I remember when this book first showed up in the bookstore back around 1990. I was a high school student at the time and didn't have much money to spare for purchasing new fantasy novels by authors whose names I did not even recognize. Still, this one caught my eye and I glanced it over. I didn't like the art on the cover, for starters - though I should mention that I eventually learned the artist's rendition of the characters, on every cover he's done for the series, only vaguely resembles the way they are described in the book. Emphasis on vaguely.

Also, it had a blurb from a popular SF/Fantasy author across the top of the front cover: "This looks very like the next major fantasy epic!" Had that blurb been generated by Roger Zelazny or Barry Hughart or Patricia A. McKillip, I might have decided to splurge and buy the silly thing. Unfortunately, the name attached to the blurb was Piers Anthony. That settled it for me. Based on my opinion of his own fantasy epic called Incarnations of Immortality, I didn't trust Piers Anthony to recognize the next great fantasy epic if it bit him on the foot.

Years later, when I finally got around to reading this book after someone recommended it to me, I discovered that I had done Piers Anthony an injustice for once. Something about the writing sucked me in and wouldn't let go. I guess Anthony makes a better critic than he does an author.

Magic-users in this world are called "channelers." I don't think Jordan ever uses the word "magic" at all in these books, although I often use it when discussing them. Channelers are human beings who happen to have the correct genes to let them access the One Power, although men and women access different halves of it. Men channel saidin and women channel saidar, and the vast majority of the human race never channels either no matter how hard they might try. Got it? Good!

Over three thousand years ago, there was a great war, variously called by such names as the War of Power or the War of the Shadow. The bad guys were working for the Dark One (the almost-omnipotent evil entity who happened to be trapped inside a prison from which he was only slowly breaking loose) and intended to conquer the world in his name, with him eventually completing the task of breaking free of his prison and ruling the world directly. Fortunately, the good guys won by the skin of their teeth after many long years of devastating struggle. Their top military leader, and one of the most powerful channelers alive, Lews Therin Telamon, led the legendary Strike at Shayol Ghul which managed to seal up the Dark One's prison all over again at a time when his thirteen principal subordinates, collectively called the Forsaken, were all inside the mountain called Shayol Ghul for a strategy conference, with the result that very little has been heard from the Dark One or his Forsaken for the next thirty-odd centuries (although occasionally something would happen to demonstrate that he hadn't given up yet).

Unfortunately, it appears that when the Dark One realized what was happening that day, he had just enough time to make a massive counterstrike which somehow tainted all contact with saidin, the half of the One Power which male channelers are able to access in doing their magical deeds. The more you channeled, the more the "taint" affected you, until eventually you went insane and lost all touch with reality and started channeling like mad for any reason or no reason.

The resulting devastation made the damage caused by the preceding war look puny. Continents were remodeled by earthquakes and sudden changes in elevation of large areas, cities were eradicated, rivers dried up, the weather got really unpredictable (and usually in a bad way), and the whole thing lasted a couple of hundred years and probably left the human population on the planet only a fraction of what it had previously been. Civilization largely collapsed. (There had been a world government in the old days, but no longer.) The whole mess only ended when all male channelers had either died of old age, caused their own destruction in their madness, or (I assume) been killed off by some sniper who managed to sneak up close enough to do the deed while the powerful lunatic was asleep or distracted. Channelers who take care of themselves can live for hundreds of years, so it took a long time. Also, every once in a while a teenage boy would start channeling because he had the right genes for it, and that had to be dealt with.

