Lord of Chaos — Dinaburg Writes

by Robert Jordan

An interesting facet of our permanent digital age is the ability to access receipts without being wildly organized or owning a heavy industrial filing cabinet. Having a personalized reading record, even before something like goodreads made it a valuable, aggregated commodity, can be kind of cool.

“The return window closed 20 years ago,” he rasped, his bones turning to dust.

Amazon.com, the current corporate overlord of goodreads, lacked its supervillian sheen in 1999. Back in high school, there was no way for me to find A Cast of Corbies, since neither the Waldenbooks in the mall nor the new-to-our-area Barnes & Noble had it. And that was pretty much it for books that were a niche even within the niche of the fantasy genre.

A mystery for another day is how I got an Amazon gift card in 1999, but I did, and it got me to build an account years before I had a credit card, and so a few days later a book I could find nowhere else plopped itself into my hands. The Information Superhighway saves another child.

Six months later, I dipped back into the well that Bezos built: Lord of Chaos. I cannot emphasize the goodwill that Amazon had from me, a child of serial content, when looking for consecutive interconnected reading material. I can remember the halcyon days of youth, where finding any Angel Park All-Stars book at the library was good enough, even if I only ever got to read #1, #7, #5, #7 again, then #2, in roughly that order. Slightly older, I recall ordering The Elf Queen of Shannara from the Scholastic Book Fair, even though A) I was embarrassed to let my classmates know I liked elf-things, and B) I had only read The Sword of Shannara at that point. There was some intense confusion until I bridged the four-book gap, replete with multigenerational plot jump, between those books.

So being able to cruise into book six of The Wheel of Time at my discretion and not at the whims of fate—not having to jump ahead to book seven or eight just because they were all I could find for sale nearby—was magic in a very real sense. But this is twenty years later, and any book is available at any time, and the only thing multigenerational now is my family.

Having a mostly completely formed adult brain, I still find this book to be a bit of a lull in the series. I can see why: it takes care of a lot of housekeeping. Worldbuilding needs to get done sometimes, and so Lord of Chaos feels like it is setting the stage for great events to come. I don’t have the cheat code foresight of future book knowledge to inform my suppositions, but there is no one-on-one duel between Rand and a Forsaken here; instead, a grand battle between armies rages. The internecine power-jockeying of Aes Sedai schisms are interesting, but not in a mythologically epic sense. It is apt that the hero quest element is obscured a bit in favor of discussions over cohesive governmental representation—questions such as, “Who will take the throne in Cairhien?” is a big plot issue—but we’ll get into that later on.

Beyond the expanded scope from adventuring party to nation-state wrangling, the plot has to slow for another major reason: Travelling. Rand can warp around, collapsing time and distance in such a way that “the journey” as a trope barely exists anymore. And “the journey” is the beating heart of the Fantasy genre: we all live in the travelogue that “There and Back Again: A Hobbit’s Tale” built. Now that he and a few others can move around the world near-instantly, plot-restrictions-via-distance are a thing of the past.

It reminds me of how storytelling in contemporary fiction has to deal with the eternal problem of saying, “Well, don’t they both have cellphones? She could just text him that the friar’s potion only makes it look like she’s dead.” Or, “Wouldn’t he see on instagram that she cut off her iconic hair to buy a grand gift for him, or she note that location dot has been at the pawn shop an awful lot lately?” To be more on-point with obviating the need for a life-changing journey, there is the classic genius at work moment of, “Why didn’t the eagles just fly Frodo to Mt. Doom?”

Yes, this has nothing to do with Frodo or the Eagles, but this is still my favorite Tolkien thing. Sorry.

So with the addition of Travelling letting some key characters be whereever, whenever, keeping all the threads (Wheel of Time cosmology pun completely intended) untangled becomes a monumental undertaking. Simple things—like Rand jumping to Cairhein and then wants to ride a horse, so there’s a scene of him in the stable and a description of some ill-tempered warhorse (the exact type of horse Rand wouldn’t want but a group of conquered Cairhien stablemen might think he would)—feels amazing, if you’re paying close enough attention to notice. Were I in charge of maintaining the timeline, I likely would have put Rand atop his standard horse Jeade’en and not noticed for a second that Jeade’en should still been stabled safely in Caemlyn. Have teleporting videogame mounts broken my brain? Mayhaps.

