Blog Entry 3: Freestyle

I finished Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World, and of course, it ended in such a way that I need to get the next book in the series immediately. I won't spoil the ending by talking about it, so I'll write about another aspect that I've been thinking about: except where the characters spend some time apart from one another, the storyline is chronological, and there are no subplots. This structure is a little simplistic, and I think I would have even more interest if the trajectory of the story were interrupted and made more complex with a more fragmented chronology and/or subplots (not that the novel needs to be longer because it's already 782 pages!). Basically, the characters start on a journey that they follow through to the end, even though they don't end up where they initially intended, and in each place, they can't stay because they're a danger to others, and the dark creatures hunting them keep them moving.

Another related aspect of this is that each of the characters on the journey has a special skill or issue. This feels very Dungeons-and-Dragonsy where you roll dice to determine the point value of the characters skills in various areas, and usually each character has skills in some category. It kind of feels like a fantasy of equal power, like kids on the playground saying, hey, I have magic powers, and hey, so do I. I'd like a little more comlexity. We aren't all the chosen ones (and they all seem to be here), but we do have productive lives. The whole chosen one thing is also really tedious and suggests that heroes are born rather than made through courage, which I totally disagree with. I really like, for example, how Tolkien makes a hobbit the main hero of his Middle Earth books, a totally unexpected, not royal, not tall and beefy, and not chosen character

Aside from these issues, I found the novel very readable and looked forward to reading it before bed each night. I liked particularly the character of Perrin as he finds he has a connection with the wolves and doesn't want to admit it. Here's a passage that depicts Perrin's discomfort with this connection: "If he could outrun their eyes [his traveling companions'}, outrun the ravens [the Dark One's spies], outrun the wolves, but above all Egwene's eyes, that knew him now for what he was" (431). The talent of communicating with wolves and seeing like wolves comes so easily to Perrin that he can't hide it, and his companions notice and begin to realize he's changed. They don't criticize him, but he feels embarrassed about the change. This conflict makes him very human and engaging. I look forward to seeing him come more into his own in the later books. Nancy