189 of 203 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Tremendous Start, But Beware, November 8, 2002
The Wheel of Time is probably the best-known and most widely read fantasy series other than The Lord of the Rings.
When this book was published in 1988 or 1989, it created a sensation -- a tremendous first volume that had the usual good-evil battle and tons of action but also was filled with magic, history, politics, sociology, cultural background and realistic characters. When I re-read the first five books, I was amazed at the details of history and politics that Jordan provided in his world. Jordan also has numerous protagonists, not just one or two primary ones like many other fantasy writers.
Moreover, Eye of the World features strong men and, through their magical abilities and powerful personalities, stronger women. Jordan has been rightly lauded for the prominent and powerful roles he created for the female characters.
The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, The Shadow Rising and The Fires of Heaven followed and created a tremendous series such that The New York Times noted that Jordan had come to dominate the genre that Tolkien made famous.
In Eye of the World, the writing is smooth, the various characters and their motivations work well, and there's action aplenty. The sense of innocence and mystery that correspond to the heroes' relative lack of knowledge of their surroundings and the world at large is palpable and realistic.
Unfortunately, starting with Lord of Chaos (book 6), Jordan's creation became unwieldy. Instead of concentrating on following the themes and story-threads of books 1-5 (which combined are more than 3500 pages, hardcover), he created new storylines, bogged down the narrative and halted the pace of the epic. Book 8 in particular is an unmitigated disaster -- 650 pages (hardcover) of wheel-spinning (pardon the pun) with almost no progress to the story. Book 9 began to jump-start the narrative once again.
The series is at 10 books (the tenth will be published in about two months from now) and growing (13 total possible -- it's a common numerical theme in the books), thus the last volume will be published in 2006, at the earliest.
The Eye of the World is great, as are the next four in the series. They are, however, addictive, so know what you're getting into.
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61 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An original, fantasy epic, December 18, 1999
This book was recommended to me by the manager of a brick and mortar store nearby. I have read a great deal of science fiction/fantasy, and after a while, it all starts to feel the same. You know what I mean: how many times can we revisit Tolkein-esque charcaters like elves, dwarves, and orcs? I was very pleased to discover an entirely new world.
Robert Jordan has created a landscape of magnificent proportions. Accents, legends, superstitions, politics...His amazing attention to detail allowed me to become fully immersed in the story. Even more surprising is that the quality of his writing is maintained throughout the book's length of 782 pages. I couldn't put this novel down, with the result that I finished it well inside of a week.
This is the first book of a series, and the reviews for some of the later books aren't as glowing. However, I feel that this book is a great read, and can stand on its own. It is not uncommon for series to degrade over time -- take a look at "Wishsong of Shannara"by Terry Brooks, "The One Tree" by Stephen R. Donaldson, or "The Sorceress of Darshiva" by David Eddings. All three of these books fail to live up to the quality of others in their respective series, but that doesn't mean you should avoid the series altogether.
"Eye of the World" provides us with an epic that is also refreshingly new. Robert Jordan presents us with a world that is the most richly colorful since Tolkein. If you're a fan of fantasy, then don't miss reading this book.
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93 of 112 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A series that makes "Tolkien imitator" no longer an insult, June 18, 2000
After I read the _Lord of the Rings_, I couldn't help agreeingwith Tolkien that one of that trilogy's few faults was that it is tooshort. In other words, I (and many other readers, obviously) wanted to read more books that did the sort of thing Tolkien did--opened a gate to a new world; made us feel that ordinary life can suddenly take on epic meaning, and so on. Less healthily, perhaps, we wanted to lose ourselves in a fantasy world where we could think of ourselves as heroes without actually doing any work or putting ourselves in danger. (I think these two aspects go together--"escapist" literature is neither completely unhealthy nor entirely free of dangers.)
