The Eye of the World, chapters 26 and 27, in which there is a shocking and unpredictable death

We come at last to the end of the beginning: this book is 782 pages long, which means the middle is page 391.  To recap for those who fell asleep sometime in the late 1990s when I'm pretty sure I started these posts: Rand al'Thor is a Simple Farmboy (adopted by a master swordsman) who was born at the right time for a prophecy, so he and his besties and his not-girlfriend Egwene (the real protagonist) and his neighbourhood witch have run away from home, under guidance of a wizard and her bodyguard, to escape the hordes of the devil and take refuge in Wizardopolis.  They are also accompanied by a crotchety old bard who has been helpful but formed no close personal bonds with any of our cast members, so I'm sure he'll live to see the end of the book.  Everyone has magic powers and the devil haunts the three boys' dreams.  Girls are scary but okay as long as they know their place.  Our Heroes got split up but are making their separate ways toward the same city.  Ballads are cool, and so are apostrophes.

Is there anything of real substance in the last 400 pages that I actually missed out on, there?  Things that a reader would be confused not knowing if they jumped in now?  I suppose I could detail more prophecies, or the specifics of their magic, or speculate on exactly what 'the sundering' was, but honestly we've only been told fragments of those things already, and they're mostly easily intuited stuff that would take the average reader about four sentences to pick up on.  'The dark lord was fought once before and sealed away but some of his power leaks through and that's how he's able to have armies of minions'--well, fricking obviously.  In terms of Epic Fantasy, that's like saying 'gold can be exchanged for goods and services' or 'none of the protagonists are black'.  There are certain things a reader learns to take as given.

The Eye of theWorld: p. 378--413

Chapter Twenty-Six: Whitebridge

On the boat still, Thom the gleeman and Mat have exactly the same conversation they had last chapter, about Thom taking his 'pretend the kids are your apprentices' story too seriously.  Rand is shocked to hear Mat speak matter-of-factly about the possibility the rest of their party is dead, but then a voice pops into his head asking if he thinks this is all a cheerful fireside story:

The heroes find the treasure and defeat the villain and live happily ever after? Some of his stories don'tend that way. Sometimes even heroes die. Are you a hero, Rand al'Thor? Are you a hero, sheepherder?

FORESHADOW FORESHADOW.  They turn a bend in the river and finally see the White Bridge, a huge smooth white-stone bridge with implausibly thin supports and no seams, and one end in the town of Whitebridge.  We're told it looks like glass but it's never slippery, and it's apparently indestructible, a remnant of the Age of Legends,when apparently Aes Sedai just did this kind of thing regularly.

There's a lot of generic ship-crew-work described, the captain fires the token sailor we hate (who kept trying to get rid of Rand and company), and gives them back the money they paid for fares, plus some, because of all the morale-boosting work Thom did.  (Silver coins from Moiraine: recovered.  Oh no, our heroes almost actually lost something.)  The captain wants them to keep sailing with him, down to some bard competition in Illian, but Rand insists they have friends to meet nearby.  Thom warns them all to be stealthy and cautious, and then completely forgets that his patchwork cloak marks him as a gleeman, the most exciting thing to ever happen to any of these peasants in their whole lives.  (I'm not clear on why gleemen are such a big deal.  Storytelling is important stuff, but folks in this book act like Thom is one in a million.  It played much better in Backwoodston back in chapter two than it does here at a major shipping junction.)

Times are hard in fantasyland:

Hawkers [...] tried to interest the passersby in their skimpy trays of fruit or vegetables, but none was getting much interest. Shops selling food had the same pitiful displays of produce Rand remembered from Baerlon. Even the fishmongers displayed only small piles of small fish, for all the boats on the river.

I... no, that's the opposite of how famine works.  If the best anyone can get is 'hardly anything' then even really unimpressive cabbages are going for heaps of cash and no one can keep them in stock.  People are desperate for any fish at all--meat; real meat!  The only reason for people to ignore the food for sale is if they already have enough themselves, which they can't if the grocers can't get any better than this.  What are these people eating?  (Please say it's tourists.  It's time for something proper scary; let's have a town full of desperate folks eating adventurers.)

Thom leads them to an inn where they can decide on a course of action.

Rand wondered idly if all innkeepers were fat and losing their hair.

It take some chutzpah to write interchangeable self-parodying stereotypes and then have your characters comment on how These People Are All The Same.  After some more meandering, Thom shakes news out of the innkeeper that Logain, the guy who said he was the Dragon Reborn, has been captured by Aes Sedai and they're taking him to Tar Valon via Caemlyn, where the Queen lives.  (These people have a queen?  But--wait, is this feudal?  Are they serfs?  Do they pay taxes?  Are they granted military protection?  Who governs the territory around Two Rivers?  I thought every town was an independent body in a semi-anarchic city-state sort of model.  You can't just stick a queen on top of that and just act like it makes sense!  Why was the first concern of Two Rivers not to inform their marquess or baron or something?  HOW DOES THIS WORLD FUNCTION.)

