M.J. Whitehead

I’ve just finished reading The Gathering Storm. (Book 12 of The Wheel of Time, for those of you who have not yet had the pleasure of getting hooked on the series) I’m now going to rant about how I feel about how the book was written, having finished reading.

Firstly: Oh my god, what a great read. Without getting into spoilers, the plotline for Rand, and Egwene’s struggle, and finding out exactly what was going on with Verin Sedai are simply full of win. The plotting here is so spot-on that more and more I can’t understand the perspective of fans who were, presented with preview chapters, trying to nitpick what was written by Sanderson and what by Jordan. It might help that I was familiar with and liked both authors before coming to this book, but there is simply too much right here to justify anyone doubting that Brandon can get this project over the finish line. Hopefully everyone who liked the series has given him a chance to prove that.

Secondly: Brandon stayed true to and made good on his promise to make this a Wheel of Time book, but not try to pretend to be Jordan. There were short chapters here that Jordan would never have published- he favoured long threadlike chapters that he wove together slowly. There are names that don’t quite sound the same as others in the Wheel of Time universe. But nothing that doesn’t work. There is nothing that makes this a bad story. Every time I felt I was going to be thrown out of the story because events had twisted away from my expectations, Brandon recovered me by showing me that it was just good tension and plotting that left me guessing. I was feeling as if I was about to be thrown out of the story because the events were fulfilling promises in unexpected ways, which is exactly what any author worth their salt would do- it’s just that the twists are getting much bigger now that the series is wrapping up, so the tension was good enough that it had me questioning if what I was guessing would even happen. And of course, in those cases, it didn’t.

The rules that Wheel of Time characters follow- that revelations are dramatic, that secrets are important, that the genders feel mutually incomprehensible to each other, that earning trust is hard- it’s all still there. Nobody acts wrong. All the characters have their same motivations, and the new ones we discover make perfect sense. There were even things that had eluded me in previous novels that I picked up in this book, because Sanderson got into the character’s heads a bit more, rather than telegraphing their feelings with body language or reactionary thoughts, and leaving the motivations behind them undescribed. The advantage of being near the end of the series! It all builds properly on everything that came before it, and it fits so deliciously in. There is no “McDune” problem here, not that I had expected to find one, but I was surprised to find that I didn’t have time to worry once I had a chance to sit down with the book. I was too busy wanting to get back at the next chapter when I needed to break from reading.

There are a few parts where you can tell we’re going at what for Jordan would have been breakneck pace. A lot more seems to happen “off-camera” than generally happened in the middle of the series, (There was certainly a lot of off-camera action at the beginning, however. This is still within the bounds of how The Wheel Of Time was written) and, as earlier, the chapter structure seems a little bit different from other Wheel of Time books. That’s as much as I really want to say that skirts comparing Jordan and Sanderson; I’m not going to spoil the experience of the rest of this series by trying to figure out in much detail what’s changed since Knife of Dreams, and the things I’ve mentioned are small changes of focus that any author could choose to make during their own series. The awesome lingering reminders of the Mat/Tuon relationship and the fast pacing are both still there from Knife of Dreams, which frankly, would have been enough for me on its own.

The Aes Sedai acted like Aes Sedai. Perrin was appropriately torn. Mat was a rascal with a heart of gold. And that’s all you’re getting without spoilers. There was, however, a small amount of Brandon’s tendency to do a lot in his endings, but this wasn’t the usual traffic jam that he wields at the end of a book, tying everything up neatly in parallel. There was still the usual serene close of Wheel of Time books, with the usual relaxed room to ponder just exactly what is coming next.

The novel excited me. I didn’t want to put it down. (I managed, however, when I had to get off the bus. Somehow.) If you were still on the fence, I simply want to say this: The pattern is in good hands. Brandon’s earned the trust that Harriet put in him, and then some.