We
continue the "Wandering Trilogy" with Winter's Heart, another short
volume that required another two year wait. This is when it really became
evident that the pace of the series had slowed considerably. It wasn't a one-off
anymore; it was a trend. Re-reading now, it's a decent book, but back in the day
it was frustrating, despite having one of the iconic scenes of the
series.
More on that later. First, a digression
about the new medium of book publishing. eBooks.
Before you continue:
- This is part 9 of my The Wheel of Time retrospective
- See this blog post for an overview of the retrospective
- These blogs are most effective with your own re-read of the series
- Warning: CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE ENTIRE SERIES
The Prologue eBook
Winter's
Heart started something new in publishing. Given
that the previous book was the first #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list of
the series, anticipation for the next installment was high. To capitalize on
that and build even more buzz, they offered the prologue for Winter's
Heart, entitled "Snow," in an eBook format for $5 a few months before the
book dropped.
Now, eBooks barely existed back in 2000.
And I certainly did not want to spend $5 for it, even though the prologues from
this point on are around 90 pages on average. A few bucks more could get you an
entire paperback book six times that length. It also felt like they were
starting to milk the series and make as much money off it as they could.
Obviously there are marketing reasons behind all this and it is a business after
all... but to a 24 year old still naïve about some things in the world, it was
hard not to think that way when the books are suddenly shorter, take longer to
release, are slower in plot and are now #1 bestsellers. I'm just
saying.
But really, the primary reason I didn't
bother with the prologue eBook (or any others in the future), was that I wanted
to read the entire book at once. I didn't want to read part and then wait a few
months in between. It's like when you hear the first single from your favorite
band's new album, and listen to it incessantly, then when the album actually
comes out you skip that song during the first few listens of the album because
you've already heard it twenty times. The book was meant to be read whole in one
shot, so that's what I wanted to do.
Reading
eBooks
I would have only been able to read it
on a computer at that point, anyway. I got my first computer of my very own in
1998, after finishing college (the only computer I "owned" before that was a
Commodore 64 my parents had). It was a Compaq laptop with Windows 98. But I
didn't use it to read eBooks. I didn't want to read books on my
computer.
If I recall correctly, though, the
only decent formats then were .pdf (Adobe), .pdb (Palm OS) and .prc
(Mobipocket). You could also read them on a PDA. I did get a few eBooks a few
years later, in 2002 / 2003, just before the next volume (Crossroads of
Twilight) came out. I would get them in the PalmReader format, and I had
this totally bitchin' Sony CLIÉ PDA on which to read them. I actually still have
those eBooks on my previous PC hard drive, but they are worthless now, since
they have DRM and it was tied to my account and credit card info on whatever
ancient website I bought them at, which I don't remember. So I can't even view
them now.
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| Only thing missing here was internet access. |
Thoughts Then
Anyway, as I said
before, another two years passed before this volume arrived. I was starting to
get used to this; Winter's Heart was the third volume in a row that was
released in a two-year interval. I realized that the days of a new novel every
year were gone (sigh). There seemed no end in sight for the series, and I
figured it might stretch on to 15 or 16 volumes. I definitely thought that after
reading this one.
I still lived in Omaha when
this book came out. I vaguely remember sitting in a mall food court and eating
lunch while reading the prologue, awkwardly trying to hold hardcover open with
one hand while eating with the other. I'm pretty sure it was the Westroads
Mall, which was right by where I worked at
the time.
I liked how the novel was themed
around winter, since prior to Book 8 there wasn't much in the way of snow or
winter. The early books spanned longer periods of time and things were so
fast-paced that I didn't really pay attention to the seasons in the series that
much. It had been summer for so long (due to the Dark One's touch on the world)
and with the years between books I had forgotten about
winter.
However. I did not like this book upon
first read. I was very frustrated with the glacial pace. Where were all the cool
things that had been prophesized or viewed, all the things Jordan had left hints
about and had been building up to for 8 books? We're still not there
yet?
No Preparatory Re-Read
Something worth mentioning is that this
was the first time I didn't do a full re-read of the series prior to the new
volume coming out. That had become a tradition for me starting with Book 6,
Lord of Chaos, but with 9 and counting, a re-read every time became a bit
much. It takes a long time to read these books.
