A Memory of Light Thoughts

 Happy New Year!

So it’s New Year’s Day, but also important is that tomorrow is my parents’ anniversary.

Also! I saw The King’s Man and I can’t help but think that the basic plot is how the story of an Assassin’s Creed story might go: a shadowy cabal of villains starting a historical war to meet their own goals, and the heroes go around covertly trying to kill them and foiling their plans.

Anyway let’s talk a bit about Wheelie of Time. I didn’t actually prepare for this Note as much as I should have, given I did have time, but it was a rough week so I’m just going to gush over how much I liked the last book.

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Wheel of Time and Concluding a Long Series

I don’t have much point or plan in this other than to talk about how much I enjoyed A Memory of Light, the final book in the long-running Wheel of Time book series. And for the record, I have been critical of some of the previous installments but I powered through them because I desperately wanted to know how it all ended. And this week I finally did.

It felt like a pretty satisfying ending to me. Just about every character and plot thread got a resolution. All the ones that I kept track of, anyway. I’ll admit that I could not follow every single character and plot line, so it’s entirely possible that there’s a contingent of fans out there who hate the ending because their favorite character, some random Aes Sedai who wanders in front of Rand on her way across the street to buy cookies or something, doesn’t get an ending that fits her character. Considering the loads and loads of characters, that as many got as good endings as they did seems an achievement to me.

There is also a lot of pressure to deliver something big. We’re told again and again that this will be the Last Battle, Tarmon Gai’don, in which the Dragon Reborn and his forces will fight the armies of the Dark One, and all of the Forsaken have been trying to one-up each other to get the top spot on the roster for this fight. Admittedly, I haven’t finished any other book serieses with this many books of build-up (although whenever Dresden Files finishes it will get there) but I’ve noticed that there’s a tendency nowadays to try to make it so that the final battles of fantasy sagas are… minimized?

I think it’s in part because many authors feel like they can’t do big battles justice, but it’s disappointing. Many times the battle happens just off-page, or there’s something that comes along and just diffuses the situation before it really gets too bad. Again, I think back to the Soldier Son trilogy by Robin Hobb in which the colonialism conflict is solved because… the colonizers find some gold, so instead of invading indigenous territory they go back to their own (which they stole from other indigenous people) for a gold rush to last an unspecified amount of time. And while sometimes there’s a point being made by the non-battle going on, it still feels a bummer to anyone who wanted to see something big. Like I get the ending of American Gods but I would have liked to have seen more of the Old and New Gods facing off.

Sanderson and Jordan do not have that problem here. Basically all of the last book is a battle, and there’s enough back-and-forth, and awesome moments that stick with you. When characters die, it feels like it means something, not like they’re getting killed off for shock value or because the author hates a character. It kind of reminds me of The Last Olympian that way, actually. And when a character narrowly avoids death, again, it feels like something that’s happening because it makes sense in the story, not because the author decided to spare a fan favorite character.

There’s a really long chapter titled “The Last Battle” which takes up a large chunk of the book, dedicated to many of the key movements during the battle. And one would think that it feels really long, except it doesn’t? I kept forgetting that the chapter wasn’t changing. I just thought that it felt organic that it kept going on like this because it felt like I was in the moment.

And EVERY time someone goes to fight Demandred, I took a deep breath because it felt like a very important boss fight and I knew it would be a difficult thing to get right, and I wasn’t sure who was going to manage it.

I didn’t know what was going to happen in this battle–I had a feeling the good guys would come out on top, but I didn’t know how many would live, and I didn’t know what the consequences of the victory would be. I think that may be key to a very good conclusion: making it so that you don’t necessarily telegraph everything that’s going to happen, but still make it so that the endings don’t come out of nowhere. That the characters’ arcs feel organic and they make sense and end in a way that’s not there to shock readers.

I only wish it didn’t take 14 books to get here.

There were some things at the end that I think could have been resolved more clearly, and I wondered if Robert Jordan had been around to write them that they would have gotten more detailed conclusions. And I don’t know. Some of it is purposefully ambiguous, I think. But I also think that had he been around the series might have stretched another five books or so, at least, and with more and more multiplying characters and subplots that would have made it very difficult to wrap up. It took three books to conclude what he had already–Jordan intended the twelfth book to be the last. I can’t imagine how much longer it’d be if he kept going.

I am very happy with what we got. I wish we had gotten there sooner, and that the previous few books had the same level of urgency, action, and plot development as the last three–especially A Memory of Light which was pretty darn awesome.

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