f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] A Memory of Light (Wheel of Time, #14) [Author] Robert Jordan [Rating] ★★★ [Year] 2013 [Read] 2013/01/09 [Review] 
So. It has come to this. WoT finally ended. I remember how the wheel of dharma began to turn for me: my mother ran a Girl Scouts troop while I was in middle school, and sometimes they met at a local town rec center. Rather than try to participate, I would sometimes kill time in the lounge reading their old donated paperbacks. One of them was remarkably thick, but the cover looked interesting, and I was hooked by the opening passages: a Tolkien-esque chapter about a young lad heading back to the Shire and haunted by a Ring-wraith. (Not so much the Prologue, which was too mystifying.) I’d read Tolkien by this point, of course, and wondered if it’d be an awful shameful ripoff like Sword of Shannara, but I kept reading. The opening was nifty enough but not gripping, at least until I reached Moiraine’s speech to the villagers about Manetheren. I was spellbound and had not been so gripped at least since Tolkien with Gimli’s dirge for the dwarves in the Mines of Moria. And the book didn’t stop there: there was the creepy interlude at the cursed city of Shadar Logoth, the even more creepy Machin Shin of the Waygates, the unusual Templar/Children of the Light, the intriguing uncertainty about which of the kids was the Main Character (you thought it was Rand, of course, as the major viewpoint, but the dreams kept you uncertain - surely the author wouldn’t throw those in if there weren’t a good chance the obvious choice wouldn’t be picked?), the good troll character who is a scholar rather than a warrior, a Western-samurai militaristic setting a whole city of female magicians, Old Tongue on every other page culminating in no less than the Green Man at the Eye of the World (just one of many nods to real-world things). I was impressed as I read it over the weeks, meeting by meeting, and soon checked out the other 6 or so. This was a long time ago. A very long time ago. Indeed, WoT could be considered Tolkien turned up. Tolkien had a cast of hundreds? WoT would have a cast of thousands! Tolkien had a few countries going to war against a dark lord? WoT would have dozens of countries and regions! Tolkien had two or three scheming magicians? WoT would have scores of scheming magicians, and they would be split into more than a dozen groups, all scheming. Tolkien had one or two trolls? WoT would have trolls too, all over the place, and they’d be the good kind, peaceful scholar; and Tolkien had a character recording events for a history, well, that’s a perfect task for one of the scholar-trolls. Tolkien had a few Ring-wraiths and a big fight against one at the end, well, WoT would have ring-wraiths in every book and they’d be a standard foe (which makes sense given all the magical powers given to every other character: you need to power up the bad guys if you power up the good guys). The Shire would be tainted by evil due to the hero & companions coming from there and eventually have to be led to an uprising? Emond’s Field would never fall and would wage epic battle against Padan Fain et al. And so on. You couldn’t say that Wheel of Time had the restrained scholarly English sensibility of LotR, but it packed a punch. If LotR was the novel, WoT was the video game or maybe movie adaptation, with everything dialed up to 11 and an unlimited budget for explosions & exotic locations. And it did this very well in the early books. In that sense, it’s an excellent ‘Tolkien for teenagers’. (In another sense, reusing the old ‘hidden prince’ trope of being born to a destiny and with arcane powers, WoT is also good for teens: they’ve long loved that trope, perhaps because at that age they desperately love the idea of being given a defined role and the (unearned) ability to fill it. This trope is perhaps a bit too narcissistic for adults to enjoy as much, although given how popular Frozen has been and how many people, child or adult, claim to identify with Elsa, I may be wrong here.) One of the lessons I learned from WoT was learning the hard way why one should avoid in-progress series: the mental suffering and time expended is radically out of proportion to the pleasure. (I am handily applying this lesson now to that other endless vast fantasy epic, GRRM. Given my pre-2007 comments that it was entirely possible that Jordan would die before finishing, I wonder how that one will turn out.) Another lesson is that length and a big cast of characters should not be taken as a goal in its own right because you descend into repetition and cliche. In some sense, Sanderson’s AMoL for me succeeds just by existing and giving me closure. I would be happy if it is not as enraging as King’s ending to The Dark Tower, or as unremittingly awful and a disgrace to all parties involved as Brian Herbert & KJA’s work in the Dune universe. Perhaps all the people on Goodreads who are leaving laudatory 5 star reviews without even reading the book and apparently are ignorant of what a “review” is feel the same way - that as long as it’s not awful, it deserves 5 stars for giving them closure. And