The Shadow Rising

by Robert Jordan

I forgot my favorite quote from the prior book in the Wheel of Time series, The Dragon Reborn:

[Perrin] growled disgustedly. “We are just travelers on our way to Illian, girl. What is your name? If I have to share this ship with you for days yet, I can’t keep calling you girl.”

“I call myself Mandarb.” He could not stop the guffaw that burst out of him. Those tilted eyes regarded him with heat. “I will teach you something, farmboy.” Her voice remained level Barely. “In the Old Tongue, Mandarb means ‘blade.’ It is a name worthy of a Hunter of the Horn!”

He managed to get his laughter under control, and hardly wheezed at all as he pointed to the rope pen between the masts. “You see that black stallion? His name is Mandarb.”

The quote is an apt lead-in for The Shadow Rising. It centers Perrin, who is the star of the fourth book. Additionally, the horse Mandarb has been named hundreds of times over the last two books, so it is definitely funny. But in a world where Mat has sounded the Horn and Rand has fought the darkness in some sort of sky-battle, selling me a book where most of the pages are Perrin defending his hometown from a handful of Trollocs is not something I thought I wanted—not in the late 1990s when I was an “all Rand, all the time” kind of teen; not in 2020 when I was writing about how he was still boring in The Eye of the World. And yet not only does it work, but focusing on a solo Perrin adventure emphasizes something that good stories require: “the separation of powers.”

In its most basic form, it is the act of removing the characters whose specific traits or skills could make the current conflict trivial. Otherwise, you just have to shift powerlevels around to fit the plot, and I hate that. Here are a few outside examples. I’ve been slowly watching One Piece [subtitled of course, I’m not a bakemono] for the last four years and they handle it quite well; the monster trio of Luffy, Zoro, and Sanji can roll through basically any physical challenge, so you need reasons why they aren’t available for situations that could be solved by simply hitting things very hard, repeatedly. The first live-action Transformers movie wasn’t particularly good, but I remember being impressed when Megatron just absolutely destroyed a bunch of “normal” Transformers super fast, which is correct. You don’t have an extended battle sequence—just because it looks cool—between the physically strongest bad guy and a bunch of, I dunno, non-war-robot chumps. Really weakens the threat if Spider-man has to punch a bank robber more than once. Proportional strength of a spider, and all that. Don’t make my level 20 Baldur’s Gate Avatar of Murder fight a bunch of scaled-up bandits, those bandits would not be robbing carriages if they were strong enough to slaughter gods.

miss the armpit webs

Where did you get a +5 bow?

So unlike twenty years ago, I’m not flipping ahead to find the next chapter icon that focuses the narrative on Rand. I’m thinking that when Perrin springs the trap in the Two Rivers, if Rand went, he’d just melt all the bad dudes. Tada! No dramatic tension. No thrills. Just, well, poof. Problem over. Or, even worse, Rand would show up and be arbitrarily limited by plot tethers: “We’re sorry but the One Power is temporarily unavailable at this time.” Sure, cutting away from Rhuidean right as Mat and Rand completed a super cool quest hurt me, but not only is Perrin’s stuff pretty interesting, it is also a microcosmic view of Rand’s larger struggles. Even if you don’t recognize that right away—like I didn’t until this reading—the rationale that keeps Rand from swooping in and solving some of the smaller problems throughout the whole series is clearly expressed here:

“Listen to me, Perrin,” [Faile] said urgently. “You—can—not—do—everything. If Loial and Gaul have gone to lock the Waygate, you must let them. Your place is here. Even if you were strong enough—and your are not! Do you hear me? You are not strong enough!—but even if you were, you must not go after them. You cannot do everything!”

I mean, that’s it in a nutshell. To win in the long run, Rand is going to need to rely on other people. Honestly, that’s Rand’s whole gambit through this book, that the Aiel will follow him for their own reasons and he’ll be able to rely on them to not try to murder him like the High Lords of Tear, or manipulate him like the White Tower. So, Perrin, sure you can’t kill a thousand Trollocs on your own any more than Rand could win the last battle all on his own. But neither of you have to. That’s the whole dang point!

Oh, and I should say that The Shadow Rising is where Moiraine breaks out of being Lady Gandalf and flexes into her own person. So far, we’ve seen less of her as a character and more as a font of narrative exposition, a repository of knowledge that Rand—as reader stand-in—needs to know about the world. Her personal motivations are almost exclusively glimpsed in reflection from Siuan Sanche: co-conspirator; friend; rogue operative. But when she runs into Rhuidean, oh, that’s Moiraine becoming someone beyond her dutiful-Aes-Sedai-plot-device incarnation:

“Speaking of names,” [Thom] said levelly, “it is remarkable how much can be puzzled out from a name. Moiraine Damodred. The Lady Moiraine of House Damodred, in Cairhien. Taringail’s youngest half-sister. King Laman’s niece. And Aes Sedai, let us not forget. An Aes Sedai aiding the Dragon Reborn since before she could have known that he was more than just another young fool who could channel…”

Taringail is Elayne’s father, I believe? And King Laman, well, you can’t have read this far without recognizing the Treekiller King. Moiraine’s got a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, is all I’m saying! And they’re good pies, brent.

The Shadow Rising is the best Wheel of Time book so far. And while I’m finally edging into territory where i don’t remember all the plot beats—which is exciting for me, but irrelevant to you—I remembered most things that happened, so novelty wasn’t the secret ingredient. What makes it really enthralling now as compared to the first trilogy is that there is enough verisimilitude in the world to be self-referential rather than real-world-mythologically referential. New ideas can extend themselves into any direction they want, confident that the reader is invested enough to follow more subtle detailing: from The Forsaken becoming people [horrid people, I take back what I said about Lanfear being the cool Vegeta], to the Aiel expanding into more than just murder-ninja nomads, to the Aelfinn and Elfinn stretching the sense of magical possibilities beyond the scope of the One Power, everything seems to interlock. Most major characters have unique personalities peeking out from the fantasy archetypes they’ve inhabited for the first twenty-five hundred pages; not only are their quirks interesting, but for the most part we as readers have gotten to see them develop in ways that feel natural. And because I love Moiraine, watching her tenuous hold on Rand slip from:

Sammael is in Illian,” the Aes Sedai went on. “The Tairens are always as ripe for war with Illian as the other way around. They have been killing each other off and on for a thousand years, and they speak of their chance for it as other men speak of the next feastday. I doubt even knowing of Sammael’s presence would change that, not with the Dragon Reborn to lead them. Tear will follow Rand eagerly enough in that enterprise, and if he brings Sammael down, he—”

to:

“If only you would...allow me to go in with you.” Except for that one slight hitch, Moiraine’s voice was as serene as ever; cool calm painted her ageless features, but her dark eyes looked at Rand as if her gaze alone could force him to relent.

in one book was a wild ride.

I called Perrin the star of The Shadow Rising, but I think it might be Moiraine. Here she is, the Allanon, the Belgarath, the Gandalf, and all of her hobbits are hyper-powered wizards in their own right, not to mention stubborn and distrustful of her after a lifetime of culturally ingrained biases against everything she is and stands for. Is it simply because I’m old that I find Perrin interesting, or think Rand may be a doofus for pushing back so hard against experienced advisors? Will Moiraine continue her trajectory into being the secret best character in the whole series?

I’m quite excited to find out.