Grade: B

I started reading the Wheel of Time series ten years after the first book was published and it’s still been over a dozen years for me. That’s the kind of series we’re dealing with here. The Eye of the World was originally released in 1990 and in case some of you have been holed up in fear of the Mayans and missed it, it’s now 2013. The original author, Robert Jordan, died after 11 books and an ill-advised prequel, and Brandon Sanderson took over for the last three. 14 books, 23 years, and we finally get to read about Rand’s fight with the Dark One. To be honest, I haven’t really enjoyed the series for a long time now. I loved the first three, liked the next three, and then due to a progression of mediocre books and a waning interest in fantasy as a whole on my part, I just read the following books out of a sense of obligation. I’ve anxiously awaited the end of this series more just to be rid of it than a burning curiosity of what the outcome of the Last Battle would be. And because of this I’ve never reread any of the books, meaning I read the first one 13 years ago and the subsequent titles not much after and for the life of me I can’t remember what the fuck happened other than the main plot points and even some of those can be a bit fuzzy at times.

With all this in mind, how do I give this final installment a fair review? I probably don’t, but I’ll try my best. First off, it’s long, and it probably has to be, but it’s entertaining pretty much the whole way through. It clocks in at just over 900 pages and I read it in a couple weeks which is the time it usually takes me to read a novel less than half that. So obviously it’s a page-turner. Most of the book is a battle between the forces of light and dark and Sanderson handles it well. He obviously knows his military tactics and it shows without the narrative getting too bogged down in the details. The main characters are all well-represented and get great moments of redemption or heroism or whatever it is they’ve been building towards throughout the series. There are deaths, a series like this absolutely has to kill some people you love or it just feels dishonest. But I’d argue not quite enough. Despite all the carnage and pain and suffering everybody goes through over the course of the series, it sort of feels like most of them get off just a bit too easy, at least from a dramatic standpoint. There are specific details but I’m trying to avoid spoilers because this is the kind of series with passionate fans and I imagine they will be offended if they stumbled upon this blog and read the details of the plot.

Let’s see, what else? The dialogue’s terrible, I mean really terrible. It sounds like a 13 year old who just watched Willow for the first time wrote it. But that’s been true of pretty much the whole series if I recall. The final confrontation between Rand and the Dark One is odd, though kind of interesting. Instead of an all out magic war of fireballs and lightning and frog plagues we get sort of a philosophical discussion on the nature of good and evil and their respective places in the world. I saw that as kind of a ballsy move considering a lot of people probably would’ve rather had the fireballs. The final message of the series seems to be along the lines of evil’s not really our enemy, so much as something for human beings to rise above. Or something a lot more poetic than that maybe.

The last thing I’ll talk about is that it just feels rushed. This is probably caused by the size of the series more than this particular novel though. After slowly building plots, subplots, tensions and conflicts over 13 books, finishing them all in one, albeit very long, book just doesn’t seem quite possible. This is particularly true of the ending. The middle section stretches out and allows itself to capture the enormity of a battle between millions of people and beasts. There are battle tactics that work and some that don’t. There are betrayals and victories and defeats and twists and it feels pretty authentic. Then the end comes and the last hundred or so pages comes and goes so quickly I started questioning why the lengthy, drawn out middle was so necessary. Then after the battle’s over there is virtually no epilogue (after an 80 page or so fucking prologue you can’t write a 10 page goddamn epilogue to tie up some loose ends and see off these characters?) , it’s just over.

I guess that point brings me to my final critique of this novel. It’s too long, but it felt rushed. How do you fix that? Don’t write a 14 book series.

Buy this book!