Fantasy-Hive

Main Menu

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Interviews
    • Author Spotlight
    • By Author Surname
  • Book Reviews
    • Latest
    • Hive Reads
    • Self-Published
    • By Author Surname
  • Writing
    • Write of Way
    • Worldbuilding By The Numbers
  • Features and Content
    • Ask the Wizard
    • BookTube
    • Busy Little Bees Book Reviews
    • Cover Reveals
    • Cruising the Cosmere
    • Excerpts
    • News and Announcements
    • Original Fiction
      • Four-Part Fiction
    • SPFBO
    • The Unseen Academic
    • Tough Travelling
    • Women In SFF
    • Wyrd & Wonder
  • FAQ

logo

Fantasy-Hive

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Interviews
    • Author Spotlight
    • By Author Surname
  • Book Reviews
    • Latest
    • Hive Reads
    • Self-Published
    • By Author Surname
  • Writing
    • Write of Way
    • Worldbuilding By The Numbers
  • Features and Content
    • Ask the Wizard
    • BookTube
    • Busy Little Bees Book Reviews
    • Cover Reveals
    • Cruising the Cosmere
    • Excerpts
    • News and Announcements
    • Original Fiction
      • Four-Part Fiction
    • SPFBO
    • The Unseen Academic
    • Tough Travelling
    • Women In SFF
    • Wyrd & Wonder
  • FAQ
Book ReviewsEpicFantasy
Home›Book Reviews›The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

By Chris Mahon
December 6, 2017
3555
0

The Eye of the World (Wheel of TIme) by Robert JordanLet me put something in perspective.

If you read Neuromancer, you remember the surreal paradise of Straylight, the space station Case and the crew travel to. You remember McCoy Pauley, the “Flatline,” his accent, and his bizarre dead man’s laugh. You remember the sequence when Case jacks into the matrix to take on the T.A. AI. And if you’re like me, you remember the last line, “He never saw Molly again.”

The entire story of Neuromancer took place in 270 pages. All of its minutely detailed worldbuilding, its revelations about Riviera and Wintermute, and Case’s struggles to get over Linda Lee are encapsulated in those 270 pages.

Page 270 is where I stopped reading The Eye of the World from sheer disinterest. There were no characters I cared about, no aspects of the world that captured my imagination, and nothing in the plot that made me keep turning pages. In the space of 270 pages, the same length that entire masterpieces of fantasy/sci-fi have been written, nothing of substance had even appeared to give me a reason to finish the book.

Let’s go deeper here.

Wizard of Earthsea. If you read the first book in the Earthsea series, you know Ged becomes Ogion’s apprentice, travels to Roke, stays a year in Kurremkarmerruk’s tower learning runes, builds a rivalry with Jasper, unleashes a gebbeth on the world, fights a clan of dragons to a stand-still, finds the Ring of Erreth Akbe on an abandoned sandbar, and travels to the end of the world to confront his own death in 183 pages.

The Fellowship of the Ring. By page 200 in Fellowship, Frodo and his friends have already made it through the Old Forest, the Barrow-Downs, and the encounter with the Ringwraith on the road. They’ve encountered Elves on their travels, watched Bilbo disappear, and Frodo has learned about the diabolical nature of the Ring and the stakes of destroying it.

In 270 pages or less, each of these stories accomplished what Eye of the World did not: present an engaging cast of characters, the beginnings of an interesting, well-paced plot, and a reason to care about any of it. You could say everyone’s tastes are different, and that if I didn’t like it, that has everything to do with me and little to do with the story. As a writer, I disagree.

To borrow from Harry Plinkett’s Star Wars prequel reviews, a litmus test that every character in fiction should be able to pass is to have someone describe them without explaining their appearance, their job, or role in the plot of the story. What’s their personality, their character? What do they want, and what drives them as a person? Taking a step beyond that, are the character’s desires or goals driving the story? What will they get at the end of it all? All of these are roundabout ways of saying “Why should I care about what happens in this story?”

I couldn’t answer any of these questions about the characters or the plot of The Eye of the World because, as in most D&D campaigns, the story lurches forward because The Plot requires it to. This isn’t a story about people struggling for something, this is a puppet show. Set on a pair of rails, the characters have to play along with no agency and no motivation beyond staying alive.

I’ll make a note here about Egwene, who develops the desire to become an Aes Sedai after Moraine reveals her ability to channel. Egwene has a personal stake in getting to Tar Valon: she wants to become special and learn the extent of her abilities. But Egwene’s presence on the journey to Tar Valon is so incidental, so badly rationalized as “a part of the Pattern,” that it renders her whole role in the plot moot.

