The Wheel of Time I: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

The Spiel of Grime: The Eye of the Turd

For a genre called “fantasy”, it’s amazing how much of it is the exact fucking same.

An orphaned child who’s the chosen one. A mystical mentor who always knows exactly what’s going on. An evil lord unironically called “The Dark One”. Villains capable of talking only in clichés. A magical plot device called the Capitalized Noun of X. The Eye of the World has all of them and then some. 

I hardly even need to recap the premise for the sake of this review, because you’ve all heard it before. But still, for the sake of coherency:

Rand Al’Thor and three of his friends have their village attacked by non-copyright infringing orcs called Trollocs. A mysterious witch named Moiraine and her gruff ranger sidekick Lan announce that one of them is naturally the Dragon Reborn, the chosen one who will bring goodness back yadda yadda yadda.

The vast majority of the book is then this group trying to get to Tar Valon, hunted by more utterly disposable trollocs. Along the way, Rand and his friends Mat and Perrin are visited by a strange figure in their dreams who spews out the most laughably pathetic threats that make Captain Planet’s villains look like MacBeth in comparison.

What’s worse than Jordan telling a story we’ve all heard a million times before is that he can’t even tell it particularly well. The pacing and structure are abysmal. We never even learn what the villain’s plan is until 600 pages in; it reads like Jordan forgot to give his book a plot more developed than gormless twats running around the countryside bumping into random people, so just stapled a climax onto the end. Characters espouse pages of boring exposition that has little to no relevance to the story; the second act is littered with disposable subplots about our heroes meeting random goons, learning some of their history, and then leaving, never to mention or see them again. We meet a man who can possess wolves, the queen, not-Gypsies (who alternate from being loved by everyone to being hated by everyone within a chapter), and about thirty million inane pubs and taverns filled with unreasonable bell-ends who seemingly have no purpose in life except to drink and start fights.

A common criticism of Robert Jordan’s writing is that he can’t write women. I would like to amend that; he can’t write ANYBODY! Perrin and Rand are about as engaging and dynamic as wet cardboard; they’re both dragged along on a journey they don’t seem to care about at all, always letting someone else seize the initiative. Mat and Egwene, on the other hand, both have some semblance of personality, it’s just that Jordan makes it the most unlikeable personality ever. Egwene is pretty much the epitome of “strong independent women” characters written in the nineties by middle-aged men; all she does is complain about men. This is actually a welcome break from Mat, as he complains about fucking everything.

Moiraine is clearly a pastiche of Gandalf, except vacuum-sealed of all personality or weakness. Lan doesn’t seem to have any real personality until we’re suddenly told halfway through the final act that he’s actually a rip-off of Aragorn. And no, this has absolutely no impact on his character or the plot. He slots nicely into the “gruff and cynical mentor with a heart of gold”, an archetype Jordan shamelessly uses three more times.

There are a few specks of vaguely interesting worldbuilding here and there. But Jordan never bothers integrating this into the story, it’s just dropped on us in boring unreadable infodumps.

I had already long consigned the rest of the series into my “do not read” pile, but even if I hadn’t, the moment I found out a later book features a female villain defeated through public spanking would have sent the sequels straight to the crematorium. Without wishing to kinkshame, the author’s spanking fetish apparently pops up throughout the series enough times to rival the ubiquity of feet in a Tarantino flick. 

Absolutely not worth anyone’s time. I’m astonished as to how anyone could slog through fourteen books of this bland, derivative, boring mess.

2/10

Buy The Eye of the World 

Recommended Instead: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin. It’s just as long, except Martin remembers to include things like “plot” and “character”.