Last night, I spent a considerable amount of what should have been sleeping time looking for bad reviews of the last three books of The Wheel of Time series. After the death of the real author, the series was finished by a stand-in author, who did an execrable job, and I wondered why none of those books rated less than a three-star review on Amazon.
One reason, I discovered, is that a lot of people give him kudos for doing a thankless job, but it wasn’t thankless. He got paid for his work, and those books helped catapult him into the fantasy-writer stratosphere.
Another reason is that he writes in a simplistic style that appeals to today’s readers — short sentences; quick scene changes; lots of action; little real character development; not a lot of depth, emotional or otherwise. All of which is antithetical to Robert Jordan’s writing.
I also tend to think a lot of the acclaim he gets for his Wheel of Time books is because they are in direct contrast to Jordan’s books. There is no doubt that Jordan’s last few books could have used some heavy editing (though oddly, one of the substitute author’s acclaimed books is more or less a replay of the Jordan book that people tend to hate) but much of what people seem to object to in Jordan’s writing are things that shouldn’t be an issue.
For example, when Jordan started writing The Wheel of Time books, there were few female protagonists in that genre. This lack makes sense in a way because the writers of high fantasy tended to be male. Also, the genre seemed to attract more males than females in the beginning (or at least it was assumed to be so). Writing a male protagonist was safe — females will read books written by and for males more often than the reverse.
Jordan tried to turn this assumption on its head, writing both male and female protagonists. He tried to balance the power between males and females, and he tried to subvert stereotypes. It surprised me to discover that so many people think his writing is sexist, though in a world of his own making, with sexual dynamics of his own making in that world , how can he possibly be considered sexist?
One of the problems is that his readers are so young. (I have yet to discover a group of readers my age, online or off, who have any interest in reading the books let alone discussing them in any depth.) These younger generations don’t realize there was a time not that long ago when women were considered gossipy, flighty, unable to handle finances, and needed to be looked after as if they were children. In fact, it wasn’t until 1974 that women could obtain credit cards in their own name without a male co-signer. At the same time, it became illegal for mortgage companies to refuse loans to unmarried women as had been common.
It was only a handful of years after these major real-world changes that Jordan started thinking about his series. In his attempt to subvert stereotypes, he reversed things — women in his series consider men to be gossipy children who don’t have any sense, so the women think nothing of bullying the men to get them to do what the women think is right. Making things more complicated, in Jordan’s world, men are raised to be chivalrous, putting women’s safety first, and protecting them even if they don’t want the protection. This leads to an underlying theme of the story — men don’t understand women, though they try to. Women don’t understand men, though they think they do.
Adding further to this complicated dynamic, the “magic” system had become one-sided. It used to be that both men and women could tap into the power that drove the universe, so they were equals. But during the time of the story, only women were able to use the power, so it threw the balance off.
And yet readers try to fit today’s mores into Jordan’s world.
What really made me stop and think during my research last night is that most of the people in the United States today became adults after those life-changing laws governing women’s financial autonomy came into play. If only 20% of people were born before 1964, then that means 80% never had to deal with (and probably never had to learn about) a fairly recent time when things were so terribly unbalanced in the real world. No wonder so many Wheel of Time readers haven’t a clue what that particular theme of Jordan’s was all about.
In the end, I suppose it doesn’t really matter why the substitute author gets lauded for his awful writing. In my world, those books no longer exist, so unless I can come up with my own ending, the series ends with the real author’s death.
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One.
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