Crossroads of Twilight

I've now finished Crossroads of Twilight, Book Ten in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. It's mind-boggling how little could actually happen in an 820-page book. However, I think it went a long way toward redeeming the past few volumes of the series, and may set up a good final push to the promised Book Twelve finale.

Let me explain. Rand al'Thor, the Dragon Reborn, is supposed to fight the Dark One at the Last Battle. Most fear that he will bring a second Breaking of the World, and the prophecies certainly speak of lots of chaos and destruction. However, it seems evident that Rand himself is trying to build things, and there's some evidence he might bring back much of the Age of Legends. In Lord of the Rings, Tolkein declared the Third Age over largely by fiat: The Elves left Middle-Earth because "their day was over," the the end of the threat from Mordor removed the enemy who had previously dominated the world.

In Rand's world, however, actual changes are happening in the course of the trilogy. Take all the bondings between people who can channel that have happened in seemingly random plot threads: Alanna/Rand, Logain and those Aes Sedai, Cadsuane's Aes Sedai and certain Ash'aman. This sets a stage for certain things that happen near the end of CoT that both point to a serious social change regarding the One Power. Egwene's plans for the future of the Aes Sedai also point in this direction, and I'm starting to suspect that the whole "Bowl of the Winds" mission was as much about discovering the Kin as it was getting Mat to the Seanchan.

It'll be interesting to see how much of the seemingly random milling around ultimately points toward some key developments along these lines, which given the fact changing the world was always a key point of the Dragon's future is clearly important to Jordan's vision. I still think the last few books have been weaker than earlier installments, though, just because Jordan seems to have run out of discoveries. The series that early on hit us with the World of Dreams, those alternate realities from The Great Hunt, Rhuidean, a seemingly invincible army of the dead via the Horn of Valere, the Ways, and so on has turned pretty much everything into a plot device. An important meeting of the Hall of the Tower doesn't have nearly the same impact as Rand's decision to blow the horn at Falme or the same drama of his announcement to the Tairens in the Stone in The Shadow Rising.

At the same time, key characters, such as Loial and Thom Merrilin, seem to be in storage waiting for the plot to catch up to where they're going to do the things everyone expects them to do, emphasizing just how much the overall battle against the Shadow is spinning its wheels. I'd be surprised if Jordan's original plan called for resurrecting Forsaken, or if he just needed some significant enemies hanging around. However, certain things from the end of the book made it seem like things are finally about to start moving - at the very least, there's been a directional shift from different groups splintering to groups coming back together or uniting in new ways. And that leads to interesting possibilities that make me look forward to the next installment.