Surviving female channelers of the "Aes Sedai" organiation eventually managed to regroup and build a new headquarters called the White Tower on an island (in the middle of a river) called Tar Valon. (The original "Aes Sedai" had apparently been the worldwide Channeler's Union without regard to gender in the days of the Age of Legends, but now they obviously had to be all-female.) One of the most important things Aes Sedai have done ever since that time is investigate any reports of possible male channelers, subdue them if the reports appear to be accurate, and haul the young men as prisoners back to Tar Valon for a process they call "gentling" which somehow destroys the man's ability to channel the One Power and thus makes him harmless. The process does not physically harm him. If he was still sane at the time this was done to him, he won't get any worse now that the taint no longer affects him. However, he usually goes into severe depression over the shock of no longer feeling the power he had been developing, and often dies within a few years.

On the other hand, there are prophecies (considered highly reliable) that eventually Lews Therin Telamon will be reincarnated (and will then be called the Dragon Reborn - "Dragon" was a title applied to him during his previous life) and will once again be required to use his vast power to save the human race from the renewed threat of the Dark One and his Forsaken. Apparently that sealing job he did over three thousand years ago was just a quick'n'dirty patch and not guaranteed to last forever and ever. One tiny little problem that is not squarely addressed in this book is the question of how the Aes Sedai intended to make sure they gentled every male channeler they caught except the one who was destined to save the human race by clever use of his channeling ability?

As you might guess, however, not everyone has been content to just wait for the prophecies of the glorious Dragon Reborn to be fulfilled in their own good time. Over the millennia, several men who matured into strong channelers have proclaimed themselves to be the Dragon Reborn and have tried to gather armies of faithful believers and do other things meant to demonstrate that they are fulfilling various of the prophecies. None of them have managed to make it stick in the long run, however, and they are commonly referred to as False Dragons. (You have to bear in mind that in Jordan's books "Dragon" basically means "Messiah" and not "large fire-breathing reptilian creature." There are no living, fire-breathing dragons anywhere in sight in the Wheel of Time.)

What does all this ancient history have to do with the plot of this novel? Plenty! For one thing, you have to grasp the idea that for over three thousand years, the most feared organization in the world, with a virtual monopoly on magical power as far as we know, has been the Aes Sedai, who are all female. And they go to a lot trouble to remain very politically influential. As a result, the developing cultures of the new nations that emerge from the fragments of old ones have been a lot less chauvinistic than was the case in Medieval Europe. It appears, for example, that in most of the noble and royal families of the known world, titles pass from the previous holder to the eldest child regardless of gender. (In this book, we learn that in the nation of Andor, the title of Queen normally goes from mother to daughter, or some other female relative, but never goes to a mere man at all. Andor has successfully followed this pattern for a thousand years, although only as regards the monarchy. Lesser titles may be held by Lord This or Lady That without any gender prejudice that we know of. There are also a couple of nations that are very male-dominated politically, but that's only 2 out of about 17 separate nations mentioned on the map.)

Also, as you probably saw coming a mile away, there are strange things happening that suggest that it's rapidly becoming Prophecy Fulfillment Time! In other words, the Dragon Reborn might start making waves at any time, although with the way reincarnation works in Jordan's world he probably won't remember a thing about his past life right away, and other people might actually identify him before he himself had a clue he was anything special.

I figured dwelling on the background material was more important than spending all my time discussing the surface plot of this novel.

The main viewpoint character of this story is Rand al'Thor (with some chapters focusing on the viewpoints of two of his friends following an event that caused their traveling band to be split up unexpectedly). Rand is an only child. His mother died many years ago, and he lives with his father Tam al'Thor on a farm a ways west of the incredibly wholesome and peaceful rural community called Emond's Field, which is one of four towns in the very remote corner of the world called the Two Rivers. (No relation to the ancient Land of the Two Rivers which was in the Middle East and referred to the area along the Tigris and the Euphrates.)

Rand is probably 19 years old (my best calculation from data provided later) and his two best friends are Mat Cauthon, shameless practical joker and professional flirt, and Perrin Aybara, apprentice blacksmith and incredibly brawny, but so gentle, patient, honest, and utterly reliable that I never did figure out how Perrin and Mat became friends in the first place. What do they have in common? (Rand's personality falls somewhere in between, but leaning toward the Perrin side of the equation. He's no good at flirting and he's discovering that practical jokes don't seem as funny as they did a year or two ago.)

