebook-atlas to his world that soaked up a couple of years. And reading the books became like slogging through swamps, mired in more and more detail about less and less story.
Eventually responding to criticism of his pace -- both narrative and output-wise -- Jordan indicated that the 12th book of the series would bring WoT to a close. That, combined with a somewhat leaner narrative for Book 11, brought a lot of positive response. But in 2006, Jordan announced he had been diagnosed with a terminal heart condition and that, with treatment, the average lifespan of someone with his condition was about four years. The treatments, much like chemotherapy for cancer, left him fatigued and made it difficult to write. He continued writing the manuscript for A Memory of Light, saying it would be the last book even if it had to be immense. At the same time, he prepared a detailed outline of what he had yet to finish, allowing for the chance another author could finish things if he could not. Jordan died in September of 2007 with that final volume unfinished. But Tor Books, in collaboration with his widow, selected fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson to finish it, making the announcement in December 2007.
Confronted with the large partially-finished manuscript and the even larger scale of what remained, Tor and Sanderson decided that the final book would instead be three books -- none of which, it may be noted, weighs in at much under 300,000 words in its own right. The first came in 2009, the second in 2010 and the third and final piece of the puzzle found itself on bookshelves in January 2013. Sanderson, of course, had work of his own to finish in and around his work on WoT. He noted on his blog that Memory is almost certainly the final volume set in the world of WoT, as there are not nearly enough notes or outlines available for the other three prequel novels and three or four "outrigger" novels outside the main sequence that Jordan had considered at one time. It's unlikely that Harriet McDougall, Jordan's widow, would consent to those stories being written, as Jordan's influence would be very light upon them.
THE STORY
In Jordan's world, time exists as a wheel made by the Creator, and is cyclical, much as some religions teach. All of life is a part of the Pattern woven by the Wheel under the Creator's direction. But the Dark One, Shai'tan, is not a part of the Pattern and seeks its destruction. The Creator imprisoned the Dark One at creation, leaving him unable to touch the Pattern even though he can influence those who let their minds turn to selfishness and evil. Through the One Power, the Creator allows people to channel his influence and energy to do good in the world. Men and women access different aspects of this One Power to do what we would call magic.
Thousands of years ago, some extremely advanced but arrogant researchers used their power to try to tap the power available from the Dark One without releasing him. This Bore allowed him to reach out and touch the Pattern, and to influence people to work towards releasing him and destroying both the Pattern and the Wheel of Time itself. Others used their strength in the One Power to place a seal over the Bore and reimprison the Dark One, but as he was being contained he struck out and tainted the male part of the One Power with his evil. Men who "channel" this power will now eventually go mad and destroy everything and everyone they love, as well as a whole lot else, before they destroy themselves.
Rand al'Thor is a young man living in a small village. His best friends are Perrin and Mat and he is perhaps interested in a village girl named Egwene. One day Rand learns he is in danger from attacks by evil beasts called Trollocs, which were created by powerful magicians who served the Dark One by combining human and animal characteristics. Rand, his friends and the young village wise woman Nynaeve flee, accompanied by a woman named Moiraine and her guardian Lan. Moiraine is an Aes Sedai, which is the name given to a sort of convent of women who can channel the One Power.
Over the course of the next thirteen books, Rand learns he is a man who can channel the One Power -- in fact, he is the Dragon Reborn, the champion who will lead the battle against the Dark One's forces and fight the Dark One face-to-face. But not everyone thinks he should be in charge of those forces, even if they also fight against the work of the Dark One. Rand has to navigate political alliances and survive attempts by the Dark One's followers to end his life before that final battle. He has to fight the Forsaken, immensely powerful "Darkfriends" being used by the Dark One to target Rand and his allies. Mat and Perrin will play their own roles; Mat as a supernaturally lucky general and Perrin as what we would call a werewolf. Egwene will find she too can channel and becomes not only an Aes Sedai, but is raised to the leadership of the order following its own division over how to fight the Dark One and deal with the Dragon Reborn.
Each of the young villagers will also find a mate; Rand will in fact find himself in love with three women and they with him.
THE LAST WORD
Memory on its own is not a bad fit for the finale. Sanderson brought a freshness to the series that Jordan began to lose somewhere in the middle of Book 6. He also had the good fortune to be writing the final act and so not saddled with all of the buildup that Jordan had deemed necessary (and Tor had deemed profitable). Even if he was putting out 300,000 words at a time, they were 300,000 words that went somewhere. He could unload some of the baggage that Jordan carried -- a habit of not-quite-matching metaphors now and again, and uncomfortably frequent incidences of female-on-female corporal punishment. And ridicuous time spent describing clothing and costuming under the rubric of "world-building." And a lot of energy devoted to incidental characters we just met who are suddenly crucial even though nothing about the main narrative requires their existence.
