The Wheel of Time Crosstalk: Did we enjoy reading The Eye of the World?

Amazon is currently hard at work on a TV adaptation of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, a 14-volume fantasy epic that follows the adventures of Rand al’Thor and his friends as they battle the Dark One and his minions. With the series approaching, we figured it was a good time to talk about the series, starting with the first book — and likely the basis for the first season of the show — The Eye of the World.

Whether you’re on your tenth reread of The Wheel of Time or you’re newcomers like us, it’s a great time to be talking about Jordan’s saga. So let’s talk.

Caution: There will be SPOILERS.

COREY: As the first entry in the series, The Eye of the World plays it pretty safe overall. There are more than a few similarities with The Lord of the Rings, with many characters feeling like clones of J.R.R. Tolkien’s creations. I don’t mean that to sound like a negative; Rand, Lan and Moraine all have enough differences to be interesting, but clearly Jordan was playing it a bit safe in his first novel. Having read ahead in the series, I’m happy to report that the longer the novels go on, the less resemblance they beat to Tolkien’s series.

Plot wise, I’d say Eye of the World veers pretty strongly away from The Lord of the Rings in that there isn’t a macguffin our heroes are trying to keep out of the hands of the Dark One. Sure, the novel begins in a Shire-like part of the map, and our heroes quickly flee from that quiet corner of the world, but again, it’s just a matter of time until the plot veers away of Middle-earth. Most importantly, the book does a good job of setting up the world without inundating us with information. Jordan’s world is massive, and he explores every corner of it before things are all said and done, but Eye of the World manages to explain what’s going without overloading the reader.

DAN: Okay, so you’re a ways into the series, and I pretty much just finished The Eye of the World, so it’s still fairly fresh in my mind.

And I suppose the similarities to The Lord of the Rings are a good place to start, because they are definitely there. In fact, I think you might be underselling them. So we begin our story, after the prologue, in the bucolic country backwater of Emond’s Field, which is clearly an analog for the Hobbiton, with the Two Rivers as the Shire. We have lead characters Rand, Mat, and Perrin, all small town boys who go on an epic quest: meet our hobbits. They’re accompanied on their journey by Moiraine Damodred, who is basically Lady Gandalf, and they fight Trollocs, which are orcs by another name. There’s even a Gollum-type figure in pitiful thrall to the Dark One who follows them from town to town, and an Ent-ish creature who talks very slowly and who I swear to god once described himself as “hasty,” which was one of Treebeard’s favorite words. And at the end of the book they’re in the Blight, which gives off serious Mordor vibes.

So YEAH, there are similarities. You say that Jordan was playing it safe, but I wonder if it was more of a marketing tactic. Like, if you’re trying to sell a new fantasy epic to publishers, what better way than to say, “It’s like The Lord of the Rings but the lines between good and evil are blurrier and there are actually prominent female characters”? People like what they know. I know I did. As familiar as some of the book was, it did feel kind of cozy and comfortable. I had an easy time settling in, and when it went down different paths, I was wiling to follow, trusting it would go somewhere good.

I agree that the world was set up very well. There’s a lot of meat on the bones. It’s almost odd how little of it gets filled in, though. Like, we hear a lot about the Aes Sedai — how untrustworthy they are, how powerful they are — but little in the way of specifics regarding their organization, their history, etc. But there are 13 books to go so Jordan has to save something, and it did leave me wanting more.

Lemme ask you a simple question: did you enjoy reading this book? Cause I did, overall.

COREY: Okay, so I guess I undersold the similarities. But I will stress that as the series goes on, there are fewer and fewer similarities. But yeah, if you’re trying to hook people on your 14-book series, no small commitment, it makes sense that you’d want to hook readers with something familiar before you get seriously out there with the plot.

As to your question, five books in and The Eye of the World is probably still my favorite book. The second book, The Great Hunt, is also pretty solid, but as the series goes on the books have a tendency to drag. You mentioned wanting to hear more about the Aes Sedai and other aspects of “Randland,” and I can assure you, you’re going to get all the information you want. I thought Eye struck a nice balance between plot momentum and exposition. Further on in the series it becomes the opposite, so enjoy it while you can.

If I had to complain about one aspect of Eye, it was that basically everyone has a super power, which is sort of convenient. The odds of five friends from the same village all having super powers is pretty ludicrous to someone raised on stuff like the X-Men, where they manifest randomly. Still, Jordan is a clever enough writer to give himself an out, explaining that everything is a product of eponymous Wheel of Time; “the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills,” after all. It’s a superb excuse for all number of plot coincidences, and Jordan relies on your belief in it to advance his story.

