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33 of 35 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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