Terry Brooks's _Shannara_ series was clearly written with such readers in mind (so were a lot of much poorer tales--but I take Brooks as one of the better examples); Brooks himself was no doubt one of the Tolkien addicts whose withdrawal pangs after reading LotR twenty times or so he was trying to alleviate. While Brooks's series has its virtues (which this is not the place to discuss), they were generally best when they forged new ground, rather than treading in Tolkien's shoes. While one could take them as one's "Tolkien fix," that didn't really do justice either to Tolkien or to Brooks. Similarly, Stephen Donaldson's _Thomas Covenant_ series (far more skilfully crafted than the _Shannara_ books) showed clear signs of Tolkien's influence but headed in a substantially different direction.
When I picked up _The Eye of the World_ about three years ago, I almost gasped with delight. Finally, someone had done what Brooks had so obviously tried to do--written a story that rings the changes on the familiar Tolkien themes, but does so in a way that is interesting and gripping in its own right--a story that, if we had never read Tolkien, could open the same gates that he opened.
This would be enough justification for reading Jordan. But even in _The Eye of the World_, it's obvious that Jordan is more than a would-be Tolkien--even the best of the would-be Tolkiens. And this has become even clearer with subsequent entries in the series. Indeed, though it may be blasphemy to say it, Jordan's work is in some respects superior to Tolkien (though of course, like all other modern fantasies, it cannot compare with Tolkien in the things Tolkien does well). One of the biggest defects of the Lord of the Rings (well, maybe not defects--I wouldn't want Middle-Earth to be different than it is--but certainly one of the ways in which Tolkien fails, or doesn't even try, to create a credible secondary world) is its failure to give us many details of how people live. Indeed, apart from the Shire, Middle-Earth seems to consist of mountains and barren plains over which huge armies roam. The one large city Tolkien describes, Minas Tirith, contains only a fraction of the population it could hold. Of course, this is partly on purpose--the Third Age is waning, and the great kingdoms such as Gondor are only a shadow of their former selves. But one would like to know more about Tolkien's people than their languages and their myths. What do they eat? What do they wear? What are the major agricultural products of each region? The major industries? With a very few exceptions, Tolkien passes over such matters with fine disdain.
Jordan, on the other hand, creates a world that is crammed to the brim with life and bustle. Though he too can evoke vanished grandeur, his nations are not simply ghosts of ancient, legendary realms--they are real places with distinctive customs and cultural presuppositions. And Jordan describes these customs and attitudes in what threatens at times to become wearying detail. This does not create a better series than Tolkien's by any means, or even one half as good. But it is a series that in some respects surpasses its model. And that is high praise.
Another superiority of Jordan's series is the prominence given to its women. While all the women tend to be similar (no surprise, since Jordan says that they are all modeled on his wife), and all share a good deal of affectionate contempt for men, which they express over and over in more or less the same terms, they are nonetheless an impressive gallery of characters compared to those found in many other fantasy series, particularly LotR.
On the other hand, Jordan's work is by no means without faults. In particular, the attention to detail has increasingly come to bog down his series, so that each mammoth volume moves the story along only slightly. Furthermore, Jordan's style is voluble and repetitive, with similar cliches and mini-plot summaries repeated over and over. This makes it very easy and enjoyable reading, especially at the beginning. But after five volumes or so it begins to pall. One wants to say, "Don't tell us for the five thousandth time how stubborn and dumb Nynaeve (and all the other female characters) thinks men are, or how incomprehensible the men think the women are, or how Wise Ones don't trust Aes Sedai, or how difficult it is for Aes Sedai to tolerate the existence of men who can channel, or any other of the things that anyone who has been reading the series (and who's going to pick it up at volume 8? Jordan's series doesn't lend itself to that sort of treatment) has burned on their brain by now. Instead, how about making some progress on telling us about Egwene's march toward Tar Valon, or Perrin's mission, or which kingdom Rand is going to attack next?" But I don't have high hopes. Judging by vol. 8, vol. 9 is going to have a lot of Aiel and Aes Sedai bustling about, a few battles with Rand losing control of the One Power, and precious little else.
However, I'm supposed to be talking about vol. 1. The flaws I've been mentioning are distinctly manageable at this point. The main problem with this volume is its ending, which appears tacked on to bring the story to some sort of conclusion--a conclusion that turns out to be only the beginning. END
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