Rereading The Shadow Rising: Peak Wheel of Time, With the Cracks Showing

Cover image: The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan, published by Tor Books. Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet. Used here for purposes of review and commentary.

Robert Jordan's The Shadow Rising used to sit, alongside The Fires of Heaven, at the absolute peak of The Wheel of Time for me. I thought so when I first read the series, and I still thought so when I returned to it perhaps fifteen years ago.

This time was different. I still recognise the book I loved, and some of its best sequences remain among my favourite parts of the series. What has changed is how much I am prepared to accept between those sequences. The length bothers me more, but length is only part of it. Character behaviour that once generated tension now often feels like machinery designed to keep people in conflict. Mysteries I once enjoyed analysing can look like unnecessary branches when I already know where they lead. Some of Jordan's psychological assumptions are harder for me to believe than they were when I was young.

I had intended to keep rereading The Wheel of Time roughly alongside the television adaptation, but the increasingly loose book-by-book correspondence of the adaptation, followed by its cancellation after Season Three, derailed that plan. It consequently took me much longer than expected to finish The Shadow Rising. Perhaps the delay was useful: this became less a revisit to an old favourite than a test of how an old favourite survives a reader who is no longer quite the same person.

The plot summary is kept relatively light, but the analysis below contains spoilers for The Shadow Rising.

Why the Aiel Still Carry the Book

After taking Callandor in Tear, Rand al'Thor finally possesses something resembling conventional power: followers, an army, a fortress and one of the most famous weapons in the world. His answer is to leave most of that behind and head into the Aiel Waste, following another set of prophecies towards Rhuidean. Mat and Egwene go with him while the rest of the cast splinters into increasingly separate stories. Rand's journey into the Waste remains the part of The Shadow Rising I enjoy most, largely because the Aiel remain one of Jordan's most compelling creations.

I liked them when I first encountered them and I still do. Their culture feels shaped by its environment rather than merely decorated with unusual customs. Water scarcity affects behaviour and values. Warrior societies are woven into everyday life. Honour is not a vague ideal but a complicated system of obligations, debts and status expressed through ji'e'toh. Even behaviour that initially seems irrational becomes understandable once the internal rules are clear.

There is something in the experience that reminds me of reading James Clavell's Shōgun when I was young. Not because the Aiel are Japanese, or because the two cultures map neatly onto one another, but because both offered the pleasure of encountering a society whose assumptions about honour, shame, violence and obligation differed sharply from my own while remaining coherent on their own terms. The best fictional cultures do not require the reader to share their values. They make it possible to understand why people raised inside them would.

Jordan is particularly good at connecting Aiel customs to scarcity. Water has moral as well as practical value because the Waste makes it precious. Martial competence fits a culture adapted to an exceptionally hostile environment, while reputation and obligation perform social functions that formal institutions might fulfil elsewhere. The customs feel, at their best, like consequences rather than inventions.

Rhuidean then turns that culture inside out. Rand's journey through the glass columns, experiencing the lives of his ancestors backwards through time, remains one of the strongest sequences Jordan wrote. The most aggressively martial society we have encountered descends from people who followed the pacifist Way of the Leaf and served the Aes Sedai. The modern Aiel are not the preservation of an ancient culture but the result of its gradual transformation under pressure.

That gradualism is what makes the history so effective. Nobody decides that the Aiel should become warriors. Exceptions become precedents; precedents become habits; habits become traditions; eventually the descendants no longer recognise the assumptions of their ancestors. It feels much closer to how cultures actually change than the fantasy convention in which a society remains essentially frozen for thousands of years.

I find the history fascinating. I find the consequences Jordan attaches to discovering it much harder to accept. He does prepare us for the secret's psychological weight: not everyone sent into Rhuidean returns, and those who do are forbidden to discuss what they have learned with the uninitiated. The later reaction is therefore not something invented at the last moment. Jordan has established that the Aiel themselves believe knowledge of their origins can break people.

