Jordan evelopes you in an Epic World (The Eye of the World - Robert Jordan)

Member Name: Saul_Walker

Product:	The Eye of the World - Robert Jordan
Date:	06/05/01 (45 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great setting for the book, Excellent Characterisations, Very Descriptive to the point of reality

Disadvantages: Long- 1000 pages or so, Long seires (9 books), Not to be read in one afternoon

I enjoy nothing more than a great fantasy book from some of this genres great authors: Tolkien, Feist and Magaret Weis to name a few. So when I got recommended The Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan by someone on Dooyoo, I couldn’t wait to give it a go. The series that is at this moment 9 books long starts with what is dubbed an all time classic- ‘The Eye of the World’. So it was with this book that I entered another realm in entirety.

The story line starts us in the little Hamlet of Emonds Field, home to three friends who are the focus of all the series, namely Rand al’Thor, Mat Cauthon and Perrin Aybara. After one night of destruction at the hands of an untold evil the three friends become entwined in a journey with two strange travellers Moraine and Lan. Also the characters of Thom Merrilin; a gleeman (Travelling showman), Egwene al’Vere and Nynaeve al’Meara; the village Wisdom (kind of a witchdoctor) become involved in what Moraine excuses as ‘ the way the wheel turns’. Their journey is to end in the ‘Blight’- home to the evil that has taken an interest in the three boys, but the journey throws up endless amounts of problems, questions and adventure.

This book is huge and that isn’t only in the one thousand pages or so but in the story line and the setting of the novel. It has to be said first that this isn’t a book for the afternoon but for a couple of weeks. I read it almost continuously for days and it still took me a whole week to finish. I felt physically exhausted but completely enriched when the ending came only wishing that there were more pages so I’m glad there are eight other books of the same length.

Robert Jordan’s style is probably the best aspect of the novel, his descriptiveness rivals anything that Tolkien and Feist produce. The book therefore showers you in many images of characters, locations, objects etc. but he never goes over
the top trying to explain the relevance of anything to the whole world the book is set in. This doesn’t mean, however, that Jordan could write anything and it would be relevant, the reader knows that the author doesn’t need to explain anything totally but that later books will answer the questions the previous book throw up. It is this that keeps me addictively reading the book.

The world in which Jordan sets his book is so complicated one would have felt that he has spent most of his life conjuring this land and defining it’s politics, religion, social status among everything. He doesn’t try to impose this on you though, knowing that too much would be overkill. He just assumes that the world has always existed and that he is writing the book set in the land. It is a very unique and exciting style that makes the book so special.

Also Jordan uses many characters and their relationships to the world instead of concentrating on one or two main heroes. This gives the book a more universal appeal and keeps the journey bouncing around with various points of view that mean the story never stagnates if one character’s potential in a certain situation is lacking.

Overall Robert Jordan has written a very solid book in a world where every book in the series will contain something new. The Eye of the World is the strongest base I have read for any series and really epitomises what a great and imaginative author Robert Jordan is.

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