Review: Wheel of Time

Review: Wheel of time

Wheel of time is an extremely well written book, and I liked it a lot. But then I might just be biased, it is probably only for fantasy enthusiasts. Because, first of all, is plot is no different from some of the famous fantasies. Just like in LOTR or HP, the main plot is about slaying a dark lord. (I hope this is not a spoiler. This is like saying LOTR and HP are the same story. But their presentation is so vastly different that you may not even realise it’s the same story. Same with WoT, despite the same basic plot, the presentation has great novelties.)

Same old plot

I am so tired of this story by now. Padhda padha when I came to the point when I realized that the plot is the same old thing, I was soooo tired. Fourteen books for this? For the same thing? Yawwwwwwn. Why is there always a dark lord? Why should you call him (it's always a 'him') the dark lord? Why is he always obsessed with immortality? Is that the only prize? Why, in all the stories, has he been bound, or is formless, and is gathering strength so that he can either break out of his prison or gain a form and then rise to terrorise people? Aargh. Even GoT, which started out as a story of human politics, ultimately had an unslayable dark lord, and everything just disappears when you kill him, like even the dragons he made and all just vanish. I am really tired of this magical end to everything, although I have read just book 1 of WoT and don't know how it will end.

I am really tired of this dark lord with his obsession for power and expanding control, which makes no sense to me. For example, who is this dark lord Sauron who is bound, formless, in an eye? What does he seek? Eternal power, eternal control, and what is he going to do with it? From the looks of it, he just wants to kill everyone, and what is he going to rule over if everyone is dead? This concept is further expanded in WoT, the land surrounding the place where the dark one lives is dying, the leaves are rotting and there is no beauty or life left. I mean, what is the dark one going to do if he gets o control the whole world? Just kill everything? Then what is he going to rule over?

And what about those dark armies? The orcs in LOTR and the trollocs and fades in WoT. They are supposed to have been "created" with dark power. How are they created? Are they just spun out from a factory like robots? Or are they bred? If they are bred, where are the females? How come we never see them or hear mention of them? Are they animals with a place in nature and ecology with their own philosophy and romantic life? If they are like other violent creatures like tigers or hawks, they should not be hated or negatively portrayed, right? And if they are simply manufactured from factories, then they are very boring, they don't make very interesting characters, they have none of the reader's sympathies, and they don't inspire any psychological terror also. In this respect, I think HP does much better. Fenrir Greyback, for instance, a villain with a cruel mind, is much more terrifying than a stumbling orc or a bumbling trolloc that kills for pleasure. The flesh and blood deatheaters who each have a story, are much more relatable and therefore fascinating. You understand Voldemort's ambition: he wants to rule, he wants groveling servants, not necessarily dead ones. Now, the dark lords of these other high fantasies who spread only death and decay all around, I don't understand. Death and decay is a natural process, eliminating it doesn't usher a happy world, but leads to more chaos as nothing dies. What I'm trying to say is, the story is more relatable and fascinating if the villains are also three dimensional. For me, HP does much better than LOTR or WoT with their inhuman violence machines, even though the latter two are more respected as "literature" and HP dismissed as kiddie stuff.

And again in WoT we have, stereotypically like in the "hero's Journey" archetype story, typical heroes who have no idea of their destiny. Think of Harry Potter who doesn't know he is a wizard, or Frodo and company who are leading blissful hobbit lives until they are thrown into the plot. But it is here that WoT get interesting. Unlike Frodo and his all-male company, WoT has three boys and two girls who set out for the hero's journey. One of them is obviously the main hero, but the other four also seem to be more than sidekicks with their own storylines. Also, the Gandalf/Dumbledore figure here is a woman, which is so refreshing to see.

Diverse women's roles

I have heard that the gender diversity is the good thing about WoT in future books as well. WoT is full of formidable women characters, even more than GoT. In GoT, the women were quite formidable, but the world was quite similar to our own, in that, they were rarely queens or heroes in their own right. Strong characters like Catelyn and Cersei stared out as wives, and Dany too was sold off. WoT is unique in that it has actual positions for women already.

