The Not-So-Great Hunt

It has been a while since I finished reading The Eye of the World, the first book of Robert Jordan's series The Wheel of Time. I read a variety of other books afterward, before finally circling back around (ha!) to book two, The Great Hunt. I find myself in a quite similar place now as I did after reading book two.

I did find the plotting to be an improvement over book one. The story of The Great Hunt isn't the Lord of the Rings knock-off of the first volume. (It is still thoroughly steeped in the "hero's journey" tradition, but this is what you get when you read fantasy, nine times out of ten. It's hard to quibble much with that.) More importantly, the book concludes in a more exciting way, suggesting where book three will be going, and seems like still another improvement.

On the down side, the writing itself got worse than book one, in almost every way. All the female characters remained as uniform and uninteresting as they were in book one. All the characters -- male and female -- continued to think and say the same things over and over again, as though repetitive behavior is the thing that defines one's character.

Most annoyingly, the pace began to slow. Robert Jordan seems to require 20 pages to say what could be said in two. That's perhaps no surprise, considering he wrote 11 books averaging 300,000 words each in his lifetime, and still couldn't finish... but reading it, I often found myself exasperated at the way entire chapters could be filled with mundane nonsense that didn't progress the plot. I've heard from some friends who have read the whole series (so far) that this became par for the course after a few more books. If what I'm reading now is Jordan being "to the point," I'm not sure I'm going to be able to hang in there for the long haul.

But I must confess that the ending did leave me curious enough to continue on for at least another book. It feels like that book is sure to be a telling one. The Great Hunt concludes very much like the middle volume of a trilogy, and from where I'm sitting now, I can't fathom what story could take a dozen more books to tell. I feel like the ending should be right around the corner, so I'm sure my desire to continue after book three will depend on whether I feel the story earns its right to keep going after that.

As for The Great Hunt, I'd probably call it another B-, like its predecessor.