The Gathering Storm Review

There may be no beginnings or endings in the turning of the Wheel of Time, but The Gathering Storm is the beginning of the end.  After this, there will be only two more books to review (including the next one, which is probably my favorite in the whole series).  We wrote a post recently about the difference between approaches to writing series, with the example of The Lord of the Rings being a “series” intended to be read as one book that happens to be split over three volumes for ease of printing (and reading); the final three books of Wheel of Time, as Sanderson explains in his forward, can be conceptualized as either three separate books, or as volumes of a single, final installment.  Personally, I do consider them distinct enough in how they are plotted to be conceived and treated as separate books.

Speaking of Sanderson, this is the first of the Sanderson books.  As I’ve mentioned a few times before, Brandon Sanderson was tapped to finish Wheel of Time after Jordan passed away before he could finish it.  I can think of few tasks more difficult or daunting than stepping in to finish another author’s masterpiece like this, especially one so famous and so far along, but Sanderson did an admirable job.  There are certainly differences, but the story itself stays true (aided by Jordan’s copious notes and the input of his wife and editor, Harriet).  That said, while I don’t remember noticing it the first time, probably because I had to wait a while between when I read Knife of Dreams and when The Gathering Storm was released, there are noticeable differences in the prose, style, and voice.

This is surely inevitable, and it seems like Sanderson tries to minimize them, but it does make for a slightly different reading experience.  The Gathering Storm reads faster than Jordan’s writing, and the prose is less descriptive and more straightforward.  Not that the descriptions are lacking, but they don’t linger, and aren’t emphasized, as much as they are in Jordan’s writing.  Sanderson also favors a construction where he will follow up particularly dramatic moments with a short statement which may or may not be a complete sentence, which I don’t mind in his writing, but which I kept noticing in this book and found somewhat distracting.  To put it another way, Sanderson’s prose is, by his nature, more “transparent” than Jordan’s, but these are differences you might only notice if you are reading the books in close succession.

Imagining a genuine collaboration between Sanderson and Jordan is an interesting exercise.  They are not the kind of authors who would fill each other’s gaps so much as they would support each other’s strengths.  Jordan’s command of language, his immersive descriptions, and his ability to bring even minor characters to life on the page would synergize nicely with Sanderson’s tight, fast-paced, epic-scale plotting and ability to manage a large cast of major characters.  Unlike some earlier installments, there are no skipped viewpoints amongst the major characters in The Gathering Storm, although Mat and Perrin don’t make much of an appearance, and Elayne, whom I would consider more of a secondary character by this stage in the series, only appears in passing.  The main plots are Egwene’s work with the White Tower and Rand’s trials.  However, I think we get less from the side characters’ perspectives than we do in Jordan’s novels – giving so many minor characters time in the spotlight is a distinguishing feature of Jordan’s writing.

If you’ve made it this far, I doubt much I say is really going to change whether you continue the series or not – really, who gets to the twelfth book of a fourteen-book series and decides that’s the time to give up on it?  The Gathering Storm is not the same book it would have been if Jordan was able to write it, but I can think of few authors who could have done as well filling in for him as Sanderson did.  Certainly, he maintains the most important element, the tone of desperate optimism against an overpowering evil, which is the series’ distinctive character.  With The Gathering Storm’s conclusion, the Last Battle is near at hand…but we still have one more book before we get there, and it might be my favorite in the whole series.