Lord of Chaos Review

Of the books to come so far in Wheel of Time, Lord of Chaos feels the most like a middle book.  At last, Jordan moves away from concluding each book with a climactic confrontation between the Dragon Reborn and one of the Forsaken – so far away, in fact, that the ending of the book comes as something as a surprise, indicated more by the diminishing number of remaining pages than by the pattern of the plot.  While a welcome change, he might take it a little too far, for there is almost no denouement after the concluding battle, paragraphs in a thousand-page book.

This is symptomatic of the larger struggle of Lord of Chaos, which is a dramatic slowdown of the story’s pacing compared to previous installments.  Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing, and arguably important after Rand goes from shepherd to semi-accepted ruler of multiple kingdoms and peoples, with multiple key figures for the Dark One eliminated within the previous books, considering we’re not even halfway through the series yet, but Jordan seems to struggle to find an internal plot upon which this novel can focus.  The unifying thread is the Aes Sedai and their political struggles, but that thread is not entirely apparent except in retrospect.

When authors write long series like Wheel of Time, there is always, at the beginning of each installment, a question of how to reintroduce the reader to the world.  Some authors assume the reader is coming right from the previous book, and jump right into the storytelling (this approach seems to be more common today than it used to be), while other authors establish a new learning curve in each book to deliberately bring the reader back up to speed on where the story is currently.  Given the amount of time that went between each installment’s publication, it makes sense that Jordan would lean towards the latter.  His prologues, often nearly a hundred pages long, are masterworks in providing dozens of short scenes from different perspectives to convey a sense of what is happening in the world and to create tension, since this is where the majority of Dark One-aligned perspectives are seated.  From chapter one, though, it can be almost painful as a reader coming from the previous book after less than a year as we are deliberately reintroduced to characters and concepts we already know.  This lasts through enough chapters in Lord of Chaos for it to be difficult to engage with the first few chapters – it felt, this time around, like the story only really got its momentum back some dozen chapters into the book.

Perrin reappears in this book, briefly and only at the beginning and the end, with a whole slew of adventures happening off-page as he travels from the Two Rivers to rendezvous with Rand, in that Ta’veren fashion at just the right time.  Mat has a few chapters, but little real development, and the same is true for Nynaeve and Elayne.  Egwene gets some character development, although it could be more properly said that the character development she had over the past few books, during her time with the Wise Ones, comes to fruition when she returns to the Aes Sedai (which felt like it happened much sooner than I remembered).  Mainly, this is another book about Rand, and Jordan again manages to convey both the sense that Rand is going mad, and how each step and action he takes is reasonable and logical for itself, along with the tension that creates, and the problems his resulting decisions and actions are beginning to cause to fester.  For instance, the Asha’man.

One of the best parts of Wheel of Time, which comes to the forefront in the greater breathing space afforded by Lord of Chaos, is how rich the characters are, even the side and minor characters.  Characters like Sorilea, Sulin, some of the Maidens of the Spear, the relationship between Berelain and Rhuarc…their appearances always convey the sense that they have entire stories of their own that could be told, so that, despite the series being famous for its length, the effect is to make Lord of Chaos sometimes feel too short, or at least leave the reader wanting more (which is not a bad thing).  Not just because we could have perspectives from the minor characters, but because we could have perspectives from characters who otherwise don’t receive much attention in this particular novel.  My logical brain always tries to write an equal number of chapters for each perspective I’m doing, which is part of why the first time I attempted to write Fo’Fonas didn’t go very well – Wheel of Time makes a fine case study in why it’s not necessary to come even close to balancing the perspectives to keep the reader cognizant of what a given character is doing and interested in their fate.

As mentioned, Lord of Chaos ends rather abruptly and dramatically, without much chance to examine the fallout of what happened, and there is certain to be fallout.  That’s what the next book is for, and I hope you’re still reading along.  It might be a few weeks before we return to Wheel of Time, but that’s the power of a series like this – it can end a book like skidding to the edge of a cliff, and wait until the next book to tell us what happens to the rocks tossed over the edge.