I could have written this

I feel bad for saying this, Brandon is such a cool guy and it's obvious Team Jordan invested massive efforts in finishing the series properly (which salvages the enterprises from full disaster, somewhat - full disaster being for me that it would be written in such a poor way that it's impossible to get a good idea of what RJ originally intended), but objectively, TOM has to be one of the worst novels I've read in many years, and by a fair margin it's Brandon's worst published novel to date. Though it's not necessarily the truth (based on his previous book, it isn't), it reads like the work of a very average writer, with very poor understanding of dramatic structure and very bad planning of his novel, coupled with a lazy editor who let way, way too many major and minor problems slide. Harriet certainly doesn't live up to her reputation with this one, and one wonders how people at Tor with the proper distance from the work itself didn't raise any red flag that the book still required a great deal of polishing to be in a publishable state.

I understand perfectly the marketing and commercial rationale behind the decision to split Jordan's outline in three books, and to insist to have a book out last year, and to attempt to stick to the expected date of release this year. From Tor and Harriet's perspectives, this made perfect sense, and in their shoes I might have made the same decision. From a literary standpoint, this is proving to be a big mistake. Some of this was apparent already in TGS - at least some signs of alarm that problems were coming, but Brandon did manage to get a focussed and intense book by limiting it to two main storylines. It's major weakness was only that it didn't felt like a proper Jordan book, as the feeling of scope had been evacuated way, way too much.

What TOM made plain, however, is that Jordan was absolutely right to believe this material ought not to be split, that the beginning of his finale wouldn't make a great novel in itself. Brandon has managed to do the "impossible" in the WOT history: come up with a book that make COT look like a masterpiece of dramatic structure.

What Jordan had planned for AMOL, it becomes very apparent now, is a very gradual (and parallel) descent into darkness and despair in all the storylines, a fairly slow-building but necessary first act and a faster paced and very dark and intricate (in sheer amount of sub-plots coming together, and themes being echoed from one storyline to the next) second act that took things to the bottom of the well, and when all seemed doomed, suddenly climaxed with Rand's epiphany, that (thematically speaking) brought back the ray of light that would begin to break the deadlocks in the other storylines: Egwene won the Tower, Elayne and Mat got the dragons, Perrin found himself and allied with Galad, Aviendha got determined to bring radical changes to the Aiel etc. This was all to come after Rand's spectacular epiphany, and set the stage for the penultimate third act, yet to come for us. Tell these stories after Rand's epiphany, and they become undramatic and contribute nothing anymore to the build up of despair and darkness.

What we got instead is a complete dilution of Jordan's carefully planned first act (with obscure elements sometimes going back to his earliest books. He may have faltered in places mid-series, but he sure had been planning his finale very very well), for the most part ruined by showing Rand's epiphany (unexpected, at that juncture, as Jordan planned it as a descent into madness and darkness, with a very sudden rebound once Rand hit the bottom of the barrel. and which came as a dramatic plot twist when we'd expect Rand to do something disastrous at that point) way too soon. Without the two "darker" descents, Rand's and Egwene's, running in parallel, the storylines of Perrin and Mat appear almost trivial, and very unbalanced dramatically (which wouldn't have been the case with Jordan's structure, Mat coming as a kind of comic relief during very dark acts one and two - though for sure Jordan didn't plan to deprive Mat of all his newfound gravity and darkness shown in KOD to make him a caricature of his EOTW-TGH self, and Perrin remaining more or less in control despite problems contrasted how Egwene and Rand barely had any control on events around them anymore). With Rand going mad and nearly falling to the Shadow - with little hope of a plot twist to change this anytime soon, Perrin's situation would have looked far more dramatic. Even a detail like the fact Tam (his best "general" was snatched away was dramatic, when Perrin might be about to face battle (and a good example of Sanderson's complete lack of flair is how it overlooked this, and not only Tam didn't worry about leaving Perrin at that delicate juncture, but in TGS we got a Polyannesque Tam who seemed to think the one thing to tell Rand was of his amazement that Morgase was alive and with Perrin...)

TOM in many ways is a showcase for amateurish writing and the sort of things you ought never do in a story. Not only the timeline wasn't respected, but quite a few characters jumped back and forth in time and location (Elayne, Tam etc.). Brandon didn't have chronology problems this time, he seems to have simply given up on any coherence there. Even the devices to help keep track (like the swirling colours, the moon phases, the feastdays etc. - Jordan's whole bag of tricks) were thrown overboard, with Brandon most often chosing to show "generic moments" (eg: "Rand was sitting in a chair!" Very helpful, thank you!) to blur any chronology problem instead of doing his homework (or have Maria do it for him...). In his mouth, Jordan's timelines have suddenly become "very complex". That must be why readers with some work to follow all Jordan's clues were able to piece a full timeline together...