Internal preparation is not quite the same as psychological persuasion. If I discovered that my ancestors several thousand years ago lived according to principles almost completely opposed to mine, I would find that historically interesting. It might change my understanding of how my culture developed. I struggle to imagine it making my present identity collapse. Cultures change; almost every modern society would horrify, confuse or simply bewilder some of its remote ancestors.

The obvious counterargument is that I am applying a fairly individualistic conception of identity to a society where honour, ancestry and collective obligation matter enormously more. The Aiel do not treat history as an academic subject. Their sense of who they are is embedded in inherited duties and a cultural narrative they regard as almost sacred. Discovering that this narrative conceals not merely change but an ancient failure could plausibly hit them far harder than it would hit me.

That gets Jordan some of the way there, but I am not sure it gets him far enough. There remains something strange about a culture defined by extraordinary endurance being so psychologically vulnerable to information about its distant ancestors. The Aiel can survive deprivation, battle, torture and enormous personal loss, yet knowledge that their ancestors once rejected violence can cause some of them to abandon everything they are. I can believe that reaction in individuals. I find it harder to believe at the scale Jordan eventually asks us to accept. The history of the Aiel still works for me; the taboo surrounding it works less well.

Rand and Mat Become the Characters I Remember

The Aiel storyline also works because this is where Rand becomes a substantially more interesting protagonist. For much of the first three books he is pushed around by prophecy, Aes Sedai, Forsaken and circumstances he barely understands. In The Shadow Rising, he starts deliberately keeping information from people, making plans without explaining them and manipulating what others expect him to do. Some of this contributes to the communication problems that increasingly frustrate me, but the underlying development is necessary. Rand cannot remain the bewildered farm boy while simultaneously becoming the Dragon Reborn.

His emergence among the Aiel as the Car'a'carn, the prophesied He Who Comes With the Dawn, consequently feels like more than another stage in a chosen-one checklist. He has not merely passed a supernatural test. He has acquired knowledge that gives him enormous authority while threatening the culture he is expected to lead.

Mat works particularly well beside him because he has almost the opposite relationship with destiny. Rand increasingly accepts that prophecy has trapped him; Mat continues to behave as though prophecy has made some kind of administrative error. Destiny naturally responds by becoming even more interested in him. His encounters beyond the redstone doorway and the consequences that follow push him towards the character he will later become without requiring him to embrace the transformation. Rand increasingly walks towards prophecy. Mat keeps looking for the exit and somehow ends up deeper inside it.

The Other Roads Through the Book

The Shadow Rising is also where The Wheel of Time decisively abandons the idea that its principal characters are travelling through one shared adventure. Perrin heads back to the Two Rivers, while Nynaeve and Elayne pursue members of the Black Ajah to Tanchico. The story begins splitting into the parallel campaigns that will define much of the remaining series, and I have never found those storylines equally compelling. Rand and Mat were always my favourites; Perrin generally sat at the other end of the scale.

That remains true even though The Shadow Rising gives Perrin some of his strongest material. His return to the Two Rivers has genuine emotional weight because Emond's Field was once the whole world. He returns carrying strange abilities, political enemies and experience that would have been incomprehensible to the boy who left. At the same time, the Two Rivers itself is forced to change: an isolated rural community has to organise, accept outsiders and defend itself.

Perrin's reluctant emergence as a leader is particularly good. He does not announce that he is a lord and demand obedience. Circumstances create a need for coordination, people begin looking to him, and authority accumulates around him before he has fully accepted what is happening. That is more convincing than fantasy's frequent assumption that exceptional personal qualities naturally produce political legitimacy. Even so, I spent much of his storyline wanting to get back to Rand. Some preferences are apparently immune to decades of ageing.

Tanchico has almost the opposite problem on reread. Nynaeve and Elayne's hunt for the Black Ajah contains several excellent scenes and expands the sense of a world already becoming politically unstable before Rand reaches it, but much of the storyline depends on uncertainty: what the Black Ajah are seeking, why it matters and who is manipulating whom. Those questions naturally lose some force when the answers are already known.