As much as I love the story, there are other things I'd like to
read, and I need breaks from it every once in a while. So I didn't do a full
re-read for this one, I merely read the previous two to refresh my memory on
recent events.
Thoughts Now
It's so much
easier to like this book now, with the knowledge of events in later volumes. It
still feels a bit short, and the Elayne chapters still make my eyes glaze over
(I generally skim through them), but overall I enjoyed the book a bit more this
time. I can now see why Jordan did what he did, though as I mentioned in the
blog for The Path of Daggers, it's hard to see that when you first read
it and don't know where things are going.
The
book is slow in places, and personally I don't think that slow pace works as
well when chapters are grouped in chunks by character, especially "one and done"
groups of chapters (i.e. the character never appears again in the book). Take a
step back and look at what's going on at a high level, compare it to any of the
first 7 volumes, and you'll see a marked difference.
- 6 chapters = Perrin finds out Faile has been captured, he mopes around
camp.
- 8
chapters = Elayne dickering around in Caemlyn,
assassination attempt (though not really), a bunch of women glaring at each
other (Sea Folk, Kin, Aes Sedai, Wise Ones), sex with Rand, bonding Rand,
visiting the Borderland rulers in Braem Wood.
- 10 chapters = Mat
loiters in Ebou Dar, thinks about leaving, finally leaves with a huge entourage
of Important People.
- 8 chapters = Rand skulking around Far
Madding, looks for renegade Asha'man to kill, finally leaves and cleanses the
male half of the Source.
A visual breakdown can
be seen here.
That's essentially it. There are
a few important and memorable scenes, but for the most part the book moves bits
and pieces of the main storyline along at a snail's pace. The Perrin and Elayne
storylines barely advance in comparison to their length. The Rand and Mat
storylines were satisfactory, in that they moved many pieces about, but I
desperately wanted more during that first read-through.
And when grouped in chunks by character, some of the content loses
its importance. Take the Perrin chapters. They are all at the beginning. He
doesn't do much, and then he's done until the next book. I mentioned this
earlier, it's a "one and done" type of structure. Jordan started doing this with
A Crown of Swords. This is part of why I don't like these middle books
(Wandering Trilogy) as much as the others, which mix up appearances throughout
each book and make it feel more like everything is happening at
once.
Crossroads of Twilight, the next book, does this too. It really drags down the story, in my opinion.
Far Madding
One thing that has always bothered me about this book is Far
Madding. Of course, we've known the city has existed, since it's marked on the
map, but the characters have never gone there. It's briefly mentioned a few
times, but nothing about what the city is like, aside from men are expected to
obey women there (big surprise, women are more powerful in this world
overall).
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| Is it me, or does the island look like the Starfleet emblem? |
So I found it quite a shock to learn
that people can't channel in Far Madding. They have some large
ter'angreal in the middle of the city called a "guardian," that prevents
men and women from channeling in the city, as well as detects channeling outside
the exclusion zone. Rand goes here for one main reason: to escape the hazards of
saidin. He's been having all sorts of problems with the Source – getting
nauseous, having problems holding onto it, etc. Very convenient to suddenly have
a completely new place that blocks channeling to go to.
I
would guess that this caused confusion for many readers because we didn't know
the city was like that. It seemed like this would be knowledge the characters
would discuss earlier, mainly for the benefit of the reader. Kind of like how Cadsuane is never mentioned until halfway through the series. After 8 books, it
seemed odd to throw in an entirely new element like this, especially when the
city is smack in the middle of the map. At least to me. I mean, there are other
places we don't go to until way later in the series – like Bandar Eban and
Maradon in Books 12 and 13 – but those places don't have any special attributes
like Far Madding does.
The Cleansing
This is one of the iconic scenes of
the series, the cleansing of saidin. It's rather clever how Jordan pulled
this off, since it's hard to fathom that anyone short of the Creator or the Dark One
could cleanse the male half of the Source. But Rand made it work with all the
tools that were essentially left to him from times long
past.