What happened, IMO, is that Brandon and Harriet seriously underestimated the time Brandon would require to finish the novel (the full AMOL). One year was wishful thinking. For a while, it seemed they would have no choice but to do the wise thing and delay publication at least until Brandon reached the end of the second act and he and Harriet could step back and take a good long look at all the material, polish up the thematic developments by tweaking what was oversighted because of Brandon's method of writing by POV clusters (at the end after it was all done, it would have been apparent where this and that chapter should go, and that this or that element needed a bit more or less thematic emphasis to "fit" with what went on in the other storylines etc.) and decide how best to tighten the whole thing to get a single novel, or else split it in two volumes (a slower one for the first act wasn't a problem if they had two volumes out of three ready to go to print at once... beside... Brandon's chapters are full of annoying redundant elements (reminescent of KJA's annoying habit of repeating the same things from POV to POV as if these were mantras or something), and he really isn't very good at developping multiple plot points in a single scene by allusions to events etc.. He's not as bad as Kevin J. Anderson, but he still has way, way too many too short scenes that end up being longer in total than fewer multi purpose scenes would have been. He's not as verbose as Jordan, but he sure doesn't have much of his skills at implying rather than showing on screen. Ironically, AMOL in Jordan's hands would have had more depth while being significantly shorter...).

Brandon played the apprentice wizard (and sorry, but IMO the fact he's an experienced novelist with several books under his belt isn't quite apparent with TOM) and came up with a way to restructure the two storylines he had already written as one novel, and it feels like his analysis of the rest to ascertain the wisdom of his decision was, to say the least, rushed. He got lucky, this worked for TGS but in hindsight, this decision has completely ruined Jordan's classic three-act structure and lessened the impact of the story and developments (no wonder a lot of people now say they feel uite underwhelmed by some of the resolutions... they have lost much of their dramatic impact, being read out of their proper context, and out of order. A novel, a story, is more than a sum of chapters...).

AMOL could be split in two, and perhaps even in three volumes, but its story needed to be told chronologically to keep its full impact, at least based on the two first acts we now have (though Jordan seemingly feared if he did just that, the first book would be badly received as another COT. It's still what he would have done, in the end). One small example: Aviendha's trip to Rhuidean fell completely flat (and out of context) if you put it after Rand's epiphany, and not before where it clearly belonged on the timeline, adding to the burden of despair. Now, like much of the developments in TOM, it felt like "bah... so what. Rand has changed now, everything will be taken care of in due time". The book became terribly very confusing in places (not the plot as such, it was hardly complex enough to lose track), as if Brandon himself had lost track. Details fell by the wayside over and over, and the assets put in place by RJ got squandered, for example Elayne's complete lack of reaction to the fact Mat married the Seanchan Empress! Elayne intended to discuss the topic of his wedding with Mat at dinner and then.... nothing. The impact of the Seanchan attack on the Tower also got wasted instead of further darkening the moods of everyone, as intended. Whole subplots went awry or got rushed through... Alviarin and the BA hunters and so on (Brandon didn't even care to return to new elements he put in there.. like Alviarin's lateness at the beginning of TGS).

And I could go on and on about the numerous shortcomings of the book, not only as a novel (not a unique case in the genre, Brandon is merely average as a proper novelist, but so was Jordan, and many other Fantasy writers) but primarly as a Wheel of Time book, but you've already pointed out most of my main issues.

