A Memory of Light

by Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson

Upon my full completion of The Wheel of Time (holds for applause), I have closed the door on one of the funniest things you can do with books: I no longer have the option of picking up A Memory of Light without knowing anything about the rest of the series. The relative insanity of this idea forces one to confront why the title–A Memory of Light–is relatively bland: there’s no market to capture by smoothing it out. It’s not likely to sell to someone who doesn’t have thirteen 1,000-pagers of backstory under their belt. Why not just call it Tarmon Gai’dan or literally any nonsense made-up word from the text? Something fun. A shibboleth for the loyal readers, the close fans, the Jordan-heads? I knew a guy in grad school whose AIM-name (which would now be a discord handle, I suppose) was Ashaman plus some digits that probably held meaning for him but made remembering his name impossible for the rest of the world. I pretended I didn’t recognize the (true) source, for both of our sakes. Being afraid of admitting that I had read every fantasy book in a 1996 Barnes & Noble kept me from befriending the types of people I probably would have liked. A shame, really.

I did it once. Started a fantasy series in media res, I mean. I suppose, in a related event, I also admitted to a ‘normal’ person that I liked fantasy books. Both events were related. In fifth grade, at the Scholastic Book Fair, I picked out The Elf Queen of Shannara with no prior understanding of what an Elf Queen was, and certainly never having heard of the Shannara series. I mostly read it–it was adult fantasy from 1992, which meant Tolkien-y, which meant plodding for a nine-year-old (I was probably 35 when I first recognized that structurally, a lot of “epic” fantasy was just the first LOTR book re-skinned. Yes, even Eye of the World). I lacked context from the prior two books in the Scions of Shannara sub-series, which were themselves a sequel tetralogy to the original Sword of Shannara trilogy. So the second series of the overall grand-Shannara narrative, making it five Shannara books before Elf Queen.

The long and short of it was that I was elf-pilled, and eventually spent a playground recess backpedalling after I told the girl that I had a crush on that she looked like an Elf, because she kind of looked the the protag on the cover of Elf Queen. She accused me of saying she looked liked ALF, the alien puppet that ate cats, and I—again more embarrassed by my love of Fantasy books than by calling my preteen crush a hairy lumpy muppet-adjacent comedy creature—just ran with it rather than correcting her. I continued to have a crush on her up through and until I left for college, which is longer than is really, really reasonable. Let us pretend that this unrequited infatuation is the reason I did not date in high school. Yes.

ALF queen of shannara reboot

It continues to absolutely rip to go into media without knowing anything about it. I love watching DOTA2 tournaments without ever having played the game–the announcers say the equivalent of, “He’s got his BACKBRUSH out and, oh lord, it’s a windstorm and I don’t know how the enemy EarthRumble is going to be able to counter it!” and I absolutely thrill at having no idea what is going on. I like trying to puzzle out main mechanics, slightly or fundamentally misunderstand them, and then try to extrapolate out intention and strategy from incomplete or incorrect information. My old favorite twitter game was, “What the hell are people talking about?” without using the search function. I believe it took me three years for someone to actually explain TIL (“today I learned”) in its totality–I cobbled together the usage pretty quickly but I could neither unearth nor backwards-build the actual acronym on my own. 

Trying to figure out what the deal was within WoT from only A Memory of Light would be particularly grueling, I suspect.

I’ve read and re-read the front half of The Wheel of Time a lot over the last 20 years. The series is quite good. I am grateful it got a conclusion, but I don’t really like this last book. I think I would have preferred to play in the world a little more–just exist, like in a pre-themepark MMORPG like Star Wars Galaxies before NGE (I wish you luck in figuring those acronyms solely from context). If it was like SWG, Channeling might function like the Jedi did—an ability locked to your account, hidden, and you won’t know you can channel until you’ve played your character for quite some time. Then you can do a bunch of tricky content to join a Tower, or something. Simply exploring the towns and Great Cities would be cool.

The actual WoT game that I remember was bad. A standard RPG where you play as any of the main cast would also be bad—I can already read the books if I want to see that story play out. After years, if not decades, of hearing about Cairhien and Caemlyn and Tear (if one tries to type these names phonetically, one might run into the Nynaeve/Nineveh issue; I did not, even once, pronounce the names of these cities correctly or even consistently in my head while I read the books), it’s a little hard to give it up—let me hang out in Far Madding and like, build a house. Stardew Valley x Wheel of Time, please.

This book remains an artifact in its own right, not simply a synecdoche for the series. I said back in Towers of Midnight that the resolution of the Aelfinn/Elfinn mysteries could never live up to my hype, and they didn’t. The return of Moiraine fell flat to me, here, as well. She was barely around! Also her marrying Thom seemed intensely and frustratingly out of character, but I think that happened in the prior book. Still rankles, though, and adds literally nothing to what either character does in this book.

Nynaeve was sorely underutilized in Memory, too. Why in the world do we get some many POV chapters for Lan—I can hazard a guess that it was a good way to shift into battle-vision—but Nynaeve is basically holding on to a stalagmite for most of the book? I acknowledge the attempt at trying to fit in a very clear “Situation where magical healing cannot help but Nynaeve’s insistence on herbal lore ends up saving the world” character moment, but it felt so graceless to me. She’s grown beyond wanting to be proved right in her folk wisdom, and patching Alanna up just enough for her to, like, sort of die better, was anticlimactic. If, instead of Alanna, it was one of the three Rand-harem and they had to hold on long enough to not distract Rand, rather than just releasing their Warder bond and passively expiring, it might have thrust Nynaeve into a moment of real pathos. As it was, this was an shrug and a half—and I liked Alanna, a lot!