We also hear that a proclamation has gone out asking everyone to sign up for book two--I mean, swear their lives to the Great Hunt for the Horn of Valere,which must be found before the final battle with the devil.  At last, Thom carefully describes the rest of Our Heroes to the innkeeper, asking if anyone has seen them, and the innkeeper does a full about-face and tells him to literally get out of town.  Apparently first a locally-known 'madman' asked about them, and then a Fade started appearing out of nowhere to ask people about the three farmboys, although by cleverly keeping its hood up all the time it prevented anyone from noticing that it was an eyeless hellspawn brimming with evil powers.  Our Heroes disagree further about whether they should go to Caemlyn as planned or continue to Illian, which Thom would have us believe is the Greatest City Ever, and Mat is near to shanking him with his Evil Knife when that one sailor we hate arrives in the inn and they have to book it quickly.

Thom swiftly exposits to the boys that the reason he's trying to keep them away from Tar Valon is because he was too slow (busy with work) to save his nephew Owyn, who "got in trouble" and within a few years "you could say Aes Sedai killed him", which Rand figures means Owyn had Illegal Boy Magic.  Thom, who is no Abed Nadir, doesn't seem to realise that giving us his poignant backstory is like turning both keys simultaneously on his personal doomsday device, but he disappears briefly and returns in a black cloak that freaks Rand and Mat right out.  They make their way out of town, and half a page later the actual Fade shows up in the middle of a marketplace.  Thom rushes it, daggers out, and yells for them to run, then screams a lot in blue light while everyone everywhere runs away.  Outside town, Rand and Mat agree to follow Thom's instructions (go to a Caemlyn inn called the Queen's Blessing), and off they go, harrowed by the series' first Named Character Death.

Today's aesop: If you have to shoehorn in a character's sad backstory in the last two pages before their death in order to give it any kind of emotional impact, you should probably workshop that character a bit more.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Shelter from the Storm

Back to Perrin, Egwene, Wolfbrother the Brother of Wolves, and the Irish Rovers Travellers.  Because carelessness and laziness are not in any way problematically coded for Travellers and Romani (I'm not clear if Jordan knew the difference) we are told that they make slow time, never getting moving until mid-morning and sometimes stopping mid-afternoon if they find a nice spot.  Le sigh.

There's actually a huge amount of exoticism going on with the Travellers, who are one and all "joyful on their feet", constantly dancing or singing or otherwise making music.  Sweet Non-Allegorical Lion-Jesus, I just caught sight of a paragraph two pages later where it's still talking about how every last one of them "went about a myriad domestic chores as if they had not a care in the world".  The kindest guess at authorial intent here is that the Travellers are analogous to Tolkien's elves, who were much the same in their song and dance, except that with the elves it was supposed to highlight how otherworldly and implausible they were, so here, applied to a particular human culture, it serves more to Other them as shallow flights of fancy with none of the serious thoughts or concerns that weigh down Our Heroes.  And Aram, with whom Egwene spends much of her time dancing, is thus the most sexualised man we've encountered so far, if only because it's the first time a named girl has been blatantly attracted to anyone.  (Egwene's belligerent sexual tension with Rand does not count, since we've seen exactly zero forms of healthy human affection pass between them.)  Oh, joy, and then on the next page Perrin sees some Traveller women dancing for the first time and he gets the most turgid boner of his entire life.  Othered, exoticised, and sexualised.  I'm like a goddamn prophet.

Perrin tries to talk Egwene out of enjoying herself (and at least nominally Perrin is worried about bringing trollocs down on a pack of pacifists) but she counters that this might be their last chance to do so before Wizardopolis.  There is much distress about pacifism and Perrin insistently carrying his axe, and he's increasingly aware of the thoughts of their wolf entourage as well, et cetera et cetera no plot development.

Perrin hasn't had any devil dreams for some days, but at last he does again, and in it Ba'alzamon incinerates his wolf guardian and throws a raven into his head, declaring "I mark you mine".  He wakes, screaming (as are the wolves), and Elyas finally declares it's time for them to leave.

We're more than halfway through this book and pretty much every plot arc has been 'our heroes arrive somewhere comfy, our heroes try to settle in, the devil Does A Thing, our heroes decide they must run faster'.  Please, for the love of sugar gliders and slow lorises, let them get to Tar Valon soon.

They have a rushed but extended farewell with literally everyone in camp, Perrin gets more boners from hugs from every girl (twice), Egwene refuses to stay with Aram, and when Raen gives them their formal farewell, Elyas replies formally as well, swearing that someone will find the song and it will be sung soon: "As it once was, so shall it be again, world without end."  That... is a really weird choice of moment to toss in a King James Bible reference.  The Travellers echo it back, and off they go, with Elyas gruffly explaining he was just being polite about the ceremony.

The wolves bring Elyas up to speed on Perrin's dream (they call the devil Heartfang, pretty badass) and they try to explain to Perrin that he'll only be safe when he accepts them, but Perrin makes bad decisions and forces the wolves out of his brain fully.  There's a final gender joke, when Perrin asks Egwene what she was always talking to Aram's grandmother about ('advice on how to be a woman', she says, which I assume in context means flirting and maybe some HJ pointers), and he says no one needs advice on how to be a man, which Egwene says is why they're so bad at it.

Ahah.

Instead, I share with you an exchange related to me via ye olde tumblre, between a girl and her mother, bemoaning menstruation.

Mother: You're not really a woman until you've got blood on every pair of pants you own. 

Girl: What about women who don't have periods? 

Mother: I didn't say it had to be your own.

Next week: More Nynaeve, no Rand.  Still some Perrin, but I'll take what I can get.