I’d also like to mention, new readers should pay attention to virtually everyone you meet. Most, if not all characters return at some point, with varying degrees of importance to the story later on. That farm girl that flirted with Rand over dinner one night on the road? She attempts to become an Aes Sedai. That random soldier Mat plays dice with? Well he just might end up being a powerful religious prophet. Everyone has a story to tell in Jordan’s world, and he spends a lot of time making sure those stories get told.

So what differences did you notice between Jordan’s world and Tolkien’s?

DAN: For one thing, Jordan’s story seems more cynical. I mean, it’s not that cynical — we’re not in George R.R. Martin territory — but there’s more moral ambiguity here than in Middle-earth, where the dividing line between good guy and bad guy is pretty clear, give or take Boromir.

Take Moiraine. She’s the Gandalf figure, but Gandalf was trusted by pretty much all of our heroes, and quickly slid into the role of protective magical grandpa. But even after she saves their lives I-don’t-know-how-many times, the lead characters are very hesitant to trust Moiraine, so deep do their prejudices against Aes Sedai run. That goes double, or maybe triple, for Nynaeve, who seems hostile to almost everyone she meets, Moiraine most of all.

Speaking of Moiraine and Nynaeve, another big difference is that The Wheel of Time has female characters. The Lord of the Rings had female characters, of course, but not many of real importance, and they’re mostly cordoned off in discrete sections of the story. But here, Moiraine, Nyaeneve and Egwene are all characters whose perspectives are valued or who drive the plot forward, or both, and I know there are more important female characters on the way (it feels like Jordan is setting up Elayne for a bigger role down the line). That seems like a deliberate response to LOTR, which has a boy adventurers vibe.

As for the characters themselves, I liked them. I don’t know if I fell in love with any of them; I think the most intriguing for me was Moiraine, who maintained a mysterious distance, and I got a huge kick out of Loial the Ogier, the Ent-ish creature I mentioned before. He was cracking me up, with his long stories and accidentally throwing shade at the human race. I want a Funko of him yesterday.

But by and large, the characters seemed a little…archetypal, is maybe the nice way of saying it? Rand has a case of Chosen One syndrome: he’s vital to the plot but kind of bland. Egwene is our ingénue, Mat our lovable rogue…my favorite of the Emond’s Fielders was probably Perrin; I liked the contrast between his intimidating exterior and thoughtful nature.

What do you think of the characters and the characterization? Who are your favorites?

COREY: There is certainly more moral ambiguity in Jordan’s novels, and even more so as they go on. People have made the point that while Tolkien’s views on war were shaped by his experiences in World War I, Jordan’s were shaded by his time in Vietnam, where a lot of soldiers didn’t know what they were actually fighting for. It’s an interesting lens to use to view the series.

Back to the characters, I think overall it’s too early to judge with a lot of them. As I’ve said, Eye is Jordan’s soft entry into the world; the characters don’t veer far very from their archetypes this early on. As the novels continue, they get more fleshed out, with intricacies that make them quite different from the generic roles they fill in Eye.

Early on, I do enjoy Perrin as you do, as well as Loial. Loial has a different way at looking at things, even among his own people, and provides a nice foil for our standard-issue heroes. But my favorite character has to be Lan. I’m a sucker for the brooding badass with a tragic backstory, and Lan fits that trope to a T. Sometimes tropes can be fun and enjoyable, and in Lan’s case, even though I’ve read his character before, Jordan writes him so well I don’t mind.

As for the female characters, I have mixed emotions. I applaud Jordan for not just including them in the story but having them drive the plot. On the other hand, holy hell are they hard to like sometimes. Egwene and Elayne are fairly likable in Eye, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a Nynaeve chapter I enjoyed. She comes off as boorish and overbearing, and five books in has yet to show any growth towards changing that. I won’t go so far as to say Jordan doesn’t know how to write female characters, because he does have some wonderful examples later on, but yeah, not a fan for the most part.

Ultimately though, heroes are only as good as their villains. What did you think about your initial taste of the Forsaken?

DAN: I’m glad you mentioned the Forsaken, because…who? Those are the two guys who turned up at the end to be the final bosses, right? Honestly, they felt pretty generic to me, like the book needed a couple of strong baddies for our heroes to overcome so it produced these two. Like, were they talked about earlier? Did I miss it?