You can tell the difference pretty easily. Before he died, Jordan wrote what would be the epilogue of Memory. Sanderson's much lighter touch gets us through the end of the Last Battle, and then Late Jordanian Pomposity takes control to wind things down. A man who gave most of the last half of his life to one work certainly deserved to have it end with his own words, but a reader could wish he'd channeled his earlier days more than his later ones and their visible sense of self-importance.
Of course, Sanderson was completing someone else's story and not creating his own, so he couldn't in good conscience jettison Jordan's own ideas or rework them according to his own conception. Which is probably a big reason why the "final volume" became three books itself, even though reading them makes it clear that there's still a lot of trimming possible and probably desirable.
The majority of Memory is taken up by the physical battle between the forces of Light, originally split into four different armies, with some rather brief exchanges between Rand and Shai'tan, the Dark One. Because the Dark One has no real power over humans unless they cede it to him, his goal is to make Rand quit fighting -- he can't beat Rand, but if Rand quits he can win. So he shows Rand possible visions of the future, depending on the battle's outcome. In one, formerly good people have become twisted and evil, and the land is blighted and barren. This, says Shai'tan, is what everyone thinks the world will be like if he wins. In another, the battle scars of the land and the nations seem to be healed and people seem peaceful and happy. But a horrible incident shows Rand that the people in this future have neither compassion nor conscience. This, Shai'tan says, is what will actually happen when he wins. Rand declares neither vision will come true, because he himself is going to kill the Dark One and end the presence of the Shadow in human existence. So Shai'tan shows him the vision of that future, which also looks placid and peaceful. But when Rand meets the people he's known, he sees they are not themselves. By killing the Dark One, he has taken away human freedom to resist and reject the Shadow and made them more like automatons. Rand realizes this will happen, and is dismayed and discouraged. His awareness of the battles being fought and the people dying under his banner brings him to the edge of despair, as Shai'tan's voice urges him to just quit and seek oblivion.
But instead, Rand sees the courage of those who fight when hope seems lost, especially on the part of those who sacrificed their lives. He understands they made their free choices to give themselves to a cause and give their own blood for it and these heroic sacrifices inspire him. He surges back, mocking the Dark One because no one would fight beyond hope for him and his evil; his followers battle only from fear or lust for power. He rejoins a physical battle against the Forsaken champion Moridin, who manages to distract Rand long enough to gain hold of Callandor, a sword-like talisman that allows channeling unbelievable amounts of power. But it also allows a woman who channels to take control of a man who channels, so when Moridin seizes it, Rand's female allies immediately place Moridin under their control and add his power to Rand's. The combined power allows Rand to re-imprison the Dark One and re-forge his prison without any flaws and without the weakening Bore.
Exhausted from his battle and suffering the effects of many wounds over the past two years (the span of the story; it took 20 years to write but the series happens over a much briefer time), Rand collapses. Aes Sedai healers are unable to save him and he dies. Except that he doesn't. He actually transferred his soul from his own damaged body into Moridin's. While his friends mourn him at his funeral pyre, he sneaks out of camp to start a new life, unrecognized and unknown.
OTHER WORDS
It's hard to read WoT without seeing the Tolkienisms all over it. Rand is wounded in an early book by an evil talisman and that wound continues to plague him through the series, much as happens to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring. Jordan's kindly nature-lovers are "Ogiers" instead of Tolkien's Ents. The ultimate Evil loses when one of his followers has control of a powerful talisman but is defeated (Gollum falls to his death at Mt. Doom after taking the One Ring from Frodo, destroying it and Sauron's power; and Moridin's seizure of Callandor allows Rand and his allies the power to turn back the Dark One and reseal his prison). Completion of the main task is followed by the hero disappearing from the world (Frodo sails westwards from the Grey Havens, Rand slips away in the night in another's body). Jordan doesn't really have Elves, at least not in the role that Tolkien does, although he has orc-like "Trollocs." He also lacks a Gandalf. Tolkien has nothing like the Ways of Traveling used by the magic-wielders of Jordan's world, and Jordan's explanation of magic power and its use is far more detailed and far more integral to his story and plot. Both have "old languages," but in Tolkien's case you could almost say he developed his stories so he could have a place to use his created language. Jordan's is designed to serve his story; he could have typed random keys in the places where he uses it and been no worse off.
But WoT is not a four-million-word gloss on The Lord of the Rings. It's its own story, and Jordan had his own goals. If he moves on Tolkien's stage, it's with his own play. He offers some comment on the human condition, even if is a little on the thin side: Evil can only win when good quits, and only good can inspire effort beyond the last breath of hope. When confronted with truth, evil is powerless against it no matter what force it can muster against the truth-teller. None of those revelations are all that deep, although I would agree with them all and like how prominently they are featured as the story ends.
