Post by Galad DamodredPost by gollumAfter TGS I'm not stepping foot near Brandon Sanderson's atrocious prose
ever again, but I would like to know who killed asmodean.
I have not yet read TGS. Just finishing of KOD so next book is going
to be TGS.
I am so looking forward to reading it since I hear it upset many RJ
fans. If this is indeed the case then Sanderson is going to be awesome.
I liked both of his WoT books. Towers of Midnight strikes me as
jarring a bit more with Jordan's tone than TGS, where Sanderson seemed
to be writing more directly from notes. It's a bit more evident in
many cases which bits he's filling in himself, a bit too many
significant events happen 'off-screen', and I doubt Jordan would have
handled some major plot points the way he does (the climax to Mat's
part of the book is handled with less subtlety and more swords-and-
sorcery cliche than I'd have expected from Jordan given the set-up,
for instance). Some of the characterisation is off as well, especially
in the dialogue; though fortunately he (mostly) does away with the
stereotype cockney prose he wrote for Mat in Gathering Storm, the
overuse of colloquialisms (everyone says "I figured..." a lot, even in
formal situations, and Perrin's dialogue loses some of its
characteristic formality at times) is sometimes jarring.
However, these are mostly minor lapses - the plot progresses well, his
choice of characters to focus on and their relative importance is
mostly good and plays to his (and the characters') strengths, although
he does make the odd decision of showing major events in primary
characters' storylines through secondary characters' eyes (a major
plot point for Elayne and Perrin, for instance, is viewed entirely
through Faile's eyes and barely mentioned in those characters' own PoV
scenes).
Others may disagree - for some reason, Mat seems to have quite a fan
club and people will probably moan again that both Sanderson books are
more Perrin-heavy, but Perrin is inherently a more interesting
character to both read and write. His character develops over the
course of the books, Mat's barely has. Perrin is interestingly
conflicted; Mat just complains a lot, mostly about the same things
that got old after the first five or six books. And when there aren't
any major battles in the offing, he just doesn't *do* anything
interesting (how many filler scenes do we need with bars and dice
games?), never mind that it's hard to get engaged with his troubles
when he can be written out of any scrapes, however dire, just by
invoking his luck (which is basically what happens to his storyline in
ToM).
This sounds like a lengthy list of complaints, but overall I think
Sanderson captures the spirit of the series well enough that it's not
always easy to see where Jordan left off and he began. He undoubtedly
benefits from picking up the story when he did; he doesn't appear to
have Jordan's eye for detail, his finesse with portraying different
cultures (the Seanchan scenes in particular read as though they've
been written by rote from what went before, rather than making any
effort to elaborate on their society) or his ability to portray a
world as compellingly, so it's probably just as well he's started from
a point where he can get away with repeatedly describing the scenery
as yellowing or covered in black spots of Blight without the need to
add more detail.
Phil