On zombie Robert Jordan
As a child and young adult, my favourite genre of fiction was without a doubt fantasy. As a child, I did not care about the quality of the writing at all. As I aged, I still loved the fantastical stories but required a bit more from the author than a vivid imagination. Today, I question even the “vivid imagination” part, as so many books seem merely derivative — exactly what I don’t want in a fantasy novel.
One of my more beloved and hated fantasy series is Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. I cannot remember when I began reading it, but it was a long, long time ago.
It is beloved because the early volumes are quite well written and engaging.
It is hated because it fell victim to itself — it has become a long, sprawling story, and I just want it to end.
The second thing I dislike about fantasy — the first being the task of sorting out the good stuff from the pile of unimaginative crap that surrounds it — is the length. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien famously wrote a novel so long that the publisher felt the need to split it into three volumes. This was called The Lord of the Rings. For some reason, this has lead every fantasy novel writer who followed in his footsteps to have equal disrespect to brevity. We, the fantasy readers, seem to accept this for reasons I do not begin to comprehend. Publishers must love it, as the common trilogy sells three times the number of books that a single novel does.
And of course, some authors then still need to go overboard. David Eddings, for example, feels that his stories require five books.
Robert Jordan — writing what is clearly supposed to be a series of books that has an ending (unlike, say, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, which is a number of unrelated books set in the same place with the same people involved), decided on the number twelve. His publisher must have been delighted. His editor, being his wife, was perhaps too easily convinced that twelve sounded good.
(Although I am now forced to note that publishers don’t like fantasy because it takes up too much space on bookshelves. I stand corrected.)
After eleven books, in 2007, Robert Jordan died. His publisher announced that the final book was “almost finished”, and promptly hired a writer to finish off the story.
A mere two years later, the book has finally appeared. The following is in the liner notes:
The scope and size of the volume was such that it could not be contained in a single book, and so Tor proudly presents The Gathering Storm as the first of three novels that will make up A Memory of Light.
That’s right. The verbosity is officially completely out of control. Not only does this require three volumes (taking the total number to twelve), but the first of these three is 784 pages long! This is the equivalent of three novels (or two long ones). The cause is simple enough — a lack of focus. Every book in the series has added new plot lines that require resolution. And at some point — around the fourth or fifth book, if memory serves — the books themselves no longer seemed to drive towards the completion of some part of the overall plot. Instead, pauses between books seem no more important than pauses between chapters. Time to take a break for tea. Mr. Jordan’s replacement must have had quite the task at hand to simply list all the loose ends, and jot down notes on their resolution.
This is not meant as a critique of the latest book. I have not read it — and will not pay to read it in hardcover. I have a desire to see this monstrosity of a fantasy series through to the end, having spent far too much time and money on the previous volumes, but that end will be found within paperbacks.
But Mr. Jordan, or the zombie thereof, is clearly out of control.
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