Of course you've already read The Eye of the World, the first volume of the Wheel of Time fantasy epic. Otherwise why on earth would you want to read a review of the second installment in the series? Be warned that the Wheel of Time is very much a single ongoing story, not just a bunch of semi-independent novels with a common setting as some series prove to be, and therefore reading the installments out of order on your first pass would be an exercise in frustration. This opinion will assume that you recently completed the previous book, enjoyed it, and are now wondering whether or not to press forward with the next one. As long as you're reconciled to the idea that there are already nine volumes in print and "at least three more" are anticipated before the story is completed, my answer is Yes!

There! I said I recommended it if you liked the first one as much as I did, and are willing to press onward with a very long series. That ought to settle it for you. Do I really need to say anything more on the topic?

[Pause for the audience's reaction]

Hmmm. Some heckler sitting in the back row is insisting that my first paragraph just wasn't enough to help her make a really informed decision on whether or not to actually spend her precious dollars on this volume when there are at least ten thousand other fantasy novels she could be reading instead.

Fussy, fussy, fussy! All right, Ms. Heckler, I'll try to give you a bit more detail. (On the other hand, anyone who is perfectly satisfied already and wants to skip down to the bottom of this opinion right now and just click on "Most Helpful" on your way out is welcome to do so! Really! I won't mind!) Be warned that I'm going to skip around from point to point without rhyme or reason, because this book is not nearly so linear as the first one, where most of the time we were seeing Rand al'Thor's viewpoint, and even when we weren't the other viewpoint characters were essentially moving "in parallel" with Rand as all of them, temporarily separated into smaller groups, kept moving eastward toward an arranged rendezvous in the city of Caemlyn. This time, however, we see characters running back and forth all over the map, and I have absolutely no intention of trying to give you a blow-by-blow account of where everyone goes and why.

First, let's stress one of the things that sets the Wheel of Time's setting above the common herd of fantasy adventures. This series makes a real effort to get away from the old stereotyped roles in fantasy where the menfolk get to do nearly all of the exciting stuff (swordplay, high-powered magic, commanding men in battle, surviving assassination attempts, rescuing friends from fates worse than death, and whatnot) and the womenfolk only get to cheer them on from the sidelines, be rescued from the aforementioned fates worse than death, nurse the guys back to health after they are almost killed in glorious battles with fiendish adversaries, and so forth. It is true that in the nations of the "known world" shown on the map at the front of the book, i.e. everything on the west side of the huge north-south mountain range known as the Spine of the World, the military profession tends to be exclusively masculine as one would expect in what are basically medieval cultures. However, Robert Jordan made a couple of changes to spice things up. One is that the general absence of women from military roles (until the off-the-map culture of the Aiel gets more attention in later books) does not mean that they are heavily discriminated against in all the other significant professions in most nations. Even the inheritance patterns of royal and noble houses generally seem to go from ranking parent (of either gender) to eldest child (of either gender) rather than power automatically passing in patrilineal fashion from father to son and bypassing the ladies entirely (although there are some exceptions, including the nation of Andor where only women can hold the throne but lesser titles appear to be non-gender-biased).

The other, more obvious change is that Jordan gave women a monopoly on "legitimate" magic-using. As you will recall from TEOTW, both men and women are capable of inheriting the genetic ability to "channel" the One Power, but for over three thousand years the situation has been such that any man who actually does this regularly will gradually go stark raving mad. Sometimes within a few months, sometimes over a period of several years, but inevitably going downhill until he's about as safe to approach as an atom bomb with a hair trigger.