I almost hate to go back to The Lord of the Rings, but evil in The Eye of the World definitely has a Mordor-ian feel to it. The Lord of the Rings is about fighting the Dark Lord. The Eye of the World is about resisting the Dark One, an ancient evil bent on domination and destruction. There’s some intriguing variety among the “good” characters in The Eye of the World, but the face of evil is as implacably horrific as it was in The Fellowship of the Ring. Like Sauron, the Dark One is a Bad Guy, with capital letters. He’s the lord of death and he wants his armies of Trollocs to overrun the world and swallow up everything kind and decent. We’re not dealing with Tywin or Cersei Lannister here, where you could argue that they’re sympathetic or good at their jobs or in some way redeemable.

And that’s fine; I’m completely cool with my bad guys being rotten to the core. And I love that Jordan gives us some very human villains, too. The Dark Friends are an interesting idea: humans seduced by the Dark One’s promise of power into doing his bidding. And the Children of the Light are very intriguing, since they earnestly think they’re fighting the Dark One and can’t see that they’ve become a private army of fanatical witch-hunters. I’m intrigued to see how these different kinds of bad interact with each other going forward.

Going back to characters for a moment, I’m gonna disagree with you about Nynaeve. She’s definitely assertive, but I looked forward to her chapters because I knew she was gonna push the plot forward. Nynaeve is a very active participant in her own story, which is great for fiction; you know she’s gonna do exactly what she wants regardless of what other people think, which means she can pull the story in any direction, and that’s exciting.

Would I want Nynaeve as a team member on a group project at school? Probably not, but I definitely like reading about her.

By the way, when I started the book, I had no idea we were even going to have point-of-view chapters for characters other than Rand. I think I started to get really invested in the story when the group split up after the incident at Shadar Logoth and we got to see how the characters behaved on their own. What do you make of how the story is structured?

COREY: I think we continue to hit the same theme here: whether it’s the bad guys, the good guys, the plot, or basically anything else, The Eye of The World feels an awful lot like The Lord of the Rings. I think I’d forgotten that as I got further into the series. Five books in, The Wheel of Time is miles away from LOTR, and it’s strange to look back.

I hate to keep jumping ahead, but the Forsaken are easily the most interesting part of the novels to me. You’re right, the first two we meet ever so briefly at the climax of this book are fairly vanilla, but we aren’t given enough time with either to really know anything about them. I will say, those two jokers were the least powerful of the Forsaken, and they’re more than a match for Moiraine.

As for Shadar Logoth, I liked the idea that they established there was a separate power from the Dark One. You learn more about it later, but in Eye I do remember Moiraine making it clear that the power there was evil, but it was not of the Shadow. That reminded me somewhat of Shelob or Smaug, in that they weren’t serving Sauron, but they weren’t exactly good neighbors either.

As for the story’s structure, I’m a fan. Much like A Song of Ice and Fire, splitting everyone up broadens the narrative and allows us to see how characters act independent of each other. In a group there always tends to be a leader or two, and when everyone is separated people have to make their own choices and live with the consequences. I’ve mentioned how I was not a fan of Mat, Rand and Perrin all ending up with super powers of a sort, but I do enjoy that their powers all feel different. I feel like the female characters tend to approach problems a little more similarly, while the male characters tend to have different ways of solving the issue at hand.

Regardless, being the first book of the series, Eye remains my favorite of the series thus far, mainly because of its pacing. As the series moves on, things begin to drag very heavily. Did you find the pace enjoyable? Or was it too bogged down with exposition?

DAN: Yeah, I thought Eye moved along at a good clip. Looking back, it really did take us on quite the journey. The sleepy Two Rivers region is very different from Baerlon, the first proper town they visit. That’s very different from the haunted city of Shadar Logoth, which is nothing like the bustling city of Caemlyn, which shares nothing in common with Fal Dara, a city in the Borderlands that’s always ready for war with the Trollocs.

In between, we get to know most of our main characters pretty well. Again, splitting them up in the middle definitely helped — I felt like I only really started to warm up to Egwene and Perin, for example, when they were off by themselves spending time with the Tuatha’an and magic wolf men. (I assume the wolf stuff is what you mean when you talk about Perin’s “superpower?” I don’t think Mat has a superpower in this book, unless you count getting possessed by a knife and turning into a dick for a while. So don’t spoil me!)

And then Jordan brings in Loial, a member of an ancient race that built many of the cities the humans now call home. I was also very interested in the Ways, the sort of fast travel system the male and female Aes Sedai built back before the men were all driven mad by the Dark One…or at least I think that’s what happened. Then there was the Green Man, and all the talk about Tar Valon, which we don’t see at all…

And I agree with you on the evil in Shadar Logoth being different from the evil of the Dark One — that’s a neat idea that opens up some cool possibilities. I want to know more about it. I want to know more about a lot. There is so much STUFF in this book, so much for a nerd like me to chomp down on, and I almost feel like there wasn’t enough exposition. I already mentioned not getting as much info on the Aes Sedai as I wanted. And the evil in Shadar Logoth…well, if it’s not from the Dark One, where does it come from? And what was chasing down people in the Ways?