In every village, there is a village council, and separate men's and women's councils, and the women have quite a strong voice and tell men off for interfering in the women's council affairs. Every village has a wisdom, a sort of healer and seer combined, who is a much respected woman. The wisdom in the protagonist's village is quite something. Furthermore, there is the Aes Sedai, an all-female organization of women who can touch and use this world's magic. There used be male Aes Sedai too, but something happened (spoiler) and there are no more male Aes Sedai. The plot revolves around a male who, it is discovered, can use the magic. So I have yet to see if he is going to upend things and dominate the female Aes Sedai in the end. But until now, the powerful female figures are quite nice to see. In the protagonists' country, there is a queen instead of a king, and her daughter is the heir, even though she has older sons. One scene where the daughter-heir is acting like an entitled princess and her brother, first sword and her protector, is indulging her, just that one scene is enough to upend the gender dynamics of most stories like this. I have heard that the portrayal of gender is not always so great in WoT – that their world's magic is divided into two halves, where the male half is "strong and needs to be tamed, dominated, brought into control," but the female half is "gentle, and gently guides the woman channeling it." But I am not there yet, so that part I will review in future if I get there.

Compare it to LOTR where there are like three women, literally, and one of them does nothing but sew a flag. The women here are quite stereotypical, portrayed as stylised ideals of beauty: Arwen is the morning star and Galadriel is the evening star. Eowen the nazgul slayer shines out, but then she is the exception that proves the norm. In contrast, the women in WoT are portrayed with as much complexity as any male powerful figures: they are not stereotypically good or bad, and they each have unique characters. Some are admirable like Moiraine our Gandalf figure, and some are hated, etc etc. I like how they are written without the sexualisation that is usually the lot of heroines in a male-protagonist's story.

Beauty of language

But even more than the gender factor, what I like about WoT is the beautiful writing. When I was reading GoT, the jarring language always stuck out to me: I felt like sometimes, GRRM did not know the right words to use to describe things, or that he was telling things which were not necessary to the plot, or that the telling was not as dramatic as it could be. I was comparing it to HP, where the writing was always excellent, Rowling had the right words, and everything was so dramatic, you could just visualize the character's expressions. Somehow, second grade writing mars GRRM's excellent plotting and characterization and will prevent it from becoming a classic like LOTR, I feel, though fans might hate me for saying this. Bad editing, basically. Bring WoT to the table and it just shines, in that regard. It is not as dramatic and page turning as HP, I guess nothing can be, but the language is really really good (his wife was his editor, hahaha). I like how the plot moves cleanly forward, uses the perfect language for every mood, from simple village life to fantastic moments to humor to terror.

And some of the descriptions are really beautiful and evocative. For example there was a dream sequence, I think the first one that the protagonist has, where he is meandering through a white city, moving towards the tower at its center. I don't want to give any spoilers, but the sequence was so beautifully written that it kept me going to the end, I was hoping for more and more of such. And a little while later, I was sold on the description of a bathhouse that the boys wander into, hahaha.

Medieval Europe

So there is a bathhouse in an inn, which has several nice sunken baths, full of boiling hot water, fragrant soap and piles of fluffy towels standing nearby. Believe me, it's better in the book. And that sent me on a train of thought about fantasies and how they bring to life the world they are written in, and how nice it would be if we had fantasies like that in our part of the world. GoT and WoT may be fantasies, but they are based on medieval Europe. They may not be based on particular sites or historical events, but they do bring a medieval Europe to life.

For example, GRRM is known to be a nerd about medieval history: he has huge collections of medieval clothes, weapons, artefacts, and stuff like that re. You can find detailed descriptions of things like castles, keeps, architecture, weapons, armors, shields, house logos, banners, and other medieval objects and concepts in his books. The history of GoT world, a separate companion book, is worth it just for the description of the unique castles in Westeros, some high up in the eyeries, some surrounded by rivers, some up north in the cold. For example, Winterfell is the northernmost castle and the home of winter kings, but it sits on a hot water spring which flows through the walls and keeps the structure warm. And the eyerie needs no doors on its prison, because the prison is built on a cliff which is open and sloping on the cliff side, so that prisoners can just slide down and crash if they are not too careful. I find it really fascinating and it adds so much atmosphere to the books. And the food! GRRM does so well with describing all kinds of exotic foods! Right now I am salivating over the 77 course feast at Joffrey's wedding. And also remember how delicious the Hogwarts food sounds! WoT is the same, there are the bathhouses, there are the villages, there are the spring festivals, lutes and flutes.

