Wheel Of Time #0 - New Spring (Part 2)
When I sat down to read this earlier today, I didn’t anticipate polishing it off in a single day. If I’d known that was going to happen then maybe I would have waited to publish my earlier post and just put it all into one post.
Now that I’ve finished this, I’m 95% sure I’ve never read it before despite it being logged on my Goodreads. Whatever parts of Moiraine and Siuan’s story I was remembering are from later books in the series, or are simply false memories. Whatever they are, they aren’t in this book.
While I enjoyed this - a lot, actually; certainly more than I expected to - I do have to wonder whether it actually adds anything to the larger Wheel Of Time story. The developing Warder relationship between Lan and Moiraine is fairly rushed, mostly occurring in the final chapters of the book, as though Jordan realised that this was the entire point of the book and that he needed to wrap it up before this turned into another 900 page tome.
It’s definitely nice to see Moiraine and Siuan’s early relationships, and it’s entertaining to read what is (for the first half of the book) effectively a magic school novel set in Tar Valon. It’s fun, too, to be able to draw some inferences about what’s happening at the end of the novel with people having strings of very good or bad luck, given what we know about Rand being a Ta’varen and the effect that has on the world around him. Presumably we’re seeing the impact of baby Rand passing through the world on his way to the Two Rivers, though that’s left entirely for us to figure out.
Prequels like this are an interesting thing, because while they take place before the main events of the series they’re entirely reliant on your prior knowledge of the series to function. I’m not sure how much I would have got out of this had I read it before reading the rest of the Wheel of Time, and I think anybody who tries to start the series with “book #0” is in for a bad time.
Part of the problem with New Spring is that it doesn’t really deliver on what it promises. The blurb tells us that this is going to focus on Lan and Moiraine’s relationship, but as mentioned, that’s quite abruptly jammed into the back half of the novel. The first half of the novel promises that Moiraine and Siuan are going to go looking for infant Rand - and while they do set off on that quest, they don’t really get anywhere with it. It’s my understanding that Jordan planned two more prequel novels, one following Tam and his discovery of Rand and the other following Moiraine and Lan’s journey to the Two Rivers and the start of Eye Of The World, but of course we never got those books. Perhaps this would be better were it more complete.
And yet, as I said, I still enjoyed it despite it feeling incomplete and a little unnecessary. Jordan gives in to some of his worst impulses here - there are chapters from Lan’s point of view that serve very little purpose and simply break up the pace and flow of Moiraine’s narrative, and his weird attitude to sex and profanity are on full display - but it’s a nice reminder that when he was good the man wrote some of the most entertaining fantasy of the 90s and early 00s, and revisiting the world was like returning to an old friend.
Am I going to re-read the rest of the series now? I know I shouldn’t, but there’s a strong chance that I will.