In the first book, only one female character (other than a few seen in one-scene cameos) actually exercised serious power, magical or otherwise, as the plot rolled along. Moiraine Sedai. However, in this book we have a lot more scenes from female viewpoint characters than we previously did, including both Egwene and Nynaeve, two young women from Emond's Field (five major characters all come from that town, including Rand al'Thor, central character in this epic) who both turned out to be natural channelers and were taken in tow by Moiraine and are now being taken to Tar Valon for training in how to use their gifts effectively. In Nynaeve's case we have a fascinating scene that shows us how one goes from being a "novice" to an "Accepted" in the Aes Sedai - sort of like the transition from "freshman" to "grad student." Before you can become an Accepted, you have to run through a set of three huge rings that give you visions (or are they "real" experiences?) of very traumatic things that might happen to you. The trick is to force yourself to turn your back on things that "need" to be done in favor of voluntarily coming back. It's more complicated than it sounds, but at least it reassures us that people who stay in the training program long enough to eventually become full "sisters" of the Aes Sedai are not weak-willed milksops.

(However, they are often snobbish self-righteous manipulative sexist secretive bullies, but at least they're not weak-willed milksops! Now isn't that comforting to know? I will admit that there is some variation in specific cases.)

Somewhere in the middle of this book, there is a scene at the White Tower where Logain, a False Dragon who appeared very briefly in TEOTW but was the subject of considerable talk, makes a cameo. By now he has been put on trial at the Tower, convicted, and "gentled" as the Aes Sedai euphemistically call it, which in this case means that his ability to channel the one power has been removed by a process involving several Aes Sedai using their own channeling ability in a particular way to permanently change him. By ancient tradition, once a male channeler has been "gentled" he is not subjected to any further penalties for his misdeeds, even if thousands of people died in battles as a result of a civil war he started, which seems to be the case with Logain. Logain appeared to be extremely depressed and aimless as he wandered around the gardens of the White Tower, which is apparently dead normal for "gentled" males follwing the psychological trauma of losing the access to the One Power which they previously were addicted to. But (I asked myself brightly) if he's really just a helpless depressive case now, why show him at all? Could it be that somewhere in the depths of the series someone will find a way to reactivate his currently-erased talent for some obscure reason I can't guess at the moment? (I won't tell you whether I was right or not - I'm just pointing out that Jordan was already impressing me as a guy who plans far, far ahead, so that a very minor character in one volume may prove to be a more important character in a later one).

Of course you recall that it was established in TEOTW that the phrase "The Great Hunt" refers to the "open to all comers!" Quest for the legendary Horn of Valere, which apparently hasn't been positively sighted by any human being for thousands of years. Every few centuries someone announces that the Great Hunt is being called again, and hundreds (or thousands, or tens of thousands?) of would-be heroes travel to a certain spot (lately, the great seaport of Illian on the south coast) to take the oath of Hunters of the Horn. Then they ride out in whatever direction they see fit and if they have interesting adventures along the way, they will try to get a bard to write songs about them and immortalize their heroic deeds etc. It sounds quite similar to the "Quest for the Holy Grail" concept in the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, with the exception that the Grail quest only lasted a matter of years while the Great Hunt for the Horn of Valere has been happening (albeit sporadically) for millennia with no success.

We were previously told that the Great Hunt was being called again, and in one of life's little ironies, Rand al'Thor and his friends ended up finding it by sheer accident at the end of the first book. It had spent the last few thousand years hidden away in a place which they only happened to visit for another reason entirely! However, early in this book it is snatched out from under their noses during a raid by the forces of evil against the palace in which they have spent the past month (since the end of the first book), and now they have to hunt it down all over again, putting some real effort into it this time! There are legends that blowing the Horn in time of need will summon up legendary heroes from past ages to fight on your behalf in a battle, but there also seems to be a hint that it won't work (or will do something terrible to you perhaps?) if you try to sound the Horn when your motives are less than pure - such as trying to impress everyone with how heroic and resourceful you are to be able to do such a thing. This creates a fair amount of suspense at various moments - will the Horn be blown, who will blow it, and will the Horn consider that his motives are sufficently pure at the time? Stay tuned for further details - I'm not going to ruin the way this problem was finally resolved. (I will say that it caught me a bit by surprise in the way it finally developed.)

