3.9	Escape From Crap Mountain The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

The Trouble Starts With a Map

When you're trying to decide just what sort of epic fantasy you're about to read, a peek at the inevitable map within the first few pages can give you quite a few of the answers you need.

Does the map have a solitary mountain with a forbidding name in the midst of blasted lands (which, in this case, are actually called the Blasted Lands)?

Does the map have two chains of mountains crossing the land at perfect right angles to one another, and are they placed in such straight lines that the Gods must have used a protractor the size of Nebraska to lay them?

Is one of the mountain chains actually named (snort, snort) the Mountains of Dhoom?

Is there a third, smaller mountain chain with a name so perilously close to direct Tolkien Rip-Off that it could cause seizures in rodents at fifteen paces? The Mountains of Mist, perhaps? Are they straight as an arrow for their entire length, too?

Do most of the names on the map read like Klingon-language translations of the program from the Welsh Special Olympics?

If all of these criteria have been met, you're looking at the world of The Wheel of Time. If the purpose of such a map is to familiarize the reader with the fictional world he's about to enter, this one does its job spectacularly. It's derivative, improbable, and badly laid out-- three of the mildest things I have to say about The Eye of the World, the first of (now) nine thick tomes in Jordan's fantasy series.

A Not-So-Classic Tale of a Boy and His Dragon

No, winged dinosaurs with napalm breath make no direct intrusion into the story. "The Dragon" is some sort of world-beating demigodling who did Vaguely Great and Terrible Things in the ancient history of Jordan's world. Much of the plot of this novel revolves around the question of whether or not Rand Al'thor, a strapping young country idiot, might not be the Dragon Reborn, and thus destined for More Vaguely Great and Terrible Things. Rand is stolen from his idyllic bumpkin existence by a mysterious woman wizard, Moiraine, and her stoic warrior companion Lan. In no time at all, Rand and a mixed bag of equally clueless friends are on the run across hundreds of miles of verdant real estate while an army of refugees from an Iron Maiden album cover chases them to and fro. The album cover refugees want to seize Rand and turn him into an agent of evil. Moiraine wants to take him back to the fortress of her mystical order and prod him like a lab mouse to discover the truth of his condition. The race is on to save or damn him, and the only thing that's certain is that it sucks to be Rand.

The first thing one tends to notice about The Eye of the World is that its similarity to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is too forthright and obvious to be mere coincidence derived from its sword and sorcery trappings. According to part of the Wheel of Time FAQ:

Jordan does indeed make the beginning of this novel hum with elements reminescent of or lifted directly from The Fellowship of the Ring. For example, the bumpkin heroes come from a small, idyllic out-of-the way place with a unique work ethic and a uniquely wholesome atmosphere. Merry and Pippin are here replaced by Mat and Perrin. Black riders chase the company of heroes to a river ferry. Beast-men called "Trollocs" step up to the plate to pinch-hit in place of Orcs, but they're Orcs in every other way possible. One of the characters receives an unhealing wound from a weapon not unlike the "Morgul-Blade" that nearly finishes Frodo Baggins.

Jordan deserves credit for openly admitting his canny commercial move (the Wheel of Time sequence, in case you've been living under a rock for the past decade, sells like nude Jeri Ryan Photoshop manipulations at a Star Trek convention), and this honesty somewhat defuses any criticism I might have for his extended "homage." However, once I moved past the first few hundred pages and out into the quest/chase sequence that takes up most of the novel, I found myself yearning for the direct Tolkien rip-offs to reassert themselves. Jordan is really at his mediocre best when lifting part and parcel from other authors. Without imported story elements to help him out, Jordan's work begins to display what I call the Four Horsemen of the Jordanocalypse-- clumsy prose, irritating characterization, subrational worldbuilding, and execrable plotting and pacing. I'll cover these all in turn.

Dull Words Dully Worded

Robert Jordan is a ham-fisted prose stylist whose paragraphs are topheavy with trite metaphors, artless description, over-explanation, and imprecision. His text is about as tedious as H.P. Lovecraft's, without being anywhere near as purple and florid. Jordan's vocabulary is pedestrian, which strips away the guilty pleasure to be had in reading Lovecraft's verisimilitudinous whopper sentences. Jordan uses piles of words because he is simply inefficient. Not to mention unclear. For example:

Apparently, the wind is blowing in two directions simultaneously. Or is it? Does Jordan mean that the wind blows first one way, then another? Who can tell? Here's another nugget of his prose:

"Crisply dark?" "Mixed with shadow?" Lackadaisical phrasing, to say the least. Jordan's description always seems half thought-out, indicative of insufficient observation of the real world. Descriptive prose relies on its author's insight and inventiveness, and Jordan's descriptions betray little of either. The question is-- is he really plugging along at the extent of his full capability, or is he purposely writing beneath his skill threshold?

