To me it's two different things - Edit 1
Before modification by DomA at 26/09/2010 02:05:16 AM
Brandon justified his decisions last year with two things. By focussing the book on Rand and Egwene, he could bring their stories further, and so reach more satisfying climaxes, and he thought it would result in a more faster paced book. The other reason is that they were afraid to postpone the book and disregard their promise to release something last year, and it so happens Brandon wasn't far along enough in Mat/Perrin's storylines in spring 2009 to publish anything where the four storylines would progress simultaneously anyway.
That's not much to do with what I find annoying. What I find annoying is that Brandon decided to throw overboard Jordan's style of chronological storytelling, which had a purpose in a story as complex as his. The structure of TGS is botched, a mess. So much so, that Steven Cooper was never able to come up with a really satisfying chronology... You have Tylee's scene happening twenty days after Malden in the prologue, followed up by a Faile scene happening in the afternoon of Malden, then you have Tuon, soon to be involved in Rand's storyline, with a scene happening just a few days after Tylee's first scene in the prologue, pushed to the middle of the book, when Rand's storyline is way ahead of that. This is just bad writing. Brandon sacrificed coherence to get his fast paced POV switches, disregarded Jordan's style and timeline rules to be able to put a Tuon chapter where he wished etc. After the decision to split the book was made, Brandon had very little time left to organize the material and fill the gaps, and it shows.
He doesn't have that excuse for TOM. It's OK he returns to Mat and Perrin, but what's not OK with me at all is if he starts returning to Rand/Egwene right at the start of the book, or puttin a Graendal scene that ought to have been in TGS in the first place totally out of order, because he finds it convenient. There are limits to how much he can screw with the timelines and retain the WOT style of writing (and story lines coherence), and it seems Brandon is going over this limit. It's a bit frightening, because TGS's timeline, as simple a book as it was, was really hard to follow in places (those who thought it easy usually were completely wrong about the timelines...), and TOM is supposed to be a much more complex book with many more POV characters and story lines. We're gonna loose all our greater perspective if events start happening out of order left and right, and that greater perspective is always something Jordan made sure to keep (it's one thing that made WOT great for theories), leaving many, many time markers everywhere, so we could follow (Brandon barely used any in TGS, it's part of the problem that we could rarely tell how Egwene, Tuon and Rand and their timeline related to one another). This might work in another series, but that's not WOT. Not to me, at least.
Perhaps it will be a lot less messy in TOM itself, but the prologue at least lets fear the worst in this respect.
Brandon could perfectly have split the books as he did and still retain chronological coherence. He screwed it not by not having the four main storylines happen in parallel, he did by not respecting Jordan's style that minor POV characters that crossed with a main storyline ought to appear at the proper place in the chronology, not anywhere in the book. In Jordan's hands, shennanigans like having a Tylee scene set 20 days later than the first Perrin scene, when both characters belong to the same meta-storyline is something that would never happened (and now we see why: Perrin's TGS scenes were "prequels" written by Brandon, and creating contiuity problems like having Perrin still at Malden, when in KOD he was setting to leave right away and it's Tylee who remained behind to deal with the Shaido. Another was the fact Perrin was already aware of the Travelling problem which Brandon had him learn about again in TGS. By all appearances, Jordan planned to have Perrin reappear in the AMOL prologue with the dream scene, which appears to be set weeks later, coinciding with Tuon's return, Tylee's scene and Mat's first appearance.... In short, a structure that made sense, unlike Brandon's)
That's not much to do with what I find annoying. What I find annoying is that Brandon decided to throw overboard Jordan's style of chronological storytelling, which had a purpose in a story as complex as his. The structure of TGS is botched, a mess. So much so, that Steven Cooper was never able to come up with a really satisfying chronology... You have Tylee's scene happening twenty days after Malden in the prologue, followed up by a Faile scene happening in the afternoon of Malden, then you have Tuon, soon to be involved in Rand's storyline, with a scene happening just a few days after Tylee's first scene in the prologue, pushed to the middle of the book, when Rand's storyline is way ahead of that. This is just bad writing. Brandon sacrificed coherence to get his fast paced POV switches, disregarded Jordan's style and timeline rules to be able to put a Tuon chapter where he wished etc. After the decision to split the book was made, Brandon had very little time left to organize the material and fill the gaps, and it shows.
He doesn't have that excuse for TOM. It's OK he returns to Mat and Perrin, but what's not OK with me at all is if he starts returning to Rand/Egwene right at the start of the book, or puttin a Graendal scene that ought to have been in TGS in the first place totally out of order, because he finds it convenient. There are limits to how much he can screw with the timelines and retain the WOT style of writing (and story lines coherence), and it seems Brandon is going over this limit. It's a bit frightening, because TGS's timeline, as simple a book as it was, was really hard to follow in places (those who thought it easy usually were completely wrong about the timelines...), and TOM is supposed to be a much more complex book with many more POV characters and story lines. We're gonna loose all our greater perspective if events start happening out of order left and right, and that greater perspective is always something Jordan made sure to keep (it's one thing that made WOT great for theories), leaving many, many time markers everywhere, so we could follow (Brandon barely used any in TGS, it's part of the problem that we could rarely tell how Egwene, Tuon and Rand and their timeline related to one another). This might work in another series, but that's not WOT. Not to me, at least.
Perhaps it will be a lot less messy in TOM itself, but the prologue at least lets fear the worst in this respect.
Brandon could perfectly have split the books as he did and still retain chronological coherence. He screwed it not by not having the four main storylines happen in parallel, he did by not respecting Jordan's style that minor POV characters that crossed with a main storyline ought to appear at the proper place in the chronology, not anywhere in the book. In Jordan's hands, shennanigans like having a Tylee scene set 20 days later than the first Perrin scene, when both characters belong to the same meta-storyline is something that would never happened (and now we see why: Perrin's TGS scenes were "prequels" written by Brandon, and creating contiuity problems like having Perrin still at Malden, when in KOD he was setting to leave right away and it's Tylee who remained behind to deal with the Shaido. Another was the fact Perrin was already aware of the Travelling problem which Brandon had him learn about again in TGS. By all appearances, Jordan planned to have Perrin reappear in the AMOL prologue with the dream scene, which appears to be set weeks later, coinciding with Tuon's return, Tylee's scene and Mat's first appearance.... In short, a structure that made sense, unlike Brandon's)