The Great Hunt Review

Since a little before I started this site and began posting weekly book reviews, I’ve been diversifying my reading.  This coincided with a rapid expansion of my reading list.  Through this diversification, I’ve exposed myself to fascinating and fantastic pieces of writing which I may otherwise have bypassed, but it meant a corresponding decrease in time for reading extensive speculative fiction.  I wouldn’t change that, but this re-read of Wheel of Time is reminding me how enjoyable it is to really immerse myself in a series.  Perhaps I would do well to be more intentional about making time in my reading schedule for such stories.

Then again, there are few series that can compare to Wheel of Time in scope, skill, quality, length, or most other metrics.  It well deserves its place in the fantasy pantheon, and, if Eye of the World suffered from a few growing pains and a lot of exposition (I won’t say it was too much, but it did make the book a bit belabored at times), those are mostly past for The Great Hunt.  The Great Hunt takes advantage of being a second installment in a lengthy series to live two parallel lives which can be read simultaneously.  It is possible both to read The Great Hunt as a contained, quest-style fantasy, following the chase after the Horn of Valere after its theft by agents of evil, and as an installment of a vaster epic in which this quest is a kind of backdrop to the main drama of our protagonists, and especially the struggle against destiny.

Technically, Wheel of Time is written in third person limited, but Jordan embraced viewpoint hopping to such an extent that as readers we gain information almost akin to what we might know were it written from an omniscient viewpoint.  Most authors might struggle to make so many different viewpoints distinctive and characterized, but Jordan makes it seem easy, and the technique allows him to play with different perspectives on the same events in a fascinating and compelling way.  This is a strength throughout the series, but especially in The Great Hunt, where we can see how decisions that seem nonsensical from one character’s perspective are perfectly reasonable from another’s.

For all the perspective-hopping, though, this book really is about Rand.  His development throughout the book is the most acute, he receives the most head time, and the larger, long-term plot conflicts that are featured in this volume all revolve around him.  In a shorter series, this might be a weakness, how little the other characters develop in an entire volume (not that they don’t have any development at all), but there are another twelve books yet to come, so there is plenty of space for all of the characters to have their time to shine.  Well, not all of the characters.  All of the major characters, at least.

Eye of the World does a kind of fake-out, giving the idea that maybe the main battle has already been won, while only hinting that there is more to come.  The Great Hunt is not so coy.  It makes it abundantly clear that this is only the beginning of the journey, for all that things are already happening on a grand scale.  The plot advances faster than the characters, which forms a key part of the tension and conflict, especially in the early books.  The quest plot might be resolved in this book, but there is left no doubt that the larger plot is only beginning to pick up steam.  By the end, the world the characters inhabit is irrevocably changed, and the next book must address the consequences.  It will not be long before I pick up The Dragon Reborn.