Tuesday Reviews

First, let me apologize in advance for the long post. 

With that out of the way, let’s start with The Bachelor…

Why are you people surprised that Jake picked Vienna?  Why are you even DISMAYED?  Come on!  Look, they’ve picked some hugely transparent phonies to headline that show in seasons past, but Jake has to be the biggest, most transparent phony in quite some time.  Probably since the show’s inaugural season.  So, I mean, OF COURSE Jake picked the girl who was most like him!  She was obviously the only one he actually got along with.  Were we watching the same show here?  What part of serious emotional commitment did that guy look like he was ready for?

Look, let me set this straight for you: Jake went on that show to bang some hot lonely and confused women.  And maybe to make himself a little bit famous.  You’ll note, after all, that he’s not Cincinnatus, slinking back into anonymity now that the show’s over.  Instead, he’s signed up to do Dancing with the Stars next season.  This is not the stuff of serious career and family commitment.  No, the guy is a social climbing train-wreck whom even an innocuous site like MSNBC describes a “moon-faced goober” now that his show is over.  So, y’know, life with Jake is gonna be rough.  And for that, Vienna, God bless her, is the only girl who’s emotionally equipped.  Because Jake is a wannabe entertainment wack-job who’s always gonna be looking for the Next Big Thing.  Against that, Vienna is an enthusiastic blow-up doll who wants to do a little social climbing of her own.  Thankfully, she seems to know what she’s getting into.  Personally, I think they’re going to be good for each other.

Meanwhile, Tarmon Gaidon is coming!  Perhaps not in the same way as Jake Pavelka, but still…

With the publication of The Gathering Storm, Robert Jordan’s epic fantasy series The Wheel of Time threatens to reach a conclusion at long last.  Unfortunately, Jordan himself died before he could finish his masterwork, but his widow and editor Harriet McDougal hired ace youngster (and BYU alum and literature professor) Brandon Sanderson to bring the series to its deserved conclusion. 

The typical knock on Jordan is that he let The Wheel of Time get away from him.  The series’ first book, The Eye of the World, is a very good piece of fantasy travel fiction.  Yes, the End of the World threatens.  Yes, there is the rather remote-seeming possibility of a horrific humanoid invasion.  But quite apart from all that, the first book—indeed, the first three books—are generally well-executed examples of The Hero’s Journey when it’s done right.  The formula works.  The problems start to crop up, really, in the fourth book and beyond.  Jordan expands his plot and the scope of his world building to such amazingly epic proportions that the individual characters struggle to get any quality screen time.  On top of that, the middle of the series is quite bogged down in what we might think of as Smallville-complex, which is to say that nothing much is happening.  We know that Clark Kent is Superman, but he never seems to get around to putting on the red cape and boots.  I myself found it tiresome mid-way through the series’ fourth volume, but I persevered all the way into Book Five hoping for a return to form that never came.

Enter Brandon Sanderson. 

Now look, I respect Robert Jordan as a man a very great deal.  He was a graduate of the Citadel, served in Vietnam where he was decorated for bravery, and he went on to make for himself a VERY successful career as a professional novelist.  He has legions and legions of devoted fans, and I’m well aware that criticizing someone with that level of popularity is more than a little silly.  His work clearly spoke to some folks.  On top of that, he seems to have been a faithful and devoted husband.  There’s a lot to like and admire there.  But with that said, I think that Sanderson is a much better writer.  I’ve read several of Mr. Sanderson’s books, and I think that Mistborn and The Well of Ascension in particular are excellent.  So, bottom line, I liked the early Wheel of Time books a lot, but I’d never have picked up the new book, The Gathering Storm, if it’d been written by the series’ original novelist.  I picked it up because I like Brandon Sanderson’s work so much that it convinced me to overlook the previous six books’ copious flaws.

So.  Rand al’Thor, the Dragon Reborn, is losing his mind.  And this is bad because Tarmon Gaidon, the Final Battle, is coming, and only the Dragon Reborn can lead the forces of Light against Darkness.  Typical stuff there.  And indeed, if you read the first three books, you’ll have no trouble at all catching up on the action, although I’ll admit to reading the Wikipedia summaries of those books I skipped in order to place a couple of the minor characters into context at the beginning of the new story.  However, this provided no barrier to my enjoyment.

The problem with The Gathering Storm, to the extent that there is a problem, is that for the first half it’s Brandon Sanderson writing as Robert Jordan.  Sanderson mutes his own style to an amazing extent, literally channeling Jordan in all of his obsessive-compulsive descriptive glory.  Storm is over 770 pages, and honestly, it takes more than 300 of those pages for Sanderson to really embrace the thing and accept the reality that HE is now the AUTHOR.  But when he does, well, that’s when things start to really shake loose.  In the past, Jordan was famous for starting slow and closing memorably.  Here, we see Sanderson improve on the original, starting slow but picking up midway, bringing the characters a level of depth and humanity in the process that they haven’t seen since the series’ very early going.

I was prepared to like this book.  I was prepared to hate it.  Even so, it surprised me.  Robert Jordan has a very distinctive style, but Sanderson falls into it flawlessly, maintaining the tone and tenor of the original to an extent that is literally inhuman.  On top of that, he characterizes carefully, letting the unimportant slide in narration but taking time to really show how our hero is falling apart—and why that’s BAD.  By the end of The Gathering Storm, I literally COULDN’T WAIT to see what happened next.  I still can’t.

Count me among the many who now eagerly await the rest of this series.  If you’re like me and fell off the wagon, I’d urge you to give the new book a try.  It’s as good as the series promised to be at the beginning.  And that’s pretty damned good.