The Fires of Heaven is finally too much. I can’t remember the last place I stopped reading Wheel of Time books, but this second time through I can’t get past the Fires of Heaven. I thought having the books read to be by Audible would make it easier to take — Audible makes it possible for me to listen to a mediocre book I would otherwise be too annoyed to read — but no. Can’t do it.
It could be because of the “war of the sexes.” His thematic point here seems to be that men and women aren’t that different, really — they both complain about the same behavior in the opposite sex. Men complain about women acting before thinking and vice versa. Women complain about men gossiping and vice versa. Men complain about women talking all the time and vice versa. OK. You know what? We Get It. There’s no need for two paragraphs of exposition about what each character thinks another character’s actions says about that character’s gender. You would think after five books freaking ginormous tomes this would be well established, but apparently not in RJ’s mind.
It could be because of the sex. There’s very little, which is not a problem in and of itself. But sex is there anyway, in how almost every female character frets every single page of five freaking ginormous tomes about how much ankle is showing or how far down her dress is cut. Oh, and they are also catty about how revealing everyone else’s clothing is, too. High fantasy? More like Victorian Victoria’s Secret. Aaaaand… why is it that when the female characters have to do something difficult, they also seem to have to do it naked? For such a prudish series, the characters are either constantly disrobing or getting torn out of their clothing. Actually, I think the women in fourth book spend more time out of clothes than in them. And don’t even get me started on the constant threats of spankings.
It could be any number of minor annoyances. How Lan is supposed to be a stone-faced stoic warrior, but practically every scene with him RJ shows him reacting strongly to some news or statement or such, then pointing out how big of a reaction that is because Lan is a stone-faced stoic warrior. It could be because every time Nineve gets frustrated we get a description about how she pulls on her braid. It could be because Rand can’t stop whining about the possibility of going crazy. It could be because every time Rand has to deal with romantic problems, we get to hear his same internal dialog about how his friends Mat and Perrin would be better at dealing with this situation — and the same goes for Mat and Perrin. Often within pages of each other.
It could be any of these things, but really it’s all of them and more. It’s the repetition that’s getting to me, folks. These five freaking ginormous tomes would be half the size if Robert Jordan removed all the restatement of conflict, restatement of character, restatement of restatements of restatements of plot, etc. The books keep getting heavier not because the stories get more involved but because RJ can’t reference earlier action or thought without summarizing or repeating all previous instances of action or thought. The number of times Nineve thinks to herself that “the men” are getting “too full of themselves” in the Fires of Heaven alone is amazing. I lost count. I lost count in one chapter. What, do you think I have the attention span of a gnat?
Robert Jordan, your writing style is like the hair clog in the drain trap of my sink, and I’m sick of waiting for the story to trickle through.
