Channeling His Spirit

September 16, 2007, Robert Jordan passed away from a terminal illness. I had to pick up the phone and call my mother and tell her Robert Jordan had died. It was one of the saddest phone calls I have ever had to make. I felt sad and bereft. I spent the next week moping about and crying at odd times when I looked at the bookshelves in my apartment. My husband was horribly confused.

You see, I had never even met Robert Jordan.

He is most well known for his exceptionally long running and long winded series The Wheel of Time. At the time of his death, he was working on the twelfth and final book, A Memory of Light. For the next few months I lived with the knowledge that one of my favorite authors had died, without completing his series. A series I had read from beginning to end over 10 times from 2001 to the present. 8429 pages worth of fantasy at its best. I even had multiple World of Warcraft characters named after obscure characters in his books.

Harriet, Jordan’s wife, promised his fans she would find someone to take the reams of notes and all of the information he dictated before he died and have the series completed. But how could she find someone who could possibly hope to fill Jordan’s shoes? In December of 2007 it was announced she had chosen Brandon Sanderson to complete the series. At first I was heartsick. I had never even heard of Brandon Sanderson. I went and purchased his first novel, Elantris. After completing the book, in a single sitting I might add, I no longer felt worried. If he pulled off Book 12 at the same quality of Elantris, it would be good enough to handle, if just to know what happened.

Last Tuesday, The Gathering Storm was published. This is the first part of the final book, which had grown too large to print in a single volume. I acquired it immediately and sat down to read, apprehensive of how it would feel.

Now, 600+ pages into the book, I am certain that not only was Brandon Sanderson the right choice, he is perhaps the perfect choice. In 600+ pages I have only had a few small moments where something was worded a certain way, or character dialogue was written in such a manner that it felt “different” from Jordan. Not bad different, that is to say, most of the time I noticed it was after laughing out loud at the quick witted response of a character and thinking, they have never done that before. But for the majority, it still feels like Jordan is holding the pen. Maybe with a different editor, but still him. Brandon Sanderson said he wouldn’t try to write in Jordan’s style, but rather would write in his own voice and tell Jordan’s story, but to this I say he mostly failed. Either that or he is channeling Jordan’s spirit. In which case I say thank you, both to Sanderson for being so diligent and exceptional, and Jordan for letting him.

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