Towers of Midnight
by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
The plot in these Sanderson versions fly. They have to. They know where they are landing and they have to get there, quickly. I can’t say enough how wonderful it is that The Wheel of Time gets a conclusion, and that somehow the series doesn’t feel absurdly truncated or broken. Even within that gratitude, though, I can admit that these last books aren’t the same–they do not gently unspool in the way prior books in the series did, where events were allowed to balloon across novels in a naturalistic, if plodding, fashion. In Towers, like in The Gathering Storm, when Rand needs to be somewhere we are getting there now, no matter how jarring.
Speaking of Rand, it is wild to me that the new “full soul” or “complete” Rand has shed any of the quirks of Rand or Lews Therin Telamon–his little ear pulls when he’s looking at ladies, his general sadness, his arrogance or fear. I mean, having SSJ Rand is pretty cool, but it happened so quickly. New guy is good, but he isn’t really Rand. This deletion-and-replacement, the smoothing of flaws into a plot-shaping literary device another pivot-point upon which to base the my belief that the series would have been 18-20 books if Robert Jordan had lived longer.
The book itself had a nadir durings its climax; the snakes and foxes–the Aelfinn and Eelfinn–have been so built up in my head for decades that there was simply no way it could live up to my own personal hype. It felt to me like the world-building in Song of Ice and Fire, where reading the first two books two or three times in 2003, you got the sense that the generation prior to what was happening on the page was were the real interesting stuff happened. For the Aelfinn/Eelfinn, the mysteriousness of the bargains, the iron/music/fire weaknesses, the transposition through generations of interhuman contact into a culture object—to the unwinnable boardgame (so cool!)—it was just so different from the rest of the book, and it felt amazing to catch glimpses of without it being too clearly explained. When characters that weren’t Matt mentioned playing and never winning Snakes & Foxes, it was the closest the book comes to dramatic irony, and I loved it.
Also, I love Moiraine. Now that Rand is completed–he doesn’t really need her anymore–she’s free to be less Gandalf and more a person. The Thom/Moiraine romance is completely bizarre to me, but I cannot wait to see what she does simply by existing again.
The book could have used more Tuon, I still have no idea where Mazrim Taim and the Black Tower are going, and Nynaeve testing into Aes Sedai brought me the closest to tears I was all book, and perhaps all series. (I still love Nynaeve and still read her random fantasy name as Nineveh in my head). RIP to her braid, but it had to go for symbolic character development reasons. Everyone is powering up into their final form.
Gaul himself had his arm in a sling; he’d fended off his spears, only to have one of his own arrows nearly kill him. He’d blocked it with his forearm. When Perrin asked, he’d laughed and said that it had been years since he’d shot himself with his own arrow. Aiel humor.
Okay, not everyone needs to change.
The series is wrapping up. I don’t actually know if an original author could do it so concisely–how hard must it be to close the door on your world, your people? I cannot believe I am on the cusp of finishing The Wheel of Time, and that I can comfortably say that, even with all my starts and stops and rereads over the decades, it has, so far, been worth the incredibly long journey.