Wheel of Time Review

In the annals of modern fantasy literature, few works loom as large as Robert Jordan's "The Wheel of Time," a fourteen-volume saga that began in 1990 with "The Eye of the World" and concluded posthumously in 2013 with "A Memory of Light," completed by Brandon Sanderson from Jordan's extensive notes. Spanning over four million words, more than two thousand named characters, and an invented world of staggering complexity, the series represents one of the most ambitious undertakings in the history of genre fiction.

The premise is deceptively simple. In a world where time is cyclical and an ancient evil stirs in its prison, a young shepherd named Rand al'Thor discovers he is the Dragon Reborn, a messianic figure prophesied to save the world or destroy it. He is joined by childhood friends Matrim Cauthon and Perrin Aybara, each touched by destiny in their own right, and guided (some would say manipulated) by Moiraine Damodred, a member of the Aes Sedai, an order of women who channel the One Power that drives the world.

What distinguishes Jordan's work from the Tolkien pastiche it initially appears to be is the extraordinary depth of its world-building. The cultures of the Wheel of Time, from the rigid, honor-bound Aiel of the Waste to the seafaring Atha'an Miere, from the matriarchal society of Far Madding to the militaristic Borderlands, are not mere set dressing. They are fully realized civilizations with distinct customs, histories, power structures, and prejudices. Jordan, who held degrees in physics and served two tours in Vietnam, brought a soldier's eye for detail and a scientist's love of systems to his creation.

The magic system, divided between the male and female halves of the One Power, saidin and saidar, is both elegant and thematically rich. The tainting of saidin by the Dark One means that any man who channels is doomed to madness and destruction. This curse hangs over Rand's entire arc and gives the series its most potent source of dramatic tension. Jordan's decision to make gender a fundamental axis of his magical cosmology was bold in 1990 and remains provocative today, yielding both genuine insight and occasional frustration.

And here, perhaps, lies the most common criticism of the series. Jordan's women characters, though numerous and often powerful, can feel as though they were written from the outside. Some readers will complain they are defined by a limited set of behavioral tics (braid-tugging, arm-folding, sniffing with disapproval) that become increasingly wearying over fourteen volumes. Nynaeve al'Meara, who begins as one of the most compelling characters in the series, a young village healer thrust into a world of politics and power, is too often reduced to her temper. Egwene al'Vere's rise to the Amyrlin Seat is genuinely thrilling, but her characterization can feel inconsistent. The reader can view these as flaws in the prose or flaws in the characters themselves. For my part, while it seems exaggerated, it is worth enduring to see the characters grow as the story progresses.

Some readers complain of a large structural challenge with the series in the middle third. Specifically, in books seven through ten, the plot seems to fragment into dozens of subplots, none of which appear to advance with urgency. Characters spend entire volumes traveling to destinations they do not reach until much later in the series. Political machinations appear to multiply without resolution. Many call this the "slog" and while it is real, and has undoubtedly cost the series readers, it is worth working through. The plots DO resolve. Stick with it for the reward. It is worth it. The careful reader will find that these "slow" books are planting seeds that bloom spectacularly in the final act.

That final act begins with "Knife of Dreams" (2005), the last book Jordan completed before his death from cardiac amyloidosis in 2007, and it is magnificent. The narrative momentum returns with a vengeance: sieges are broken, prophecies are fulfilled, and characters who have been circling each other for thousands of pages finally collide. When Brandon Sanderson took up the mantle for the final three volumes ("The Gathering Storm," "Towers of Midnight," and "A Memory of Light") he brought his own strengths to the project: tighter pacing, cleaner action sequences, and a gift for making magic systems feel tactile and consequential.

"The Last Battle," the penultimate chapter of "A Memory of Light," deserves special mention. At approximately eighty thousand words, it may be the longest single battle sequence ever published in a novel. It is also among the most emotionally devastating. Character deaths that had been foreshadowed for volumes land with genuine force. The cost of victory is felt on every page.

The series' influence on subsequent fantasy is difficult to overstate. Without "The Wheel of Time," it is hard to imagine the success of works by Sanderson, Steven Erikson, Joe Abercrombie, or the broader explosion of epic fantasy in the twenty-first century. Jordan demonstrated that readers had an appetite for genuinely long, genuinely complex fantasy narratives and not just trilogies but true sagas, with the scope and ambition of historical fiction.

The recent Amazon Prime Video adaptation, which debuted in 2021, has introduced Jordan's world to a new generation, though its condensation of the source material has inevitably provoked debate among longtime readers. What the adaptation cannot fully capture is the experience of living inside Jordan's world for the thousands of pages it takes to traverse it. The Wheel of Time is not a series you read. It is a series you inhabit.

For all its imperfections, "The Wheel of Time" endures because it does what the greatest fantasy does. It builds a world that feels as real as our own, peoples it with characters whose fates we cannot stop caring about, and asks questions about duty, sacrifice, free will, and the nature of evil that resonate far beyond the boundaries of genre.

My rating: 10/10.