But what frustrates me almost as much as the characters and plot is the insistence on the part of fans that The Eye of the World represents good, even great worldbuilding. As I’ve said before, good worldbuilding has very little to do with depth or complexity and everything to do with how it immerses readers in the story at hand. Looking at H.P. Lovecraft’s Mountains of Madness, the overwhelming detail of the expedition’s gear and supplies ends up grounding you a scientific mindset that makes everything afterward, from the frozen city to the ice to the shoggoths, all the more credulous and frightening.

Instead, The Eye of the World alternates between spending page after page describing mind-numbing, mundane  medieval farming life and reeling off long expositions about this world’s history and lore, the most egregious example being Moraine’s recounting of the heritage of Edmond’s Field. There is nothing immediate and applicable about these details, like Neuromancer’s complex descriptions of the technology Case is using, and nothing vivid and interesting that reminds me I’m in a fantasy world, like Case’s wanderings through Night City.

Someone might argue that Jordan’s prose is what makes everything hang together. I read 1100 pages of Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon almost on the strength of the writing alone. If anyone sits down and compares the writing in Eye of the World to a random chapter in Cryptonomicon (even the one with the Captain Crunch), the difference in sheer vividness will be immediately clear.

So, to sum it all up: I don’t think The Eye of the World is a good fantasy book.  I don’t think it represents what fantasy should be, or what a book should do. If it can’t give me one good reason to keep reading it in the span of pages that other books have told entire stories, I think it’s safe to say that it’s not a good book overall.

Tagschris mahoneye of the worldfantasyrobert jordanwheel of time

Chris Mahon

Chris Mahon is a fantasy writer, speaker, and essayist living in Brooklyn, New York. His non-fiction work has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, SyFy WIRE, Outer Places, The Portalist, and others. He's also spoken at New York Comic-Con, Columbia University, and the Glasgow International Fantasy Convention. In his free time he runs The Occult Triangle Lab, a blog on trigonometry, fantasy, and ungodly amounts of milk. You can contact him on Twitter @DeadmanMu or at christophmahon [at] gmail [dot] com.

Leave a reply Cancel reply

Welcome

Welcome to The Fantasy Hive

We’re a collaborative review site run by volunteers who love Fantasy, Sci-fi, Horror, and everything in-between.

On our site, you can find not only book reviews but author interviews, cover reveals, excerpts from books, acquisition announcements, guest posts by your favourite authors, and so much more.

Have fun exploring…

The Fantasy Hive Team

Visit our shop

Features

Support the Site

Books by A.Z. Anthony/Alex Knight

Books by A.Z. Anthony/Alex Knight

Jeramy’s Books

The Akallian Tales by Jeramy Goble

More from Jonathan

  • Ballad of Black Tom (Feature) The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle posted on December 6, 2017
  • Book of the New Sun (Feature) The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe posted on November 13, 2017
  • 13 Minutes (Feature) 13 Minutes by Sarah Pinborough posted on December 6, 2017
  • Paper Menagerie (Feature) The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu posted on December 6, 2017
  • Interview with Steven Erikson posted on November 1, 2018
  • Hex (Feature) HEX by Thomas Olde Heuvelt posted on November 15, 2017
  • Fifth Season (Feature) The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin posted on November 14, 2017
  • Binti (Feature) Binti by Nnedi Okorafor posted on November 18, 2017
  • THE DOLORIAD by Missouri Williams (BOOK REVIEW) posted on March 3, 2022
  • MORDEW by Alex Pheby (Book Review) posted on August 6, 2020

Laura’s Books

Books by Laura M. Hughes

More from Laura

  • Malazan Characters: Bridgeburners by Shadaan (Feature) A Beginner’s Guide to Malazan Characters: ‘Gardens of the Moon’ posted 6 years ago
  • The Faithful and the Fallen by John Gwynne 5 Reasons to Read ‘The Faithful and the Fallen’ posted 6 years ago
  • Ruin (Feature) Ruin by John Gwynne posted 6 years ago
  • Malazan Characters 2 (Feature) A Beginner’s Guide to Malazan Characters: ‘Deadhouse Gates’ posted 6 years ago
  • The Killing Moon (Feature) The Killing Moon by N. K. Jemisin posted 6 years ago
  • Prince of Fools (Feature) Prince of Fools by Mark Lawrence posted 6 years ago
  • Assassin's Apprentice (Feature) Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb posted 6 years ago
  • Slow Regard of Silent Things (Feature) The Slow Regard of Silent Things by Patrick Rothfuss posted 6 years ago
  • Larcout (Feature) Larcout by K. A. Krantz posted 6 years ago
  • The Emperor's Blades (Feature) The Emperor’s Blades by Brian Staveley posted 6 years ago