Wheel Of Time #4 - The Shadow Rising
It's been a few months since I read The Dragon Reborn and I was a little worried that I would have forgotten a lot of the context of this book, but once I picked it up I found that I slipped back into the story very easily.
I said that book 3 was my favourite of the first trilogy, and that's true, but The Shadow Rising is definitely my favourite of the series as a whole so far - although it's a really close call, because I think all four books at the start of Wheel Of Time are excellent. Here you can really feel the scope of the series starting to open up. Jordan does a great job of building and expanding on the material in the first three novels while hinting at more to come. The expansions into both Tel'aran'rhiod and the worlds of the Finn do a lot to show us the scale of what we're working with here, and we start to get a taste of the silly levels of power that we're going to be dealing with in later books.
I'm always struck by the way in which Jordan manages to make really huge, important moments take up next to no space on the page at all. The prime example of this is Egwene's capture by the Seanchan and subsequent escape in The Great Hunt, and there's more of it here as well. Matt's meeting with the Eelfinn doesn't last very long at all, and the fall of the White Tower and the stilling of Siuan and Leanne take place entirely off-page. I think many authors would lean into these moments and drag them out in order to convey their importance, but Jordan takes a completely opposite approach and it works very well.
It's been so long since I read this whole series that my memory of it is formed of several big moments (like Matt with the Eelfin), and the rest is effectively lost to me. That means that reading these is like coming to them for the first time again, which is very fun. For some reason I'd convinced myself while reading that the cleansing of Saidin takes place in this book, but of course it doesn't. I'm not sure when that occurs, exactly, but the tools that Rand needs to make it happen are attained in The Shadow Rising and now that I'm thinking about it I remember some of the other events that need to take place before he makes the decision to attempt it, so I suspect it might be a few books before we get to that point. But that, I think, is what I like about The Shadow Rising in particular. The groundwork for so much of the later series is laid in this book. It feels like books 1 to 3 were simply a prologue, and this is is chapter one. And I love that.