Couple all of this with Jordan's use of the third person omniscient voice, and you have a narrative that zips in and out of characters' heads, local history, flashbacks, and other pernicious infodumps seemingly at random. Getting-to-know-you information about Rand al'Thor is distractingly intercut on the first few pages with the action of a supernatural encounter. While bringing the reader up to speed on the background of a fantasy epic is a difficult and thankless task, Jordan is less clever than most at making this process unobtrusive.

Now, imagine a story that displays absolutely no improvement in this prose style over nearly eight hundred pages of story, and you can begin to savor what a chore this novel really is when read cover-to-cover.

Take the Cast-- Please!

The characters of The Eye of the World are, amazingly, even more thoroughly and consistently irritating than the prose, which is an accomplishment so worthy of recognition it almost makes me wish there were literary Golden Raspberry Awards. This novel is the penultimate achievement in what Roger Ebert calls the "idiot plot."³ Virtually every character⁴ in the story, from the lowliest village yokel to the mightiest servant of the dark powers, is portrayed as a bumbling, self-absorbed, immature walking cliche.

Moiraine, the mysterious woman wizard of the feared and mistrusted Aes Sedai, is a shining example of a fantasy archetype that I call "The Jive-Talking Wizard." That is, she's continually muttering warnings of dire import and making veiled references to terrible things, but whenever anyone asks her to speak plainly she screeches that there isn't enough time, or that the others are not yet ready to understand, and so on and so forth. The presence of a Jive-Talking Wizard allows an author to jerk his characters back and forth all over the landscape at the wizard's whim without the troublesome need to supply motivations or explanations. Moiraine behaves as people do only in fantasy novels-- for example, when we first meet her she falls into a solipsistic trance to offer the reader another infodump:

That's funny. In the real world, when we don't want people to hear something, we don't stare off into space and say it right in front of them. Here's Moiraine again, the first time someone presses her for answers:

Of course. If Moiraine filled out the long, empty hours of their journey with a few useful bits of explanation, she'd never get anything done. Obviously it's a great idea to let the confused and potentially very dangerous young folks muddle through the whole affair blind and dumb. What, five minutes of simple instructions would be a bit much? Pffft. Moiraine won't speak, dear reader, because she is compelled by the author to keep silent. This is what passes for "building tension" or "creating mystery" in The Eye of the World.

Need more evidence? Here's Moiraine one last time, after it becomes apparent that Perrin Aybara is undergoing some form of supernatural change:

Ah, yes. That's a born leader right there. Moiraine obviously knows what Perrin's affliction is, but she can't spare two minutes to explain it to him, even in simple terms. Far better, I guess, to leave him frightened and resentful for the rest of the journey, secure in the knowledge that Moiraine knows exactly what's going on and is too smug to tell him about it. And talking about Perrin as if he weren't even there-- genius! I don't know if Jordan's goal was to portray his characters as moronic or merely unsympathetic, but he hit the bullseye either way with this scene. Sigh.

Moiraine, autocratic arrogance and all, is still about five times as smart as the three young village men she protects (Rand al'Thor, Mat Cauthon, and Perrin Aybara) added together and multiplied several times. I know they're supposed to be naive provincials, but Chip and Dale from those old Disney cartoons have more practical knowledge than these three idiots, and they're less emotionally retarded to boot. Jordan really bent over backwards to cast these guys in a witless light. Furthermore, they too suffer from the contrivances of the idiot plot, keeping important details and clues to themselves for screwball reasons. For example, here's Rand shortly after witnessing the manifestation of a faceless rider cloaked in black following him and his father on an empty road:

That's right. Rand already told his father about the apparition, and they're both poking around looking for it. Suddenly he clams up about discussing the important details of his vision. As I'll discuss shortly, Jordan has stated that this is a world in which the presence of the supernatural is widespread and self-evident. Why should Rand get tight-lipped about his vision, save that the idiot plot dictates it?

