The wheel of time turns onward

Robert Jordan is dead — an author I’ve had a keen interest in even though I’ve barely read anything by him. To explain:

When The Wheel of Time series began with The Eye of the World all those many years ago — still in UCLA as an undergrad — I remember being taken by Darrell Sweet‘s cover art (he has a good, appropriate style for the medium, I’d say — I can’t imagine it anywhere else other than said medium but it works well) and thinking the whole thing sounded intriguingly ambitious. I hadn’t read any of Jordan’s Conan reworkings but I knew of his reputation. I picked up said first book eventually and remembered being struck by the opening few pages.

It’s still a wonderful opening, BTW — fantastically melodramatic in the best possible way. Rather than being a prelude building up to something, it’s a prelude following an apocalypse, with the citadel of a powerful lord having been ravaged by some unknown force. Knights, ladies, everyone in it is dead — and newly dead at that — with one wandering soul who has clearly gone insane stumbling through the chaos and blood. A mysterious figure then materializes, classically EEEEVIL — fastidious (there’s a great bit where he swirls his robes or whatever out of the way of blood and viscera of a victim or two), sneering, triumphant and ultimately angry, because his triumph has been marred by the fact that his opponent — the lone survivor — doesn’t have a full understanding of what he has done.

Turns out the lone survivor is in fact the lord of the castle — and apparently of the land in general — and is supposed to be the good guy nonpareil. Whatever power he holds, however, proves to be something potentially uncontrollable — something that in fact could, would and did lead to the horrors he himself inflicted on everyone around him, his wife, his children, his comrades, the whole nine yards — and more to the point, this was merely the latest act in a battle between him and Mr. EEEEVIL that has been raging for generations, millennia. The bad guy restores the lord’s memories and relative sanity to him with a contemptuous mental flick of the wrist, just to see him react in anguish to the destruction he’d just caused. Said lord has his own card to play, though, and calls down (or up — a volcano forms, I recall that much) a way of destruction to end his life and that of his opponent’s…for the time being.

It’s a great start, as mentioned — I wouldn’t call it deathless literature, no, but I would call it very effective as a way of grabbing the attention, with a style that took the setting of chivalry and pumped it up with something verging on the Manichean crossed with Grand Guignol. It wasn’t Tolkien, for sure. Friends of mine rapidly got into it and I started reading it…but I sensed from the pace of the story (which I enjoyed) that this was going to take a long, long time to unfold. And I decided, “Well, let me wait until it’s finished, then I’ll read it all. I can wait. I have time.”

I stuck to that. I kept picking up the books one by one as the years went by. I even got the official guidebook that came out, because why not? It’d be handy to have to hand. Meantime many friends I made turned out to be very intense followers of the whole series, and I learned that everyone was still addicted to it but that people were wondering when the series would end — apparently each new book barely advanced the overall story after a certain point — and that Jordan’s sexual politics and attendant philosophical musings were, to put it mildly, simplistic or at least ridiculously loaded. Still, the readership I knew (which was fairly evenly spread among different backgrounds, genders, etc., FWIW) was happily hooked and given the judgments of people I respected I was happily awaiting the final resolution, whenever it would arrive. There were a few jokes and references about hoping he didn’t die before it was over, and I was part of that. But I guess I was content enough in feeling it would all wrap up somehow — other favorite writers of mine like Dorothy Dunnett had been able to settle their own series to their satisfaction even as they grew older, so why not Jordan? Though while he’d apparently kept promising that the conclusion of the series wasn’t far off, he always seemed to be extending it just a bit further — and even wrote a prequel novel along the way, which can’t have made anyone any more patient with the pace.

Back in 2005, he’d apparently promised that the next book, the twelfth, would be the last, no matter how large it would be or how many loose ends to tie up. Sadly, the following year he was diagnosed with a rare blood disease, and his work was never as fully focused as it could be, though if Wikipedia is correct, many basic plot points if not all were conveyed to his family, so an ending of some sort can and will exist. But that’s as best as can be hoped for, and the feeling among a lot of people can be summed up by Tim Finney’s comment on ILX: “It really does seem like this very very sad cosmic punchline, I think as much for him as a writer as for his readers.”

Sad, but a reminder of how there aren’t any guarantees. It’s a bit hard to explain to my own satisfaction right now, but part of the reason why I have stepped back from the hyperinvolvement of extended book series and TV series (and arguably comics, manga and anime, though I have never followed anything in those fields to an extended degree) and all that is because I don’t want to be left hanging, as it were — because there are many other self-contained artistic creations (a solitary book, one movie, etc.) that are as if not more satisfying than the endlessly evolving overarching narrative. This isn’t an exclusive switch by any means — I mentioned a Michael Stackpole series the other day and I’m also intrigued by the sound of R. Scott Bakker’s Prince of Nothing series. But we’re in a world now where if I wanted to I could do nothing but lose myself in any number of such creations constantly, forever, 24/7 — there’s that much out there, and there’s that part of me that would appreciate BEING lost in there. I don’t want to be, though, for my own sake — a mental drawing of the line, if you like. It’s why ultimately I’m not all that het up about Lost or Heroes or immersive TV series like those.

I could go on, but you get the idea, conditional and shifting as it is, rather than being something definitive. I hesitate to say it’s because I want to have a life — many people I know who are such intense followers of things do very much have a life and then some. But I know the difference between the life I could have and the life I want to have in cases like this, and I will take the latter, and I could launch into a further extended discussion about how this feeds into my mindset of engaging with the world rather than cocooning away from it, of creating rather than simply absorbing. I’ll leave it at that for now.

The larger point of this, after all, isn’t about me but about someone else, who has sadly passed, left a loving family behind him, as well as many, many readers worldwide. It’s also intrigued me that Jordan died shortly after a fellow American writer known for high church Anglicanism and a huge body of fantasy work with philosophical and theological underpinnings, Madeline L’Engle. In a strange sort of way — perhaps because I was raised Anglican — I feel a profound shift now, like something has truly changed. It’d be amusing to try and think about Jordan and L’Engle as their own form of linked pair who now have moved on to debate and engage in another realm, but that’s just a random image rather than anything else, and they’d be more likely to intensely and happily discuss matters of faith and belief after another mass than anything else (or so I’d guess!).

When the final book comes out, in whatever form, I’ll get around to that long promised readthrough of the whole series, and I doubt I’ll ever reread it — my own wheel of time turns onward as well — but I’ll enjoy it, criticize it, frown at it, all those things, and wonder what the final actual ending might have been. But the cosmic joke, indeed, has been played.