Why else would the Choedan Kal have been
created? They were never used before, from what I gather. Why else would Shadar
Logoth have come into being? It seemed to be some random "evil thing" like Padan
Fain, serving no real purpose but to be evil in The Eye of the World. And
it helps that there's someone like Nynaeve now, one of the most powerful Aes
Sedai in a long time, in terms of One Power strength (aside from the former
damane Alivia, of course).
All the
elements were there for a reason, and Rand figured out how to do it. I didn't
exactly understand what happened the first time I read it, but later understood
how the evils essentially "cancelled each other out."
Like Far Madding, I found it a bit jarring to suddenly go cleanse
the Source. Yes, Rand mentions it a couple of times before that, but he didn't
seem too urgent about it and after the ho-hum of most of the book, I wasn't
expecting him to do it right then and there. But it makes sense when you think
about it. The problems he was having with the Source, along with the number of
Asha'man going mad, expedited his need to cleanse it.
Regarding the eBook cover, which shows Rand with the male access
key for the Choedan Kal – this is probably my favorite depiction of Rand. That's
generally how I've seen him in my mind, though with a bit longer hair. Would
have been cool if the cover had shown him and Nynaeve facing each other while
channeling, but this will do. Nynaeve was on the eBook cover for the last two
volumes anyway.
Darrell K. Sweet: 1934-2011
I'm assuming if you're reading this blog entry, you've read all the
entries before it. And if you've done that, you'll know that I haven't been kind
to the cover art by Darrell K. Sweet. Unfortunately, Sweet died while I was
reading this book, on December 5th. Instead of complaining about the cover for
Winter's Heart this time, I'd like to talk about Sweet and his art. I
recently noticed something about the art for the Wandering Trilogy (Books 8-10)
that I hadn't noticed before, and it makes more sense to discuss that in the
blog for Crossroads of Twilight.
I fully
respect Sweet as an artist. He was a great painter; his talent is unquestioned.
It was partly due to many of his fantasy covers that I got into fantasy in the
first place. His covers for the Xanth novels (by Piers Anthony) and
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (by Stephen R. Donaldson) are classics
and were very influential to me when I was younger. He also did the ones for
L.E. Modesitt Jr.'s The Saga of Recluce, which I didn't get into until I
was older, but which have become the face of the series.
I've always loved the Xanth ones the most, though. His style fit
that world perfectly. It's going to be strange to not see his artwork on the new
novels coming out in that series.
Here are some
of my favorites:
Sweet and The Wheel of Time
The main reason I pick on his
covers in these blogs so much, though, is because I didn't feel his style fit
The Wheel of Time. He knows how to make an eye-catching cover – which is
the point, they're trying to sell books – but I felt the series got short-shrift
because of the inaccuracies of the covers. I just don't like his interpretation
of Robert Jordan's world. When you paint Trollocs as regular humans with
helmets, to me that shows a lack of respect for the source material – it's like
he didn't even read the text, not even an excerpt. It's not a detail that's hard
to miss.
What makes me sad the most, though, is
that Sweet never finished the cover for the final upcoming book, A Memory of
Light. Even though I didn't like the art he did for the series, he started
it and should have finished it. According to Brandon Sanderson, Sweet created a concept, but not a finished painting. So who
knows what will happen to the cover for this last one. I trust Tor and Harriet
(Jordan's widow) will make the right decision. We'll find out next
year.
Update, Feb 2012: Michael Whelan is painting the final cover. Yeah! Very happy about this.
The last book in this series is becoming
even more bittersweet. Both the original author and cover artist have died. The
ones Sanderson has been writing still felt the same as Jordan's partly due to
the covers. Now the last one will be out of place.
Either way, thank you, Darrell K. Sweet, for all the fantasy
artwork you've done over the years. I may not have liked what you did for The
Wheel of Time, but they are undeniably an integral part of the series and
now I can't imagine it without them.
Next:
Book 10 – Crossroads of Twilight
Previous:
Book 8 – The Path of Daggers
Book 7 – A Crown of Swords
Book 6 – Lord of Chaos
Book 5 – The Fires of Heaven
Book 4 – The Shadow Rising
Book 3 – The Dragon Reborn
Book 2 – The Great Hunt
Book 1 – The Eye of the World
Retrospective Overview