The mention of the young men necessitates a mention of Egwene and Nynaeve, the frustratingly childish and shrewish young women who accompany them on their journey into the great wide world beyond their village. Jordan was obviously aiming to show the youth and inexperience of these folks, and that's a fine goal, but what he's done is grafted the mindset of thirteen-year-olds onto the bodies of eighteen-year-olds, and the interaction between all of these teens rings false. Nynaeve is "comically" temperamental, huffing and puffing and beating men on the head with her staff when she can't get her way. Egwene at times sounds as whiny and forlorn as good old Luke Skywalker did in Star Wars... "But I was gonna go into Toshi Station to pick up some power converters!"

The supporting cast is just as annoying as the main characters. The ones that aren't crudely-drawn stereotypes, one-dimensional baddies, or brainless twits are... well, they're in another book, because there are no secondary characters that don't fall into one or more of those three categories.

Journey to a Land Where Common Sense Done Gone An' Hung Itself

Once the party of teen-aged adventurers and tight-lipped mystic guardians gets out into the wide world, one conclusion is inevitable-- this place stinks. Jordan's world is a thumbnail sketch blown up Xerox-style several hundredfold. Nowhere is there any indication of cultures that have really come from anywhere, or cultures that are going anywhere. Legends and lore are poured on in copious quantities, but every city and society the characters pass through rings with all the authenticity of a set of movie extras hastily assembled for a few brief hours before the camera. More on that in just a bit.

Not only do our heroes find themselves pursued by agents of darkness, they find themselves entangled with the "Whitecloaks," a militant order of armed and armored clerics dedicated to wiping out "Darkfriends," those who would secretly aid the powers of evil. The Whitecloaks are analogous to the Inquisition of old, and just as cruel, single-minded, and intolerant, yet there is a glaring logical problem in their conception... they have no church to which they belong, no hierarchy of clergy to which they answer, no formal establishment to which they bend knee, save themselves. The common folk and aristocrats alike view the Whitecloaks as disturbers of the peace, barely more than criminals, yet these callous, destructive jerks are allowed to roam at will and do as they please. The Inquisition, at least, could rely on the activities of the rest of the church to offset their bloody excesses in the mind of the populace. The question is, why is an Inquisition without a church tolerated at all? Why are these bastards let into the walled cities and fortified hamelts of Jordan's world? If everyone, and I mean everyone, sees them for the thugs they are, why are they there? Because the author wants them there, not because the world supports them at all.

Jordan himself speaks rather intelligently about the lack of organized religion in his world:

Unfortunately, in establishing a sound basis for the absence of dogmatic sects and religious orders in his world, he leaves agencies such as the Whitecloaks without any aura of legitimacy to cling to. Yet the Whitecloaks are there anyway. That's what the whole world feels like... an ungainly mutant kludge of anything and everything ever put down in the annals of fantasy literature, like a Dungeons & Dragons game world left under an ultraviolet light for too many years. The social, cultural, economic, and spiritual elements just don't seem to add up to a working whole, an organic entity that would keep on functioning in the absence of the main characters.

Turgid Pacing for the Idiot Plot

The heart of The Eye of the World is an extended chase scene, one that plays out over many hundreds of pages. Although our heroes are ostensibly on their way somewhere to do something, they are really being driven to and fro by the activities of Whitecloaks, Darkfriends, Trollocs, and other threats. The "chase" plot has the advantage of being ridiculously simple to conceive and maintain, and the disadvantage of encouraging author laziness. The characters are like foosballs on a gaming table, getting kicked from point to point without any real need for initiative on their part. Kick, kick, kick... I found myself yawning impatiently the fourth or fifth time the characters were kicked along, and I was no more impressed the thirtieth or fortieth time it happened.

Although there is really no lack of incident to fill out the plot, Jordan has a way of straining tension and momentum out of his writing so that even action-filled sequences read like something out of a cookbook. This is what finally slew the last dregs of my interest, even after I had attempted to look past the bad prose, shrill characters, and shoddy world logic. Jordan doesn't have much of a gift for "ramping up" the tempo when danger threatens his cast. The eight-hundred page length of the novel has a uniform feel to it, a torpid pace that is rigidly maintained even when events would seem to call for more flair.