it’s neither enraging nor terribly awful, so I am satisfied. I share a lot of the complaints I’ve seen in other reviews. Some characters like Moiraine do nothing interesting; others have compressed endings like Luc/Isam and Padan Fain. Bela dies despite an expectation that she would continue her improbable luck. The body-swapping is unprecedented and confusing, since it apparently is not due to Rand indulging in cosmic powers but a mysterious gray-haired woman who I could not understand after two reads and googling a bit. The resolution of confrontation with the Dark One was clever as far as it went, but it relied on a feature of Callandor I am pretty sure was not mentioned before and I feel a bit deus ex machina-d, although I’m relieved that the general interpretation of Herid Fel’s basic point that because of the Wheel, you have to restore the prison to how it was before the Bore (rather than patch it again, kill the Dark One, etc) was correct. There were many great bits. Rand and Matt bragging in one of their last meetings. Lan taking down Damodred (although didn’t we see the suicidal maneuver in a previous book…). Min vs spies. Demandred and Graendal make the Forsaken look less incompetent than usual. Thom casually knifing women while composing a poem. Many bad parts. The endless grinding battle - by the time I finished the book, I felt as exhausted as if I’d been pushing pikes with Trollocs myself. The worst part was, despite the endless pages of battle, the battles still didn’t feel epic or hardfought; they lacked any urgency or real drama. Perhaps WoT just massively over-indulged in battles before, or perhaps the battles were just disconnected - it’s a bad thing when you have characters lampshading the triviality of what they’re doing and asking ‘so why does this matter when the only battle that matters is Rand vs DO?’ The battles are weirdly parochial and limited to a few locations. 4 battlefronts is impressive? For the Last Battle, a worldwide struggle against the Shadow? We didn’t get so much as one point of view in, I dunno, Seanchan which was supposed to have waged its own epic struggle against Shadowspawn during the original colonization! We don’t get Waygates popping open in hundreds of locations, the entire Randland convulsed in thousands of battles… Basically, we didn’t see a world at war. We bounced between 4 locations again and again and again until it was an incredible chore to read another page. Last minute rescues are a storytelling device that work only a few times. In a chapter. Before they lose any impact. Some of the writing seems stiff and clumsy, and I liked Matt less than in the previous book so I suppose that was just an anomaly. The ‘philosophy’ bits of the Rand vs DO encounter were seriously juvenile; so Rand overcomes the DO with the Power of Love but then he realizes that to destroy the DO, he would take away Free Will! And just as any idiot could have predicted, he has to leave the DO alone and repair the prison good as new. And of course the DO whines at him and Rand has to lecture him self-righteously… Give me a break. I’m sure that this must have been Jordon’s notes, because I remember Sanderson doing better in Mistborn. I suspect people will be identifying loose ends and missed prophecies or Min-visions for years to come. At least we did sorta find out who killed Asmodean. So now that it is finished, what should I think of WoT? Would I recommend it to a younger version of me? I think I would. In bulk, WoT’s flaws are reduced. The repetition fades away like the Homeric epithets filling out lines, and the multi-million word count becomes less intimidating. The awful middle-late books, like possibly the series nadir Winter’s Heart, lose their severe aggravation when you have all the books in a pile waiting to be read instead of an unknown multi-year wait upon an author who may (and did) die on you. Without years between reads, the plots and characters will be easier to track, and even if one fails to pick up on clues or asides, the resolution will be delivered soon and one can go ‘ah!’ as one newly appreciates a new thread of the pattern. But I would accompany it with this caution: “WoT, in small chunks, is not good. The characters and writing is repetitious, the descriptions pedestrian; few passages will move you with the beauty of strangeness or exoticism that marks the best fantasy. What WoT does is take the ‘quantity vs quality’ tradeoff, and jam it all the way to ‘quantity’, to see what happens, and does so more extremely than any other fantasy series I know of. If you want to see ‘epic fantasy’, with a cast of who knows how many thousands, spread over more countries than you can keep straight, and watch this tapestry evolve over years and millions of words, then you must read WoT. If you want to maximize your enjoyment per word, if you want the heights of what the fantasy genre can deliver in terms of quality, then put away WoT for another day and instead do something like read through chronologically the winners of the Locus & World Fantasy Awards.” There have been worse obituaries for pieces of your childhood.
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