I did not expect to enjoy my third or fourth re-read of Robert Jordan's Eye of the World recently, but I did. Now that the series is officially finished, I think I'm going to plow though the entire series again, that is, if I can clear my to-read shelf first, a project I've been stalled on for 2 years now. My enjoyment of the series dwindled the more the plot started dawdling in in a transparent attempt to stretch out the story for as many books as possible. But it was nice to be reminded in Eye of the World how tight the story used to be.
There were a few things that jumped out at me on this last read-through though. The first is how simple the plot of the first book is. A bunch of farm boys meet a wizard and run from the farm to the city in a mostly straight line with the devil hot on their heels. With a teleport to the final boss fight at the end. It's a pretty solid chase story, all things considered. Yes, "the bloat" can be seen in its nascent stages even in the first book, when the author takes 200 pages to describe two farm boys riding on wagons, being chased out of towns, and meeting unsavory people over and over again before finally reaching the big city. It's so repetitive, that in the paperback edition I have there is an editing error where the author accidentally describes meeting the same damn farmer twice, and describes the encounters identically almost verbatim. There's little growth or purpose to that part of the narrative and could probably have been covered in a few pages without the story losing anything. But hey, it turned a 500 page novel into a 700 page novel. Still, it grabbed me in the beginning and kept me turning pages until the climactic encounter at the Eye of the World, just like it did the first time.
Of course, some of the original head scratchers remain. While I find his depiction of the gender war in small town villages interesting and amusing, then women all seem to be the same cardboard cut-out characters. All arms akimbo, or folded beneath their breasts, or tugging on their braids and lecturing the men for being so dumb. In the Wheel of Time, men and women are forever impenetrable mysteries to the other, locked in a never-ending cold war of parallel societies. I'm not saying this is problematic necessarily, just that it always strikes me as odd, this depiction of women and their interactions with men. It's as if the male-female split between Aes Sedai has fractured the gender relations in every other part of civilization as well.
Which brings me to the biggest idea that jumped out at me this read, which is how good a metaphor becoming an aes sedai is for a homosexual coming of age story. In this universe, being a man who can channel fabulous power is not a choice, it is how one is born. It is also terrifying and confusing to anyone who finds out, so men who realize this about themselves keep it secret for fear of being ostracized or killed. Every man who can channel is assumed to be mentally ill. Rand's in love with a woman, but he doesn't seem to feel much passion for her, and it's made clear pretty quickly that he and she are destined to be good friends at most. He meets other male channelers who, while publicly reviled, disturb and excite him. He spends most of the book in denial, plagued by frumpy matrons trying to smother him in one way or another before finding freedom in channeling pure(-ish) energy with other men. He discovers he's not the same as other boys and is probably not going to be able to live the life his family and friends want for him, and eventually comes out in a public and dramatic way when he can't contain it any longer. Okay, it's a little bit of a stretch, I'll grant. Still, I think the case could be made. And honestly, I like the story 100% better when I read it that way. Read the quotes from the post below though, and tell me there's not at least a LITTLE homo-erotic subtext in a lot of those lines.
Or maybe it's just me. Just me? Okay.
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