I haven’t found food so much in WoT, the characters are on the run and eating only bread and cheese and brewing tea all the time, hahahaa. But I love how he describes clothes. For example, I loved hearing how Moiraine Sedai wore a cloak of dark blue and a gown of a lighter silvery blue, and her skirt was divided for riding. I love hearing about how you can tell Elayne Trakand was a noblewoman because she first appears wearing a rich, embroidered gown of red slashed with velvety cream. I love how her brother Gawyn wears clothes of almost the same richness, clothes a man would not even wear on a festival day in the village, and her other brother Galadared looks almost too beautiful for a man in those clothes. And I loved hearing how Egwene's clothes changed to reflect her new surroundings, with silvery embroidered flowers near the hem, and that she puts away her open hair when she comes near her villager because it is her village custom for women her age to braid their hair. Sometimes women write about clothes like this, it was even an important plot point in Hunger Games, but rarely do men. Robert Jordan also describes architecture beautifully, we have dozens of interiors of inns: bedrooms, common rooms, kitchens. We have simple homesteads, and we have studies, libraries, keeps, and castles.

What of the medieval Nepali fantasy?

Yes, all of these writers bring a medieval Europe to life. And I was thinking, where are our Nepali fantasies, where we could find descriptions of our homes, our clothes, our jewelries, our castles? How would we describe a bathhouse? Or an inn? There are no inns with signboards in Nepal, probably. It would be something like, a band of travellers bas magna gayo. Then there would be different types of kitchens: the Brahmin kitchen where everyone sits hierarchically, the men eat first dhoti ferera followed by children, then women, and outsiders are not allowed in, and the daughter in law does not leave the hearth until everyone has eaten. The Himali kitchen with its neatly arranged shelves of utensils, with a vat full of water boiling in the center, surrounded by seats where people sit where they want. And then the next morning, there is no bathhouse, obviously, but they would be pointed to the nearest dhara, where they would strip and shower without a care for the cold. And then they would have different kinds of teas: marich pani for Brahmins, and ghiu chiya for the Himalis. And then, the different types of clothes: women wearing rough cotton fariya that they have dyed themselves. Different kinds of traditional jewelry, and how they mark whether or not a woman is married. And there are different kinds of homes too: mud homes, stone homes, homes with attics, single rooms homes, Kathmandu-style tall and narrow homes joined together to form bahals. We have such a large variety of food, and also of songs and dances. I am thinking, where are our fantasies that bring to life a medieval Nepal? I wish there were some.

These fantasies also have a way of documenting Europe's naming traditions and histories and meanings within names. There is a profusion of Elena/Elaynes and Gawyns and Galadreds among the protagonists, of Aemon/Aegon, or Valere/Valyria and Andal/Andors, and a profusion of Morguls and Mordeths and Dhooms and Dooms among the antagonists, places like Mantherendells/Rivendells, and these patterns recur across the high fantasies. Why do I know more about these names than our own? Why don't we make our own names and mythologies more visible by hiding them in fantasy books?

Diverse, non-stereotypical Characters

Jolting awake from my fantasy of fantasies and coming back to WoT, one more reason to like it is because of its characters. I find them interesting, the young heroes and the older Gandalf like figures, I want to follow their fortunes through the world. That brings me to one of the likable things about this book – it's a likable world, full of normal people, which strikes a balance between LOTR and GoT.

I feel like LOTR is an ideal world – people are either good or bad, and when they are good, they are ideal, like Aragorn. They are portrayed in abstract terms like Arwen the morning star, which gives an image, but says nothing about who Arwen is and how she acts or talks or thinks or feels. Good people get a happy ending and bad people get a bad ending here. On the other end is GoT, which is hyper realistic. There are no good people here, everyone is just a different shade of grey, and the lighter greys are the heroes. It is a very harsh world, horrible things happen to good people. And all the characters are so cynical, the writer himself writes with a very cynical point of view.

I like both of these books, for different reasons. When I read LOTR as a teenager, I loved immersing myself in this beautiful, magical world. I loved the idealized people, the adventures they had. Tolkien has a way of conveying complicated concepts through his story, which stays with you for a long time. The obsession that Gollum has with the ring, for instance – my precious is now a household world, and I get that feeling often in life too. Or the famous line – not all those who wander are lost. Or the time when Frodo struggles in Shelob's lair, and to his aid comes Galadriel's light, and the words: it's your journey. If you cannot find a way, no one else will. And Tolkien's beautiful and elevated language, lesser writers can only aspire to.