And I think that’s mostly intentional on Jordan’s part. This is a looooooong book series, and he’s setting up things to develop later. I thought the world-building was the best part of the book, and it’s what has me most excited to read more.

COREY: That is entirely intentional. Every single thing that you mentioned wanting more of, you’re going to get and then some. I don’t quite know how I felt at the time, but looking back knowing how the world opens up, I appreciate how little Jordan revealed in Eye. I’d be curious to know how much Jordan planned in advance, because Eye really is a good appetizer for the 14-book course to come.

Eye  will be the easier book for Amazon to adapt, but it will still require significant cuts to bring to screen. How they will manage some of the later books, which go nowhere for long stretches of time, I have no idea, but I don’t envy the writer’s room. On the other hand, I think that the books will benefit from a little trimming here or there.

Again, this was my favorite book of the series so far, and I think it falls most in line with the fantasy tropes we’ve all come to know and love. I was excited to read The Great Hunt after reading Eye, and on some level I appreciate the slow burn that Jordan treats us to. I can only hope that the later books in the series return to the pace that Eye enjoyed.

DAN: We’re getting ahead of ourselves here, but showrunner Rafe Judkins has said that he’s going to be “condensing in the latter middle section of books.” So that might be the answer to your question. I don’t know how slow they get, but it sounds like Amazon will speed them up a bit.

As for Eye, I thought it was a good read. Yes, it was derivative of The Lord of The Rings, but The Lord of the Rings is great, and Jordan is a good enough writer that it didn’t bother me. Honestly, as a fantasy fan, it was probably a plus.

I feel like we could keep talking about the books for a while, but we’re winding down, so I’ll put shoot off a few final points:

• The Tuatha’an, or the tinkers, or the Traveling People or whatever they’re called, are clearly inspired by the Romani people. I don’t think Jordan draws as much from real-world history as George R.R. Martin does for A Song of Ice and Fire, but there’s some stuff in there.
• That attraction between Lan and Nynaeve sure popped out of nowhere, huh? Or at least that’s how I felt. I remember there was, like, a single line about her blushing in his presence early on, and then at the end they suddenly have a tragic but-we’re-from-two-different-worlds star-crossed lovers thing happening and I wondered if I’d missed something.
• Let’s pour one out for Thom Merrilin, who was a fun character. Although we didn’t actually see him die, which in fantasy books is basically a guarantee that he’ll come back at some point, although I can’t see how.
• How did Jordan remember how to spell all these names? So many apostrophes…

Overall, I liked The Eye of the World a lot! If Amazon does a good job with the adaptation, a lot more people could fall in love with it.

COREY: Yeah, it’s easy to read all these criticisms and surmise that I didn’t like the book, but I unequivocally did. It didn’t bother me in the least that it resembled LOTR, and I really can’t stress enough that that comparison fades as the books go on. As for your final points, I’m not quite sure where to start, knowing the next few books as I do. First and foremost, yes, Jordan’s use of apostrophes borders on a crime against humanity. Luckily, everyone tends to go by a shortened version of their names, so it doesn’t pop up as much as you think.

As for the attraction between Lan and Nynaeve, yeah, it was a bit random, and I’m not necessarily sure I buy it even when it gets fleshed out later. Nynaeve spends an awful lot of time thinking and talking about how men are “wool headed” idiots, so for her to immediately fall for Lan felt a little out of character. I’m not sure where it’s headed, but hopefully Jordan has something better in mind than Nynaeve falling for the first genuine badass she’s ever met.

As for your points regarding Thom and the Tuatha’an, I’ll say only that what Jordan does with these elements are examples of why I’m still reading the series. There’s far more than meets the eye to both, and it’s a slow burn reveal that keeps you interested. As for the Tuatha’an being based on the Romani, I’m not sure, but I do know Jordan has a penchant for naming characters and places based on a variety of real-world people and places, with little pattern in terms of geography or ethnicity that I can see.

So in closing, Eye on its own is well worth reading. My only caveat is be prepared for a long-term commitment. The books quickly expand in terms of scope and length, and if you are wanting to see it through to the end, it will be no small drain on your time. In the final book there’s ONE single chapter longer than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, so don’t think this will be a breezy beach read. The quality is there, but there’s a lot to weed through. Knowing that, do you still want to continue, Dan?

Image: Amazon

DAN: I know this series is a tall mountain to climb, but I am down for the challenge! Time to go on The Great Hunt…

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