Of course, we all know this series is not going to spend the next several thousand pages concentrating on village life in Emond's Field. Emond's Field may not even get to remain the remarkably peaceful little spot on the map that it currently is, for that matter. Why, in the first few pages of the first scene of the first chapter, Rand spotted a mysterious black-cloaked rider on a black horse watching him from a distance along the road, who suddenly seemed to have vanished when he turned his head away for a minute to speak to his father and call his attention to the matter. You just know this is a bad omen! (The resemblance to the Black Riders crawling through the Shire at the start of The Lord of the Rings is definitely not a coincidence, as I instantly realized and as Jordan fully intended for me to realize. This does not mean, however, that what Rand saw will eventually turn out to be an uninspired carbon copy of a Tolkien concept.)

Two other members of the local community who are going to be with us for the long haul are female ones. One is Nynaeve al'Meara, the village Wisdom (herbalist, healer, good at predicting the weather, and elected to her position to be the chief political representative of the adult women of the village, dealing with the Mayor (apparently elected by the men) as an approximate equal. Nynaeve was the previous Wisdom's apprentice and was recently elected as her successor after her mentor died. She is remarkably young for the position, being about 24. She is also unmarried and that shows no signs of changing anytime soon despite her very attractive features. She has a very sharp tongue when she's annoyed at someone (usually a hapless male), which is most of the time. Recently she has been giving lessons on healing and herbalism to Egwene al'Vere, the Mayor's daughter, who is two years younger than Rand and whom most people seem to take for granted will someday be his wife. No one has ever said so in exactly those words, and he's never explicitly discussed the idea with her . . . he gets all tongue-tied when he tries to talk to her at all lately . . . but everyone seems to think of them as a couple. (The way this developed later in the story was not at all what I would have expected.)

Interesting things are happening in town. Two strangers arrived last night. One of them is a very well-dressed and very attractive woman who simply calls herself Moiraine, but everyone tends to assume she's some sort of high-born lady. (The Two Rivers has no local aristocracy at all. They appear to have gotten along just fine for centuries without it. The result is that the very thought of meeting a real live specimen of the only-known-from-outside-rumors-and-fairy-tales "nobility" makes everyone very excited and nervous.)

Moiraine is accompanied by a big taciturn fellow with a face that seems to have been carved out of stone. He wears a big sword (one hand seems to be constantly at the hilt, showing us what a warm and trusting disposition he has) and also has a strange cloak which appears to change colors as he moves from place to place, as if it wants to be the exact same color as whatever is in the background at any given time. His cold blue eyes seem to assess you but his stony face gives no clues of what the final verdict is. His name is Lan.

It did not come as a vast surprise, a bit later on, to learn that Moiraine was an Aes Sedai and Lan was her Warder. A Warder is a professional bodyguard who been mystically "bound" by an Aes Sedai and has sworn to follow her orders and guard her life with his own. As a result of the bond, the Warder allegedly gains superhuman stamina (can go longer without food, without sleep, et cetera, than you'd think possible) and heals faster from his wounds. Usually he has spent several years in a rigorous training program at the White Tower before the instructors decide he's sufficiently tough that he can accept an offer of bonding from an Aes Sedai. Not all of them have the stony face and perpetually grim expression that characterize Lan, however - even by Warder standards he's a little obsessive.