It doesn't help the plot one bit that most of Jordan's antagonists hold true to the ideal that everyone in the story must behave like a gibbering nincompoop. For example, our intrepid heroine Nynaeve, attempting to infiltrate a wilderness encampment of Whitecloaks, is aided in her efforts by the fact that the Whitecloaks apparently don't want to actually guard their camp from anything:

Ah, there's nothing like a competent and believable antagonist to really ratchet up the tension in a scene like this, eh? Why would an order of skilled itinerant warriors happily perpetuate such an insane security practice? Because if they didn't, dear reader, the heroes couldn't get past 'em in a million years. Remember, aspiring writers, it's not about having your heroes overcome serious challenges through their own skill and daring, it's about dumbing down the antagonists until they're more of a backdrop than a threat.

After our beloved bumpkins and tight-lipped mystics get kicked halfway across the continent, lost, found, lost again, split, reformed, split again, captured, dehydrated, rehydrated, and discombobulated for six hundred and fifty pages, the author suddenly realizes that the end of the novel is rapidly approaching, and his cast is still hundreds of miles from where he wants them to be (other authors use a sneaky trick called "pacing" to avoid this problem), so the time has come to teleport them! Bzap! One quick trip along the Paths of the Dead, er, I mean... the Ways, and our heroes arrive at the site of the climax just in time for the climax. Two major bad guys then show up here, in solidly Jordanian fashion, for absolutely no discernible reason, other than the fact that the author knows this is the climax and climaxes usually need some action. It goes something like this:

Post Mortem

The Eye of the World ends as it began, in a heap of contrivances, leaving me gazing back at eight hundred pages of convenient coincidences, uninteresting characters, hamstrung antagonists, and all the aforementioned stylistic and structural problems with a dumbfounded expression on my face.

I think I can begin to see why this novel (like its sequels) is so ridiculously popular-- it is, if nothing else, obsessively detailed, and toward the end of its length it begins to add Oriental and Middle-Eastern motifs atop the traditional Anglo-Saxon/Celtic spine of its background. These mixed trappings hit a wide demographic of interests, and, when coupled with Jordan's calculated use of Tolkien's work as his foundation, turn the whole package into a sort of guided munition aimed at a wide swath of contemporary fantasy readers.

But what does this say about contemporary fantasy readers? That more detail is always better received, even if it doesn't make sense? That annoying characters, weak antagonists, a dull plot, and bad pacing aren't enough to sink a novel as long as it's big enough to swallow a small dog, even in paperback? Don't get me wrong, I like my regular infusions of junk culture, but The Eye of the World doesn't strike me as being fun enough to be junk culture. Dumb action/fantasy novels usually compensate for their dimwittery with a rollicking sense of adventure, but this novel doesn't rollick one little bit. Perhaps that's the biggest problem of all... in the end, The Eye of the World takes itself so seriously, and is written with such stifling and inappropriate gravitas, that it has nothing to fall back on when it fails to reach the highfalutin' greatness Jordan obviously aims for. It's too badly written to be epic, and too pompous to be entertaining, and altogether too many pages for what little satisfaction is spread thinly across them.

Dork Cynic, March 2002

Score Breakdown

Prose Style: Characterization: Invention: Structure: Soul: Lasting Impact: Average: Final Critical Bias: Final Score:

4.0 2.8 3.2 4.5 5.0 3.5 3.8 +.1 3.9

Thunderously dull in most places and full of laughable description. Aggravating and almost universally childish. The uninspired carbon copy by which all uninspired carbon copies will be judged. This novel has serious pacing problems. At least Jordan gives it the ol' college try. Lingering feelings of annoyance and disbelief, you mean. "I can't believe I ate the whooooooole thing!" I am being charitable on behalf of the few small passages that amused me. This mountain should have stayed a molehill.

Footnotes

1. From "An Empty Road," Chapter 1, Page 1

2. From "An Empty Road," Chapter 1, Page 2

3. Idiot Plot: A plot that can only possibly make sense if every single person taking part in the story is a complete idiot.

4. The only character not potrayed as a complete idiot is Lan, Moiraine's grim, quiet Warder. Lan is competent, wise, and likeable in a way that the other characters simply are not. I admit to being rather fond of him. Lan has no function except to kill other characters, which is fine by me. I just wish he'd do so a bit more indiscriminately.

5. From, "Strangers," Chapter 2, Page 29

6. From, "Across the Taren," Chapter 12, Page 166

7a. How the hell does a look regret something? Groan.

7b. From, "Rescue," Chapter 38, Page 578

8. From, "An Empty Road," Chapter 1, Page 5

9. From, "The Long Chase," Chapter 37, Page 562

10. The Forsaken are not the head honchos of the forces of darkness. They are twisted immortals, once men, who now serve as sub-honchos for the evil head office.