The Great Hunt
Robert Jordan
707 pages
published in 1991

I said so, didn't I, that Robert Jordan hooks you into the story? Here I was determined just to reread The eye of the World to mark his passing, so why did I immediately reach for The Great Hunt? Because I wanted to read more of course. It had been almost a decade since the last time I read through the entire series after all. Not to mention that the weather has turned decidedly autumnal, always the best season to read a great epic fantasy series.

Now as I understand it, The Eye of the World was deliberately written as a standalone novel, in case the series didn't take off. So all the plot threads resolve neatly at the end, and the plot itself is fairly linear and straightforward. From The Great Hunt onwards this is no longer the case. The plotlines start to unravel, with the various main characters going their own ways having their own adventures only to come together at the end and with some plot threads continuing in the next book. Unlike the later books though, where the plot threads multiply unchecked and drag themselves from book to book, here Jordan still has a tight grip on things. It's just more clear that this is a part of a series.

Everytime I've read The Great Hunt I've had difficulty in getting started, with the first 100-150 pages or so being just pure torture to get through. Absurd of course; there's novels that finish in fewer pages, but that's the way it is with fat fantasies. As for why this is so hard to get started, it's because the main character behaves like an idiot and the plot seems to crawl at first. Spoilers follow.

The opening of The Great Hunt finds Rand al'Thor and his friends Mat and Perrin, as well as Egwene and Nynaeve still at Fal Dara near the Blight. At the climax of The Eye of the World Rand had accepted his destiny as the Dragon Reborn, but was still keeping this a secret from his friends. Now weeks, if not months later he long should've left Fal Dara, away from Moiraine, the Aes Sedai who led him, Mat and Perrin out of their home village and who knows he's the Dragon Reborn, that he can Channel the One Power and sooner or later will fall mad, yet he's not moving. And then the Amyrlin Seat, the leader of all Aes Sedai comes to visit and it's too late.

As said, the above takes a long time to play out, with my bare bones description leaving a lot out, but at first it does feel like Jordan himself was somewhat unsure on how to begin. Once Rand finally moves however, going hunting with Mat and Perrin for the Horn of Valere, which can call up the shades of legendary heroes bound to the Wheel, things get better. While the three boys go Horn hunting, Egwene and Nynaeve go to Tar Valon, the home of the Aes Sedai, to become novices in the White Tower, where they meet Elayne, the Daughter Heir of Andor, who took a fancy to Rand when he unexpectedly dropped in on her in The Eye of the World... Not that these three are content to stay in the tower; in fact they're lured out of it by a Darkfriend sister, a follower of the Dark One.

These two plotlines come together in the climax of the story, when Rand and friends have to deal with the Seanchan invasion, the descendants of the armies sent across the ocean by the legendary king Arthur Hawkwing hundreds of years ago, long thought lost. Events conspire as they must to force Rand to proclaim himself the Dragon Reborn to his friends, as well as more publically, as he has to fight the Dark One directly, or so it seems.

Jordan's weaknesses in this series are wellknown to his fans: a tendency to move the plot along very, very slowly, as at the beginning of this book, as well as a tendency to repeat certain character mannerisms and descriptions ad infinitum. These tendencies are present here, and his writing is not yet as polished as in the next few books, but at the same time Jordan still manages to start and finish the main plotline here in one book, with everything coming together neatly at the end, while also advancing the overall plot of the series satisfactory. It's not as strong as the first book, which "borrowed" a lot of its structure from The Lord of the Rings, but it still sucked me in after I got over the hump so to speak.

Read more about:
Robert Jordan, The Great Hunt, fantasy, book review