The most interesting thing about the first hundred pages or so (Rand's trip into town, meeting people including all of the above ones, trip back home, sudden violence and terror, etc.) was not so much what was happening so far in the plot as what we were learning about the worldview of the youngsters who grew up in the very, very sheltered environment of the Two Rivers, where no one has ever bothered to fight a war in living memory. (Putting them way out ahead of most of the known world, from what we learn later on.) They are incredibly naive about various things, and it touches our hearts. It also means that since they know so little of international politics, magical matters, the various nasty monsters that serve the forces of evil and are based way up north in the area called the Blight, etc., that it will make perfect sense for Moiraine and Lan (and occasionally other people) to lecture them at regular intervals throughout the first book in a well-meant effort to help them acquire some badly needed seasoning before they get themselves killed through sheer ignorance. Which, of course, permits Jordan to lecture us at the same time without laying it on too thick.

On the face of it, Jordan seems to be long-winded. I noticed, around page 80 I think on my first time through all those years ago, that we were still within twenty-four hours of the first scene of the first chapter, and the "real action" had barely started. But I didn't care. It was an interesting long-windedness! It was clear that Jordan had worked out all sorts of details about his imaginary world and the characters he was introducing to us, and was trying to immerse us in the tale with his storytelling approach. It was also clear that he had a good sense of humor. And some of the frightening things that happened to Rand throughout the book really left me feeling nervous myself, as I noticed at the time and greatly appreciated. In other words, he had really gotten me to empathize with Rand to a remarkable degree, and if he started out by having someone try to kill Rand on page 5 and every couple of pages thereafter, that wouldn't have happened.

In due time all the major characters packed up and left the Two Rivers, grimly aware that the forces of evil were hot on their trail in large numbers (as indeed they were). By the end of the book the good guys had achieved a victory against the Dark One's minions, but not a final victory by any stretch of the imagination. I desperately wanted more! (Fortunately, at least four more volumes were already in print at this point, so I was able to get some more.)

Which leads us naturally to the obligatory warning about how long the rest of this series is so far, with the end nowhere in sight. Be warned, if you read this and like it, you may become an addict and there's an awful lot more doses of this stuff in your future as you try to satisfy the craving! I speak from personal experience!

At this moment, there are nine novels forming consecutive installments in the Wheel of Time series, as well as one guidebook (full title: The World of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time) and one "short novel" which serves as a prequel, occurring almost twenty years before this story starts and published as part of the fantasy collection titled Legends. There is no need to concern yourself with the guidebook with the long title (colloquially called "the Guide" among diehard Wheel of Time fans to save breath) nor with the story in Legends if you don't want to. Neither of them is essential to keeping track of the ongoing plot of this book. In order, the main storyline's nine installments to date have been:

1. The Eye of the World
2. The Great Hunt
3. The Dragon Reborn
4. The Shadow Rising
5. The Fires of Heaven
6. Lord of Chaos
7. A Crown of Swords
8. Path of Daggers
9. Winter's Heart

That last one only came out in hardback on Election Day 2000 and is not yet available in paperback, but the previous eight are. One problem here is that Robert Jordan has never committed himself to a grand total for how many volumes it will take to wrap up the story. From very early on, he has frequently said such things as "at least three more volumes." I believe he said that again right after #9 was released last year. I admit that his approach is more honest than that of fellow epic fantasy writer George R.R. Martin, who said firmly "four books total" when he released A Game of Thrones (the first book of a series) and then later reneged on that and said, never mind, it will actually be six books total, around the time his second book came out. Jordan's statements in interviews tell us that he knows exactly how the Grand Finale is supposed to go at the end of the last book, and thus by implication he knows exactly which characters will still be alive at that point and all present in one place at one time for this finale, but apparently he's having some trouble working them through everything they individually need to accomplish before that climactic moment can logically occur.

As a general rule Robert Jordan tries to give each volume some sense of achievement at the end: One or more real problems have been resolved, although the Great Big Problems of the entire story are naturally still lurking out there in some form. I thought the first six volumes did pretty well at that. However, #7 was less than totally satisfying from that point of view, and #8 was a blatant failure in that regard and made many true fans extremely unhappy. Fortunately, #9 made up for a lot and finally left us with a real feeling of having watched a major, major, MAJOR victory achieved, and there are high hopes that he is finally nearing the end of the series. I note that the character list by #9 has gotten very, very long (and Jordan has never bothered to include one at the front or back of his novels, so we are left to our own devices) but that is not a problem in this first volume, so don't be scared off by the thought at the very beginning.

