I'm at Pluckers Wing Bar on Easter afternoon. It's a lovely day in Dallas and I'm out with family. That's an important detail - a gathering among friends wouldn't have allowed me room for the social faux pas I was in the process of committing.
As the other three at our table place their orders (it's dollar wing day), I politely decline to order food and ask for a water. I am in the midst of consuming something far more vital to me than wings: The finale of The Wheel of Time: A Crown of Swords, by Robert Jordan. By the time the appetizers arrive, I'm already too engrossed in my kindle to notice.
As I near the book's conclusion, I feel the pace of my reading take off. It's not unlike when you're going down a hill on a bike, and the thrill of the speedy descent morphs into a fearful surrender to a pace that can't be slowed down.
Every book of the series has a final act that delivers a punch. This narrative structure feels intrinsic to Jordan's writing. He revels in demonstrating his ability to take the carefully threaded parallel plot lines and suddenly cinch them tight in a grandiose conclusion; a magic trick almost. I find this structure to have a canny parallel in the story's magic system, with the character's usage of saidín and saidar, the male and female halves of the One Power, described as the weaving of magical threads. The heroes and villains alike make these magical weaves permanent by tying them off, or invisible to others by inverting them.
The allegorical relationship between Jordan's writing style and his magic system is one of many connections I find between my daily life in the real world and the fabricated environment of our Two Rivers heroes. Now millions of words into this saga, I constantly find myself describing real-world phenomena in terms of the WoT universe.
The inherently destructive yet potent nature of saidín at times seems to be an eerie allegory for aspects of my own nature; the times where I need to wrestle with my own will and concentrate. In other moments, when I have to accept what is out of my control and calm my mind, the requisite surrender of those who call upon saidar flutters into my imagination of the perfect, fantastical mirror of my own experience. The magnifying effects of magical objects like the angreal and sa'angreal also show up in my life: One chocolate chip cookie gives me a 2x productivity boost for at least an hour.
I am enjoying these books. The characters endear me, the world is immersive, and the villains are compelling, terrifying, and motivated with astonishing complexity (book 7 in particular adds so many layers here).
Nevertheless, I am already quite sure of the aspects of these books that I don't like. Jordan has a penchant for the most obscure English vocabulary, placed in the oddest of sentences. While I love a novelty term as much as any avid reader, I sometimes find these entries to be distracting or ham-fisted.
Jordan describes indiscriminately. The series is famed for having over 2,000 named characters. This I appreciate at times, as it adds color and language to the dozens of cultures and peoples in the books. However, I do find myself wishing that in moments where further exposition is not called for, Jordan would have opted to decorate the scene with some nameless extras in the background, wearing nondescript clothing.
Lastly, the true flaw, and the only one I think is a valid reason to put these books down, is the insufferably repetitive, objectifying depiction of women. While aspects of the way Jordan handles the sex and gender of the characters are cogent, every female character has to have a clearly detailed description of her bosom, her youthfulness or lack thereof, the cut and opacity of her dress fabric, and sometimes, as and added bonus, we learn if she is skinny or fat. For a series where sex and gender are intrinsic to the magic system, and where Jordan carefully splits the main cast between male and female perspectives, I find myself frequently groaning at how much of a missed opportunity these sloppy, sometimes misogynistic depictions repeat themselves book after book. For a world with some of the most genre-defining world-building, political theatre, and magic systems, you'd expect the same level of tact and nuance to be used when expressing the gendered dynamics of the cast. Unfortunately, each book has consistently left me wanting more in that regard.
Despite my criticisms, I am eager to continue the series and discover how the story develops.
The Back Cover
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