The exception is Nynaeve's confrontation with Moghedien, which remains enormously satisfying. Until this point the Forsaken exist partly as legendary monsters, survivors of the Age of Legends whose names have been used for thousands of years as synonyms for betrayal and evil. Then Nynaeve fights one almost as an equal and wins the duel, even though Moghedien later escapes. In old TV Tropes language, it is a Crowning Moment of Awesome; more importantly, it is a good example of Jordan's talent for building towards concentrated moments of payoff. The scene works precisely because the books have spent so long telling us how terrifying the Forsaken are.

The contrast between Tanchico and Rhuidean is revealing. Rhuidean becomes richer when you know the answer because you can see how carefully the history was constructed. Tanchico becomes thinner because more of its energy depended on not knowing what everyone was looking for. Both contain strong scenes, but only one gains much from repetition.

The Things I Tolerate Less Now

The largest change in my reaction to The Wheel of Time may not actually be pacing. It may be the characters. Jordan's characters spend an extraordinary amount of time refusing to say what they mean, withholding information from people who would benefit from having it, assuming they understand one another when they plainly do not, and allowing pride to turn manageable disagreements into extended conflicts.

When I was younger, I was far more accepting of this because I experienced the result primarily as tension. People disagreed, plans went wrong, relationships became complicated and misunderstandings created consequences. Now I see the mechanism more clearly. Perrin and Faile's behaviour around the journey back to the Two Rivers is a good example: practical questions repeatedly become contests over who will admit what first. Rand and Moiraine have a more consequential version of the same problem. Each has good reasons not to trust the other's judgement completely, but their constant withholding of plans also ensures that cooperation is more difficult than it needs to be.

None of this is inherently unrealistic. Real people are perfectly capable of pride, secrecy and self-defeating behaviour, and fictional characters who calmly exchanged all relevant information and reached optimal decisions would probably be unbearable in a different way. The problem is repetition. Too many conflicts in The Wheel of Time are produced by variations on the same behavioural pattern: someone withholds something, another person interprets the silence incorrectly, pride prevents either side from correcting the mistake, and the consequences occupy another stretch of the story. The familiar assumption that men cannot understand women and women cannot understand men becomes part joke, part cultural motif and part plot engine.

After enough repetitions, tension generated this way starts to feel maintained rather than organic. This probably bothered me less as a younger reader because I was more willing to remain inside the characters' perspectives. Now I am more likely to stand outside the scene and wonder why ostensibly intelligent people are constructing another completely avoidable problem for themselves. Once the device becomes visible, it becomes less effective.

The Forsaken suffer from a related problem. They are enormously powerful channelers, but that does not make them impressive strategists. Their reputations are almost supernatural: they come from an age technologically and intellectually far beyond the present one, and their names have survived as figures of terror. Yet what we actually see them doing often involves infiltrating courts, manipulating a handful of people, plotting against one another and eventually finding themselves in magical confrontations that do not go according to plan.

Lanfear remains particularly difficult for me to understand. Asking whose side she is on may be the wrong question: her fixation on Lews Therin, and therefore Rand, seems more important to her than any coherent institutional loyalty to the Shadow. She wants victory, but preferably a version in which Rand chooses her and she occupies the place in reality she thinks she deserves. That makes her behaviour more psychologically intelligible. It does not necessarily make her more competent.

The Forsaken as a group do have a built-in explanation for their poor collective performance. Nothing about joining the Shadow required talent for cooperation, and they regard one another as rivals as much as allies. They hoard information, undermine competitors and want the Shadow to win on terms that leave themselves close to the top. A coordinated group of Forsaken would probably make for a much shorter series. That explanation is defensible, perhaps even thematically appropriate, but it does not entirely close the gap between their historical reputation and what we repeatedly see them accomplish. The more Forsaken appear on the page, the less frightening the category becomes. My younger self accepted that they were terrifying because the books told me they were; my older self wants to see their performance metrics. They are not encouraging.