I liked GoT for different reasons. It seemed a much more realistic world than Tolkien's. I liked that all the characters were grey and that you couldn't really predict the story along stereotypical lines. GRRM also has a way of putting diverse, intense feelings into words, which is quite realistic compared to the ideal Tolkien. For example, Robert Baratheon becomes king by killing the mad king, so some people think he is the ideal rescuer, but then the mad king's family hate him as the "usurper", and so do the family of the mad king's daughter-in-law, who was raped and killed by the conquering army. Also, the whole point of the war for Robert Baratheon was to find his beloved Lyanna, who was abducted by the mad king's son. Robert does manage to kill Rhaegar, but by then Lyanna is already dead too, so his victory feels hollow to him. He instead says to Ned, "I killed him seventeen years ago, but every night in my dream I kill him again." This is what I was talking about above when I mentioned how these books make killing the villain the happy ending. Killing is not so easy, even killing the person you hate, or killing someone entirely evil, gives you lifelong trauma, which we see Robert experiencing. He is never human after that, he is unable to love his wife that he marries for politics. And then all these fantasies, making it look like killing the villain is the solution to everything, like it makes you happy, Aragorn and Arwen living happily ever after with their son – even HP falls into the trap in the end, with Harry's scar never tingling again for nineteen years. Killing the villain is justified by making him absolutely evil, or inhuman, like Sauron or Voldemort or WoT's villain (though I don't know yet if WoT will end this way). But the thing is, it's not realistic, first of all, killing one person doesn't solve everything, or even anything, and secondly, it doesn't make you happy, it gives you horrific trauma. So I am glad at least GoT portrayed that realistic side of things.

To go back to the fantasy worlds, while LOTR is idealistic and GoT is violent, WoT seems to be somewhere in the middle, which seems more realistic. The real world is neither completely abstract and idealistic, nor totally evil, but full of both these things, and most people live somewhere in the middle, which is how WoT world seems. It starts out as a varied world full of a variety of normal people. The five protagonists come from a farming village. The initial chapters describe the beginning of a spring festival, with the people feeling all cheerful and excited about dancing and the peddlers and jugglers who have come into town. The way the friends talk to each other is realistic – they don't talk of abstract things like power and destiny and magic and light and darkness, but of food and clothes and dancing and flirting. They joke with each other, tease each other, some of them are awkward and some are stupid in an endearing way, and some are strict and full of temper. They are just, so real, which is good to read.

The problem: length

But the series is FAR too long, which I dislike. The first book is beautiful but meanders endlessly. Somewhere I read a review by a muddled reader who said, "nothing really seems to happen except that a lot of people go to a lot of inns and talk a lot." I would endorse this review, that's basically the first book, except that it's not just inns but also cities and forests and palaces and mountains and goretos and highways and crypts and basements and caverns and haunted houses …. Well, you get the drift. Elements of the story are revealed very slowly, as and when the characters see them. For example, the friends from a village in the back of nowhere first of all begin seeing some guards wearing red, and wonder who they are. A few chapters later they arrive in the outskirts of a city and find that those are the queen's guards who are keeping the queen's peace in the lands. Finally, in the city itself, they find that there is a queen, and that their remote village is a part of her kingdom!

Some of it doesn’t really have a bearing on the story, although I think it may have a bearing in future stories. It's like, background building mai first book gayo, and I am suspecting the next few books pani worldbuilding mai janchha. That makes the series excruciatingly slow – at least Harry Potter goes to school in the first book, yaha ta two characters decide to go to school only at the end of the first book, and I don't even know if they will reach there in the next book, hahahah. And I have heard that it gets slower in the later books because the characters and scale of the book expand.

I guess this is why some readers enjoy the book – you know how when you like a book you want it to go on and on, I wish HP had gone on for 14 books. Testai hola. Fans will love meandering through these books hola. But this is the reason I am scared of committing to the 14 book series. I could just as well watch the series, except it's not as good as the book, I watched ep 1. For now, I am hanging on the fence, but I guess I will eventually and slowly read them, with breaks, hehehe.