The Wheel Goes Round

Looking for something light but entertaining and engrossing to read, some fiction not too dire or heady, nothing that involves too much wattage of the brain, nothing that will twang too sharply upon my frayed emotional strings, I picked up Robert Jordan’s The Eye of the World last week. I am already around page 200, or about a quarter done with it.

Eye is Book One of an endless shelf of thousand-page doorstops of fantasy novels. Jordan published it in 1990, wrote about a dozen more, died, and, I believe but don’t quote me, other writers are continuing the saga. I first read it over the span of two months way way back in 2001 when me and the Mrs. were living out life down in beautiful Silver Spring, Maryland. Those were my IT help desk days, and I forever associate troubleshooting ID10T problems with that work (as well as Gene Wolfe and Cordwainer Smith novellae). Flashbacks are a-poppin’ as I’m traveling through this wheel of time.

“Wheel of Time” is actually the title of the series, like “Songs of Fire and Ice” is the title of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Throne series of cinder blocks. Jordan’s book is a pleasant, good-natured rip-off of or homage to Tolkien. Pure and simple. If you get easily offended by blatant Tolkienisms in the works of other authors, this is not the book for you. I originally purchased it about five years ago, got offended, thought about chucking it but saved it for Patch to read when she gets a little older (after she reads Lord of the Rings, of course). Then I read something recently that mentioned the book and decided to give it a go. Now I’m surprisingly enjoying my revisit.

The item I read was that “The Wheel of Time” is to Buddhism what The Lord of the Rings is to Catholicism. I don’t know if I’d go that far so early in the novel, but it seems true, though not as deep. Both stories hide their, er, philosophy (?) Theology (?) Religiosity (?) Dunno, but it’s there. Hidden, buried gems, though I think the vein is veritably vaster with Tolkien. But I am but a Jordan novice.

As far as the rip-off is concerned, I also read that Jordan was aware of, shall we say, similarities between the two works, both with theme and plot and characters good and bad. And he said it was a tribute to Tolkien. So that is the spirit in which I am re-reading The Eye of the World. As a tribute to the Master, Professor Tolkien. With that attitude, I am pleasantly pleased.

More depth in a review to follow in about a month or so.