Bloat, Accumulation and the Problem of Cutting Jordan

The Shadow Rising is enormous, and more importantly it feels enormous. There are major storylines in Tear, the Aiel Waste, Tanchico and the Two Rivers, alongside White Tower politics, the Black Ajah, the Forsaken, Dreamwalking, prophecies, ter'angreal, new cultures, new factions and a rapidly expanding collection of mysteries.

When I first read the books, much of this density was part of the attraction. It also fuelled the extraordinary culture of Wheel of Time speculation. Every unidentified figure might secretly be someone else. Every dream might contain prophecy. Every oddly phrased sentence could conceal a clue. Jordan trained readers to inspect small details because enough of those details eventually mattered. That instinct created the scale of the series, but it also created its bloat.

The problem becomes much worse later, particularly around The Path of Daggers and the books that follow, but the tendency is already visible here. Scenes run longer than they need to. Travel acquires additional stages. Secondary characters multiply. Mysteries generate subsidiary mysteries. Jordan rarely seems to encounter a narrative branch he would rather remove than develop.

It would be too easy, however, to conclude that the solution is simply to cut aggressively. Some of Jordan's accumulation is exactly what makes the strongest parts work. Rhuidean has weight because the Aiel have already been given enough cultural texture for their history to matter. The Two Rivers storyline works because Emond's Field was established as a real community rather than a disposable starting village. Nynaeve facing Moghedien is satisfying because the Forsaken have been elevated through books of accumulated mythology.

The harder editorial question is therefore not whether The Shadow Rising could be shorter. Obviously it could. The question is how much could disappear before the world itself began to feel smaller, and I suspect the answer is still: quite a lot. There are stretches of The Wheel of Time that could be compressed without damaging character, theme or setting. Other material looks redundant in isolation but contributes to the cumulative density that made the series so absorbing in the first place. Jordan's excess and Jordan's strengths do not live in completely separate parts of his writing. They grow from the same conviction that the world beyond the immediate plot deserves attention. His weakness is a reluctance to decide when it has received enough.

How Much of This Is Nostalgia?

That leaves the hardest question of the reread: would I love The Shadow Rising if I encountered it for the first time now? I am not sure. Parts of it would still impress me. The Aiel remain fascinating. Rhuidean is excellent even where I no longer buy the consequences Jordan attaches to its revelations. Rand and Mat are moving into the roles that made them two of my favourite fantasy characters, and Nynaeve's duel with Moghedien remains exactly the kind of payoff Jordan could execute exceptionally well.

But the diffuse plotting would bother me. The length would bother me. The endless accumulation of mysteries would bother me. Above all, the recurring stubbornness, secrecy and avoidable interpersonal conflict would probably test my patience far sooner than it did when I first read the books. If The Shadow Rising appeared today as the fourth instalment of a fantasy series with which I had no history, I might see an ambitious, badly overgrown novel containing several excellent stories rather than automatically accepting the whole as one of the landmarks of epic fantasy.

That hypothetical fresh reading is impossible. I have known these characters for decades. I know which minor details matter, which mysteries lead somewhere and where everyone's story is going. A new reader encounters foreshadowing; I encounter memory. A new character enters the story; I already know who that person will become. Nostalgia does not merely make me more generous. It changes what I am reading.

That is why I still think The Shadow Rising belongs near the top of The Wheel of Time, even while enjoying it less than I once did. The best parts have survived remarkably well. The Aiel still feel distinctive, Rhuidean still works, and Rand and Mat are still compelling. What has changed is my willingness to forgive everything around them.

The frustrating thing about rereading The Shadow Rising is not discovering that the book was never as good as I remembered. Many of the best parts really were that good. I simply see much more clearly what I once accepted in order to reach them. My younger self was willing to forgive Robert Jordan a great deal more than I am now.