The Gathering Storm
Written by T.gigas

         People make fun of Tolstoy’s War and Peace for being extremely long. It’s a classic work of literature, darling of critics through the ages, covering the lofty topics of, um, Russian farming? I don’t know, I’ve never really read it. I much prefer my own personal version of War and Peace in the form of the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan.

         With the paperback editions roughly the size of baby whales at almost a thousand pages each, the series stretches back to Book 1, The Eye of the World, released in January 1990. Being only 4 years old, you can guess I didn’t discover it immediately, but a glance at my bookshelf will give you an approximate notion of when I did: each edition up until Book 8, The Path of Daggers (1998), is in paperback, but all subsequent novels are hardcover. It was in the two years between the releases of books 8 and 9 that I latched on to this series and caught up to Robert Jordan, waiting with ill-disguised impatience for every new installment.

         There is never a boring moment in these books, as large as they are. The story (based in a land that has its own map, complete with an arrow pointing off the side and their world’s equivalent of “This way be dragons!”) is centered on a group of young people spirited away from their isolated village in the middle of the night. Rand, Mat, Perrin and Egwene have no idea how the world outside works, how very big it is, and the myriad of ways people can treat each other.

Their world has magic, though a stigma is attached to the people who use it. This is High Fantasy, people, so when the characters see strange dark-cloaked men herding 8-foot-tall, horned, hoofed beasts, it’s safe to assume they’re all minions of the Dark One. You know, that flame-eyed suave man who walks your dreams. Him.

The magic aspect is central to the story. The female wielders of the One Power, called Aes Sedai (“servants of all” in Robert Jordan’s Old Tongue), supposedly pull the strings on kings and queens of the various nations, but they all live in fear of a male who can do the same. Every such man is fated to be driven mad by the Dark One’s taint on that half of the Power, and in his madness he could Break the World, moving mountains and shifting oceans. The history is all explained in glittering flashbacks throughout the series, as well as the reason why one man in particular must be allowed to use the Power as he will, no matter the cost.

This may seem interesting enough, but it’s certainly not enough to fill up the 11 books (and one prequel) currently on shelves. However, as the characters develop and travel where they have never gone before, they encounter new people, and the new people’s lives are woven into the story as well. Each chapter is told from the (3^rd person limited) point of view of one of the characters. In Book 1, each chapter focuses, of necessity, on the little group as they journey away from Emond’s Field. By Book 11, there are at least 30 different people who each have unique perspectives on events, as well as companions who motives are so cloudy, they don’t even get a chapter to themselves without giving away some vital plot twist.

For the once-naïve country folk there are traps and pitfalls waiting to snare them around every corner, and they cannot even rely on each other. As the series progresses they meet up more and more rarely, being flung to the farthest corners of the continent before managing to come together again. Each time they meet they are changed further, until they are hardly able to recognize each other – no matter their outward appearances – for what they are becoming on the inside.

Each book in the series had been coming out every few years, the earlier ones closer together and the later ones spreading out just as their plots did, but in early 2006 Jordan (born James Oliver Rigney, Jr. in 1948) was diagnosed with an extremely rare heart disease and given no more than 4 years to live. Fans everywhere despaired – how will we learn who wins at Tarmon Gaidon (the Last Battle) if the story is never finished? And more importantly, how much of my life have I wasted reading this story that will leave me forever guessing at the fates of the characters?

Jordan claimed he would still live a full life and finish out the series before going on to the next world. However, he had not yet finished the final book in the series when immortality claimed him on September 16, 2007. Again fans despaired of ever finding surcease for the pain caused by lack of knowledge, but on December 7, 2007, a ray of light pierced the darkness.

Knowing that his brave front was just that, a front, Jordan had spoiled the ending for his family, as well as preparing a stack of notes to leave behind. His publishers, Tor Books, in conjunction with his wife Harriet, chose sci-fi novelist Brandon Sanderson to close out this epic series. Imagine the joy when it was announced that the 4-year wait was over at last, that the end was near!

This joy was slightly tempered by the splitting of the final book into three parts. The first of these, The Gathering Storm, will be released on October 27, 2009. Wow, had to suppress a sudden urge to dance ecstatically just then. Ahem, moving on. The next two will be released once a year, with Towers of Midnight slated for a 2010 release and A Memory of Light for 2011. A true fan can rise above petty thoughts about money-grubbing publishers wanting to milk a dead man’s book for all the public is willing to pay, and surrender to the joy of knowing that we will finally know what happens in the end. The end of the world, that is.