The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan is the first book in the Wheel of Time series, a fantasy epic that is sort of like what you might imagine if Lord of the Rings on steroids reproduced with Star Wars on acid. If that doesn’t sound like a good time to you, then you might want to consider skipping this one…
The Eye of the World has all the requisite components of a stellar beginning to an otherwise overly laborious saga. This particular book immerses you into the various settings and characters to a level that leaves you not quite satisfied and wanting more. Not in a bad way.
The story opens in a backwater village in some remote part of a country mostly long since forgotten by the rest of the known world. The scene appears peaceful, with typical rural young men doing farming-type things. Thrust from the secluded safety into a dangerous web impacting the future of the world, the story immediately draws you into a mysterious world of power, politics, and a savior to face the end of the world. Events unfold and sub-plots begin to develop in no short supply, thus fueling the fire for the series to build from, if even the foundation is made but construction won’t truly begin until book five or so…
I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys fantasy novels. While Jordan paints the pictures of the environments and characters to excruciating detail, it proves to be both the curse and the promise of the series. However, since The Eye of the World is the first book in the series, you have not yet grown bored of having the dress of some noble woman in this or that country described to you. It actually makes the story engrossing.
Beware, there is one thing I would caution any potential reader of this book against: if you decide to read book two after reading The Eye of the World, then be very careful because the books can become addictive. You will find yourself in the middle of book six, after having read five 900 page books, still wanting to know what happens but nauseous at having the color of the livery worn by the servants in such or another palace described to you while you read a sub-plot that really doesn’t interest you. Skipping to the main plot lines that are interesting can be fatal to the story because missing critical pieces of information stored in the sub-plots is all too common, thus leaving you bewildered rather than satisfied upon reading about the characters of interest.
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The series sounds most interesting….out of curiosity is the series complete? How many books are there in total?
Aye, there is the rub. The author died before completing the last book of the series, which is book twelve. I hear that a science fiction writer who was a series fan is going to finish the half-written twelfth book by using Jordan’s notes that were saved by his wife. Oh, and there is a prequel.
The Wheel of Time series is amazingly immersive. Almost too immersive. The first three books work as a solid trilogy, and contain the seeds of the massive World-Tree that the series became. From a trilogy with 80-90 characters to an epic with near a thousand, some only distinguishable by differences in clothing or manner, it sometimes requires reading with the online FAQ handy.
My major problem with the series is in how in the later books, in order to keep up with the myriad sub-plots, the narrative loses pace, and not much actually happens to advance the main story line.
Yes, RJ is dead. However, according to his blog (which he updated regularly leading to his death from a terminal disease) the final book was conceptually done- the final chapters were dictated and the story was outlined in detail. An author has been chosen I believe, to finish it out, and it should be out in 2012. (Which is when I predicted it anyhow.)