Now that I’m into the thick of the series—where the plot is not seared into my adolescence—I don’t quite recall or straight-up don’t know what will happen next. So thinking about where we are at the end of Lord of Chaos is appealing to me in a way that postulating the mysteries of prior books wasn’t. Perhaps it is 2020 talking, but I cannot avoid seeing Rand as beginning a slow descent into fascism. The Asha’man have risen, replete with snazzy uniforms and intimidating power:

“You need a name. In the Old Tongue, Aes Sedai means Servants of All, or something very close. The Old Tongue doesn’t translate easily.” For himself, he know only a few words, some from Asmodean, a handful from Moiraine, some that had seeped through from Lews Therin. Bashere had provided what he needed, though. “Another words in the Old Tongue is asha’man. It means guardian, or guardians. Or defender, and maybe a couple of other things; I told you, the Old Tongue is very flexible. Guardian seems to be best, though. Not just any defender or guardian, though. You could not call a an who defended an unjust cause asha’man, and never one that was evil. An asha’man was a man who defended truth and justice and right for everyone. A guardian who would not yield even when hope was gone.”

And Rand, he tries to do right. But he is Superman. And his stormtrooper clone army is being trained by...is Mazrim Taim actually the Forsaken named Demandred? It has been getting a bit challenging to keep the new crop of Forsaken villains straight; Demandred, especially, hasn’t meant much to me at all up until this point. Maybe he is Slayer, from Perrin’s story arc, who got hit with an arrow? After finishing the book, though, I keep thinking Demandred is actually Mazrim Taim. Is that an obvious red herring, am I just grasping at straws, or is this a pretty good example of foreshadowing? It could be that I am simply looking for an excuse to pin the fascism inherent in single-person ubermensch saviorism onto a Forsaken:

Taim appeared as close to a smile as Rand had ever seen him. “Kneel and swear to the Lord Dragon,” he said softly, “or you will be knelt.”

But the Gestapo vibes of the Asha’man is countered by the coalition Rand builds of peoples from many nations—where Two River’s folk are adopting mustaches from Tarabon, and Cairhein youth mangle ji'e'toh in an attempt to integrate Aiel social norms into their world. It speaks to where we were in the 1990s: the cultural pluralism and globalized world of premillennial America, where all our problems were solved and things would only get better, forever.

Particularly, the Aiel run a stark contrast to Asha’man: to a fault, every Aiel treats Rand like a person, not an object from ripped out of the Book of Revelations or an authoritarian alternative to chaos and conflict. Aiel people constantly downplay, ridicule, or ignore his claims that he holds responsibility for all their actions:

He spoke quickly to forestall any such thing. “Since I caused Sulin to do what she did, don’t I have toh toward her?”
Apparently it was possible to make a bigger fool of himself than he already had….[a]nything he did to lighten her burden would interfere with her honor. Her toh, her choice.

The interactions between Rand and the Aiel is metonym. It shatters the “better people will save us” mentality that pervades most of Fantasy fiction, not to mention the entire superhero mythos. Follow Rand, the Car’a’carn, the Chief of Chiefs, sure. But not with closed eyes.

Most, whether older than Sulin or as young as Jalani, welcomed him like a long-lost brother. In public they gave him as much respect as they did any chief, marginal as that might be sometimes, but alone with them he might as a well have been that brother, though whether he was a younger brother or an older did not seem to have anything to do with the woman’s own age. He was just glad that only a handful took Enaila and Somara’s path; alone or not, it was plain irritating to have a woman no older than himself behaving as though he were her son.

People aren’t passive onlookers in The Wheel of Time. The inhabit the world not as props but as real lives, no matter if they are centered or not. Rand and Perrin and Matt might be Ta’veren—shorthand for “plot critical”—but it is upon the backs of a huge cast of characters that anything good happens in the world. Rand might be able to warp around and torch people with fire, but he cannot do literally everything. And I think that is to the strength of the series: things are slowing down because it is no longer about one special magic farmboy chosen to defeat darkness. It is about bureaucracy and logistics and the grist in the mill: about putting in the work and building a consensus through peacekeeping missions and politics. Grain barges sent to feed refugees. Inflation. It is about what it really takes to save the world.

Did I mention the climate is broken, and the whole world is heating up? To be clear, I am talking about the world in the book; as a new Californian who has lived through one orange-sky-at-noon fire season already, broken climate is scarier than any Trolloc. Excitingly contemporary, however I doubt we’re going to fix our drought issues with a magic bowl.

I’ll wrap this up by mentioning that I have no idea who Aran’gar and Osan'gar are, though if I had to guess they are rebuilt versions of Asmodean and Lanfear, gender-swapped and ready to mess with saidin/saidar preconceptions. When I find out how wrong I am in two or three books we can all have a nice laugh.

I should also make a historical note that the power “ranking” of Aes Sedai is really brought forward for the first time in this book: whether because it’s a cool idea to be enjoyed for its own sake or because it is setting up something else in the future I simply cannot say. Oh, and Nynaeve healed Stilling. I just think she’s neat.

The series hasn’t let me down yet. I keep saying it at the end of each book. At this point, I think I should stop bracing myself for disappointment.