Meanwhile hero Rand al'Thor has accepted the idea that he is developing into a male channeler. However, he rejects the notion suggested by Moiraine and her old buddy Siuan Sanche (now the Amyrlin Seat, i.e. the CEO of the Aes Sedai) that he is in fact the long-prophecied Dragon Reborn. This would require that he do lots and lots of channeling and hope that he is able to save the world at the right time and place (whenever that would come up - no one has published a precise timetable of upcoming battles with the Dark One and his servants) before he goes totally insane. His preferred strategy would be to never channel the One Power again and thus stave off the madness indefinitely. No man has ever succeeded with that strategy before (in the long run - although a couple of years of very little power use has been known to happen) - but he figures that trying it beats any of the alternatives. Inasmuch as voluntarily asking the Red Ajah to "gentle" him would be tantamount to saying "please give me a case of terminal depression that will probably cause me to commit suicide within the year."

Meanwhile an invading army has landed on the west coast of this continent. (The continent is often called Randland by Wheel of Time fans, since Jordan has never been thoughtful enough to provide a name for it within the text of his books.) Over a thousand years ago, the direct ancestor of the rulers of this "Seanchan" empire from the the far hemisphere was the ruler of the "known world" (the countries of Randland which are shown on the map at the front) and the Seanchan position is that a gap of a mere thousand years does not damage the validity of their title to being the rightful rulers of everything in sight. The Seanchan also have a radically different approach to the "proper role" of female channelers in their society than the one that has developed in Randland over the past few millennia, and one of our characters gets a harsh look at this system firsthand; but I'm not going to explain it to you. Read the book!

Considering that the title of the book plainly indicates that the Great Hunt (for the Horn of Valere) is the central point of the plot, it's a trifle disappointing that nothing further will be done with the horn in the third book of the series . . . or the fourth . . . or the fifth . . . or the sixth . . . or the seventh . . . or the eighth . . . or even the ninth (which is as far as the story has progressed thus far). Having hunted it down in this book, we will see some of the good guys return it to the White Tower in Tar Valon for safekeeping early in the next volume, and then the whole concept is put "on hold" indefinitely until Robert Jordan has a reason to bring it out of storage and let the heroes put it to good use again, probably in the very last volume, whenever that will be published.

On the plus side, I suppose I should admit that since the discovery and new location of the Horn will be kept very quiet, throughout the remainder of the series our running characters will bump into one "Hunter of the Horn" or another at regular intervals, people who are poking their noses into some of the unlikeliest places in pursuit of one vague rumor or another. Some of those hunters will even become running characters themselves, for good or for evil, so you could argue that in a vague sort of way the Horn will indeed be exercising an influence on the plot development even if it's not actually being used for anything for at least seven books in a row after this one (and I believe it gets exactly one brief onstage appearance during those next seven books).

One problem with feeding you a little data about plot threads and cultural trends is that it's likely to make you think the only reason I ever read a book is to enjoy the complicated plots and cultures an author has brewed up. Actually, the major factor is the simple issue of enjoyment: Did I enjoy the first page? The first chapter? The first hundred pages? The general experience of reading the entire book? After I finally finished it, was I hungry for more or was I just relieved that I had finally polished it off? Some authors create elaborate structures and put me to sleep. Others can deal with very common plot ideas and "mundane" cultures (either writing novels set in the modern world, or set in a generic Medieval Fantasy world, or some other extremely familiar setting) and have me enthralled because of the way they tell the story. Robert Jordan actually makes me pretty happy on both counts, which is why I keep buying the silly things as they come out.

This was more disjointed than most of my book reviews, but then most of my book reviews are of "stand-alone" novels or else the first installment of a series (along with the occasional work of nonfiction for seasoning). Trying to say things that will pique the interest of those who have already commenced the series, without ruining the surprises of this book and its successors for anyone, is a difficult proposition. If you are one of my target audience (already enjoyed Book 1) I hope you found this more useful than otherwise despite my efforts at a balancing act :)

Recommended: Yes