The unfortunate side of WoT is that four million words, though. You need three basic ingredients for a good series to catch bestseller's bloat and atherosclerose itself into piano-box-for-a-coffin levels of logorrhea and obesity. These are 1) A series that people are willing to buy, 2) A publisher who likes making money and 3) Authorial vanity. Only one of those is ever scarce, and it ain't the last two. Publishers always like money (it's the one thing they can't print themselves), and when it comes to their own words, writers are like surgeons: They don't cut unless someone writes a check (you can doubtless tell nobody's paying me for this).
It's hard to know where the bloat started. The first book seems obviously intended to move a major portion of the story, even if not the one-third that would have fit Jordan's initial vision of a trilogy. Two and Three equally obviously set the stage for a longer series, perhaps the six-volume work Doherty initially forecast. But to a small degree in Five and definitely in Six it's hard to deny that Jordan is a man who has lost most of his storytelling discipline. He took a prequel novella, turned it into its own novel and planned it as a four-book series on its own. Books Seven through 11 are next to unreadable for long stretches.
Long novels work fine. Les Miserables is a classic even though it takes awhile to get through it. Long novels with non-story digressions can also work fine. Moby-Dick has almost as much in it explaining how 18th century whaling was done as it does about the doomed Ahab and his mad obsession. But long novels that take more and more time to do less and less are trials upon the reader and they deaden or even erase any of their potential impact. Readers get used to skipping large sections or even just walking away from the series.
Memory is a good example. Most of the book is battle scene after battle scene, as different members of the good guys fight against overwhelming odds. They are losing for most of the book, outnumbered by their enemy and magically compelled to sabotage their own forces. The barrage of loss as the characters tire and are forced back gives us a sense of what Rand feels when he surveys the list of those who died for his cause. But a half or even a third as much narrative could have given us the same picture, and readers tempted to skip could wind up skipping too much to get that sense. Readers tempted to throw the book across the room should probably train in the shot put first. In Book 12, Rand spends pretty much the entire book cutting himself off from those whom he loves, so their suffering or death will not weaken him at the Last Battle, before he learns that he must feel -- pain as well as laughter -- or else he will definitely lose to Shai'tan. Working from Jordan's outline and notes, Sanderson spends three hundred thousand words to get that insight across. Is there a way to do the same with less? Almost certainly.
WoT frustrates because buried inside these fifteen books are seven good ones or maybe five great ones. Had Jordan more reason to rein himself in than blanket the pages with an endless prose blizzard...had Tor been as interested in series quality as it was in series quantity...had reader rebellion aganst the bloat been more pronounced and more effective...Who knows what might have happened? Jordan might have finished the series on his own and not needed the fresher style and energetic pace of another author to make the last books of the series worth buying. He might have created something that equals Tolkien in the fantasy genre and reminded folks that genre fiction can also be serious fiction.
In the end, though, the reality that he didn't do those things is not the whole of the story. Jordan earns praise for creating the means by which his great tale could be finished, a move that obviously takes some notice of a storyteller's compact with his or her readers and works from a position of responsibility towards those whose wallets have helped fund the author's house, car and college tuition for the kids (In contrast, Martin has said that if he dies before his ever-lengthening Song of Ice and Fire is finished, no one will complete it and he will leave no outline for a successor to follow. So thanks for playing, sucker). He was probably one of the first fantasy writers to weave together a detailed and coherent system of magic and make it foundational to his story. Despite the previously-mentioned frequency of descriptions of female corporal punishment, he wrote a series that doesn't make the usual delve into deviancy featured in much fantasy fiction today. His characters are well-drawn and realistic people, for all their living in a world of magic. In Mat Cauthon, he probably makes better use of an author's stand-in character than most other writers who try the same trick.
Reading A Memory of Light, despite its flaws, was a fun several afternoons. Because of Sanderson and because of Jordan and MacDougall's foresight, it's a good reminder that over the past 20 years, the Wheel of Time series has, despite its flaws, offered more of those than the other kind.
So thanks, Rand, Mat and Perrin, Min, Elayne, Egwene, Nynaeve, Lan and Moiraine, Siuan and Tuon and Faile, Thom and Loial and Gareth, Aviendha and Rhuarc and Sorilea and Cadsuane and Tam and all the others, for the diversion and the adventure and the excitement and the fun.
Most of all, thanks, Mr. Rigney, for the story. May it not pass away into Legend, nor fall into the Shadow, but always remain a story of the Light.
No comments:
Post a Comment