At
last it is done. A Memory of Light is read and the Wheel of Time series is completed. Delayed so long by the time it
takes to write and edit and publish books, then the reading interrupted by
normal life intrusions, the epic fantasy finally ended for me this morning.
And
so it is with A Memory of Light. Physically too large to hold easily and
read in bed, this Final Battle sometimes dragged me forward, sometimes hurled
me forward, and sometimes beat me down with such sorrow that I didn’t think I
could continue. But like the characters Robert Jordan raised and Brandon
Sanderson carried on, I had to see it through to the end. Whatever end that
might be.
My
journey through the Third Age began early in 2008, shortly after the
announcement that Brandon Sanderson would finish Robert Jordan’s work. As a fan
of J.R.R. Tolkien, I had been forever after The Trilogy of the Rings,
dissatisfied by fantasy fiction in general. I had never liked series. Most had
characters about whom I did not care past the first book. And the stories got
watered-down and I, quite frankly, did not care how they ended.
The
characters in the Wheel of Time
series are so well-wrought that they lived in my imagination parallel to the
real people in my real world. I cared what happened to them. I needed as much
as wanted to know what happened to them.
And
the story. The story is truly epic. Written on this page, the word epic is so
small, but it feels too big to be contained by this world. I’m sure the story
of my real world, if there might be such a story, is also epic. But it does not
present itself to me in a coherent beginning, middle, and end style that I can
follow. The characters in my real world are so little known to me, even those
closest to me, that I do not get to see more than snapshots and shadows of
their thoughts and feelings, their anticipations and experiences. There may be
a Pattern to my real life just as there is in the Wheel of Time, but I can’t see it. Here is the advantage of fantasy
done well. I can’t see these things in my life but I can in the lives of the
characters in these books.
Five
years and fourteen books later, The Wheel
of Time has turned as it willed and, I am satisfied.