Speaking of shrugs, how many ways can a Trolloc get torn apart before I start glazing over? 

Trollocs did not die easily. They could often take two or three arrows before slowing. Well, that only happened when you missed the eyes or the throat. She never did. Monster after monster dropped to her bow.
…
The Trollocs scrambled up the hill, crashing into the line of pikes. The beasts in the vanguard tried to knock the pikes aside with sweeps of their weapons, but Uno’s men stepped forward, skewering Trollocs, often two pikes per beast.
…
The beasts didn’t stop, reaching brutish fingers to try to pull him down. Lan could smell their putrid breath as he rammed his sword into the throat of one.

I get that the last battle was key to this book, but damn dude. That was a lot of war coverage. 

Beyond what I would consider battle-bloat, the characters themselves were mostly fine. It is still quite impressive that the series received a conclusion at all; when critiquing this, the difficulty rating shifts the standard twofold: one, wrapping up a four-million-word series in general, and two, a shift in authorship (which is seems like all downside, but mostly worked out). As mentioned, the last few books had some character shifts: Nynaeve didn’t receive the nuance I either thrust upon her or was secretly there if you read the first eight books six times over 20 years; Rand went through his total-asshat-to-savior intensely fast; and Mat, well, Mat reached his apogee of snarky quip-king and just kind of stayed there.

I either remember or fabricated in my mind an interview with GRRM where he stated that Tyrion Lannister was supposed to get killed off, but was too fun to write for to do the deed. I believe that to be the deal with Mat at the end–he gets all the arch lines, all the zingers, everything fun. He drips with that wry ‘90s voice that I, as an adolescent, was primed to respect—Raphael is the cool turtle, &c—and I, having only read Mistborn, cannot assert strongly but believe Sanderson was also informed by. Mat was a complete dick in the first two books, but came around by book three–his final form in these last few books is a little bit too slippery for me, but I still enjoyed him quite a bit. 

“Are you singing?” Mat whispered to Rand.

Yes…it was unmistakable. Rand was singing, under his breath, very softly. Mat tapped his foot. “I swear I’ve heard that tune somewhere, once…Is it ‘Two Maids at the Water’s Edge?’?”

“You’re not helping,” Rand whispered. “Quiet.”

When Mat and Rand just sort of pal around, it is always adorable. This sort of small mise-en-scène is pretty good, but Memory of Light, more than the other Sanderson-assisted books in WoT, felt like a lot of loose sketches of battle thrown in between pre-scripted “Important Moments” that existed and had to be seen, triggered like a cut-scene in an open-world game. The series had to end eventually, sure, and no one is calling four million words rushed, but there was still so much left to do in the world.

It feels mostly irrelevant to “review” the fourteenth book in a series. Your own momentum will carry you through it, and, unless you’re doing a stunt review, no one will start at the conclusion. I cannot imagine anyone calling this book the best of the Wheel of Time; everything is to taste, of course, but the highlights for me were the pure adventure tale of The Great Hunt, the Nynaeve-focused Fires of Heaven, and, of course, the prophecy-laden Dragon Reborn. I dipped out of writing up my thoughts on books seven through eleven, which is a bit of a shame, but during the grinding edge of the pandemic—mid 2021 through the vaccine release–I gave myself a little kindness from, well, doing things. C’est la vie. I feel pretty strongly that book five is the peak of The Wheel of Time, though, and leaving anything past book ten unread so as to be alive and mutable in your imagination is a strong choice that I cannot fault.

When a massive series like this ends–a place where you’ve spent so much time, with characters you’ve known for so long–it draws attention to the fact that no matter what happens to the characters within the pages, when the book closes, they are gone to you. Why, then, does Egwene being gone gone–barely remarked within the text, though her actual obliteration was both intensely exciting and unexpected, to me–feel mostly the same as Rand of Mat or Perrin being gone to me as a reader, because the book ended? If I were to imagine my own versions of their post-script adventures, I simply imagine Egwene being there. Unless there are more canonical pages from which someone is missing, their death sort of lacks weight. The only lever you have to pull as an author is having them gone while there are still adventures to be had.

If death happens in-text in the last few pages, or oblivion for the character arises because the text simply ran out, gone is gone. It feels a little heartless to say that, but here we are. If Egwene missed the Last Battle, then maybe I could see it mattering. I have 13.88 books with her in them. Blazing out in a pyre of magick while removing a handful of “foreign” Channelers (having the Sharans show up and just be ‘exotic’ humans that are evil seems…off-putting…to say the least. They’re choosing to work with Trollocs, who are eating the corpses of everything? I dunno.) was high-energy but lacked punch, because the book simply ends shortly thereafter. There is no extended epilogue to feel her loss, no memorial or flash-cut to a future where Rand the Wanderer stops by the pyre of crystal to pay his respects. She just exits, stage left.

After 14 books, so too, do I. One might never know when the last time you get to say goodbye to someone is, but in this case I am fairly sure that, from seeing that kid whose name I can’t remember ignoring Señora Edwards to keep reading The Great Hunt in High School Spanish class; from being in my late thirties and eyeballing the first four books in a Little Free Library in North Beach; from jumping into the series only to be thwarted by the 2020 pandemic shutdown; from hunting for 5$ copies of the books at every used bookstore in San Francisco; from finishing out the series with a new paperback that strangely lacked the glossary at the end but had an incredibly off-putting Prime TV series promo sticker inelegantly tagged on the front; this was my final goodbye to Rand al’Thor.