Opinions varied widely as to Jordan's skills at creating characters and fleshing them out (I think he was a master at creating iconic figures in a few traits, for myself, though it was never his style to create characters with psychological depth - and he always said it wasn't a goal of his to do that), but whether his more iconic than psychological approach pleased you or not, his skills at keeping track of the details and keeping even his minor players coherent (and also, unique) were great. In Brandon's hands, all the secondary cast has either become completely generic or else weas turned into caricatures of their former selves (everyone from Lelaine/Romanda to Talmanes, Morgase, Galad to Cadsuane), even Jordan's more succesful villains, he didn't have a whole bunch he handled that well, have turned into cartoons (especially Graendal). Even with the major players, Brandon has massive problems. Mat is half the time completely off character, Lan was totally flat, Egwene and Elayne are but a pale shadow of their former selves, and their intelligence so undermined you just can't suspend disbelief and think their scenes make much sense. All the characters have taken some mysterious brew that dropped their IQ massively (and for all the complaints about the stupidity of this and that character, Sanderson makes apparent how intelligent Jordan was. There are things he wasn't so good as conveying, but intelligence/cunning, he was). From his own novels it was apparent that one of Brandon's weaknesses as a Fantasy writer is with politics/cultures/social classes. In this regard, his world building and plots are very naive, but then, he doesn't focus his books on this, so it's not that bad. In WOT, it becomes a major annoyance. Brandon makes Jordan look like a master political writer in comparison, which Jordan hardly was. I felt like I was reading the work of an arch-caricatural American high school student whose only understanding of nobility and socially stratified societies from older eras and different from the US seems to come from Disney's fairy tales with Queens and princes). A scene like Tuon's was a string of unintended humor (or frustrations, depending on one's mood), reading like a bunch of 5 years old playing at being nobles after watching Lady Di's funeral on TV. Elayne contradicts herself from page to page - pile up unsound political reasonnings before going in the very direction she claimed a few scenes earlier she ought to avoid; anachronisms abound, the various forms of address are constantly misused (servants referring to AS by name to other sisters and what not) or pushed to caricature ("Highest Empress", I mean... give me a break) the formely devious WT Sitters have become simpering idiots and Brandon's attempts at making Egwene sound "wise" and the voice of reason among them is disastrous, turning her into a superlative pontificating bore spouting evidences her various audiences know from A to Z as if this was great thinking of an original and deep significance, and who seems to be schooling a kindergarden in politics without realizing how naive and idiotic she sounds, when in fact she's talking to women of authority and experience who would never stand for any crap like this, at least not without laughing out loud. Brandon's scene where Egwene convinces the Windfinders and WO to join a kind of alliance was one of the worst in the whole series (what about a simple "let's ally for the LB, agree to train one another and exchange envoys for the duration of the LB and see if we wish to make this a more permanent alliance aftweard"?). The "negotiations" between Perrin and Elayne were pathetic as well (though that "protocol" being a law about mercenary was kind of hilarious). On the whole, the WOT social structure in Brandon's hands has become totally incoherent (sorry Brandon, but only a few WOT characters cross the lines constantly, all the others remain in their proper stations in life...). Brandon's "feel" and understanding of the period that inspired Jordan (17th century, mostly) is really appalling and naive at best, his "period" vocabulary and realities (as altered by Jordan) and his grasp of pre-modern political and economic concepts are deficient to the point of being childish at times, and his skills to translate these real world elements into fantasy world building for WOT is even worse (and don't even get me started on his crackpot notion that in merely two years street mummers recently appeared in the Cairhien Foregate, destroyed almost immediately by civil war, have turned into something like opera fit for royal Halls. Keep it simple stupid... hint: Caemlyn had not seen a Royal Bard performance in some time....).

There's also the nonsensical incoherences and continuity errors, like all those legends about Mat in Caemlyn about stuff he's never even told another soul about, or else trusthworthy confidents like Birgitte (while having Mat worry about his secrets elsewhere... so stupid) to say nothing of the similar idiocy that a tale about Birgitte's adventures at Ghenjei that Mat thought might help him could offer any such help or being more than a bunch of inventions when the two sole witnesses of the adventure, Birgitte and Gaidal, happened to die before coming out of there!). It's dumb and dumber... especially poor Mat, who seems less mature and intelligent than Olver now. Of course, Brandon also had Birgitte remember things from the New Era, when Jordan had established her last life was in Hawkwing's time, and while she pretends to be Kandori, Kandor didn't exist yet when she died.... And Setalle forgot Elayne all of a sudden, and Tam magically returns to Perrin at the end, and so on and so on.

The thing remain that Brandon still showed a lot of respect for the material, and while he clearly doesn't have the talent to carry a story as detailed and ambitious as this one properly (at least in someone else's world) and make it an enjoyable read, he at least put down on the page most if not all the elements Jordan intended. It's a bit sad that the main interest for me at this point is to get all these elements to piece together my own mental version of what Jordan had in mind for the finale, but I'm grateful to have this at least, and not just a bunch of notes and outlines, or nothing. For the rest, TGS was quite promising with a few caveats, but TOM proved this was pretty much an illusion now dispelled. I would have stopped reading it midway if this wasn't a WOT novel. I will read AMOL, because my interest in getting the full story remains, and I doubt my interest in discussing the story will vanish because I'm nassively disappointed by TOM. As for enjoying WOT as literature/fiction and having a good time reading it, I'm very much afraid this will forever stop at KOD for me. Brandon will have satisified my desire to know how it ends, but that's pretty much it. His trilogy will hardly become memorable to me.

That being said, I still very much enjoyed the developments in TOM and TGS, it's just the execution that I really can't enjoy the way I enjoyed Jordan's books. Not even close. Jordan wrote "popular literature" and he had his shortcomings, but like another "terrible novelist" (Tolkien) he had a certain gift for storytelling that Brandon has major problems to emulate, at least in Jordan's world (his own stories, developped to showcase his better assets as a writer and work around his weaknesses, are much better).