Many of the names of people and places will look at least vaguely familiar if you are well-read in various types of legends and mythology. This often leads people to the rather shallow assumption that superficial resemblances between names of characters, and other aspects of things described in the Wheel of Time, with preexisting stories by other people or out of anonymous legend, are "proof" that Jordan is a mere plagiarist without a touch of true creativity in his soul. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There are names that closely resemble the names of the key players in the Arthurian Cycle, but this is not a novel of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. There are things that look like distorted memories of some of the interesting people and events of the 20th Century, but this is not a post-nuclear war novel. There are evil monsters called Trollocs whose various tribes have names that look like misspelled versions of various modern words for nasty creatures of myth and legend, but this is not a humor novel devoted to puns. There are common elements between the first scenes of this novel and the first scenes of The Fellowship of the Ring, but this novel is not a painfully close copy of Tolkien's work after the principal characters leave home and start having adventures, nor is the whole problem going to wrapped up and the world saved by having someone hike to a volcano, toss in a magic ring to destroy it, and pow! No more problem! (Jordan has freely admitted that he deliberately started out the story with scenes in a nice small rural town to give it a certain Tolkienesque feel, but he's not exactly the first post-Tolkien fantasy author to do that and he won't be the last. It's not a felony.) There are token nods to other myths and legends from various corners of the real world, but if anyone thinks he can read a lot of old fairy tales and such and then write a series as brilliantly done (for the most part) as the Wheel of Time that contains elements of them all, he is welcome to try and prove it!

Note: I once read a claim that in all his plays, the great William Shakespeare appears to have invented one plot from scratch and borrowed all the others from historical events, old legends, previous plays by other people, or any combination of the above. Does this mean he was an uninspired hack who only repeated what better writers had already done and thus deserves no respect? By no means! He took certain plot elements and other details as a springboard and then breathed new life into them with his distinctive style and gift for characterization! Anyone who wanted to compete with him was free to do the exact same thing and see if their plays became as famous as his - but somehow that never happened!

I have been active (off and on) in online discussion forums devoted to this series for several years now, but I strongly urge you not to go looking for them until such time as you have read all the existing books in the series so as to avoid being hit over the head with zillions of Spoilers from all sides as people reminisce about what they liked best in Book 5, or what were the worst aspects of the plot threads in Book 8, and so forth. However, to try to illustrate the impact this book (and its successors) made upon me, I have a confession to make.

The Eye of the World enjoys the great honor of being the only novel I have ever parodied in the form of a script putatively meant to be illlustrated in comic book form and then presented to the world by Mad magazine or some similar publication. I mercilessly made fun of every flaw I could find in the plot and satirized the principal characters as best I could, including distorting their names in the best Mad tradition, but it was a labor of love for all of that. You don't imagine I would have taken all the time to do that for free (nobody was paying me to post each installment on a couple of Wheel of Time-themed Message Boards as I wrote it, but I did anyway) if I didn't feel a deep and abiding interest in the original material, do you?

You may be wondering why I've waited until my 78th Opinion to tell you all this if the Wheel of Time is my favorite ongoing fantasy series. The answer, of course, is simple: There were already dozens of other opinions posted on this book, and I saw no point in disappearing into the middle of the heap with, let's say, ten ratings on this opinion if I had reviewed it during my first couple of weeks here. I have now reached the point where I have high hopes of making a giant leap to the top of the list and staying there for a long time to come, because a fair number of people have been sufficiently interested by my previous book reviews to make a habit of checking out my new ones at regular intervals. Of course, if this ends up buried in the middle of the heap with about ten ratings I'm going to have egg on my face . . . :)

Recommended: Yes