Re-Reading "The Shadow Rising": "Chapter 2: Whirlpools in the Pattern" and "Chapter 3: Reflection"
As the action of the novel starts to heat up the three male leads--Mat, Perrin, and Rand--find themselves confronted with new evils that they had barely imagined and struggle to defeat.
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While we’re all waiting for the next episode of The Wheel of Time to drop, it’s time to keep making our way through The Shadow Rising. Since these early chapters of the book are quite lengthy, I’vd decided once again to just focus on a couple of them. And wow, do they pack a punch! There’s quite a lot of action–say what you will about Jordan, but the man knew how to pack a punch with an action set-piece–but there’s also some deeper introspection about what it means for Rand to be the Dragon Reborn and how this is going to change his relationships with everyone, even those he has known since childhood.
Most of the action this week revolves around our three heroes: Perrin, Mat, and Rand (roughly in that order). While Perrin is having yet another tense conversation with his new girlfriend Faile, he finds himself being mysteriously attacked by his own axe and, though he manages to survive, it’s a close thing. Mat, meanwhile, is having a card game with a number of the dissolute nobles of Tear, only for the playing cards to suddenly grow in size and start attacking him and his fellow gambleers. After finally getting rid of Berelain–who has come to his chambers to try to seduce him–Rand also grappled with a supernatural threat, this time a trio of reflections that step out of the mirror and try to kill him. They all survive, but it’s immediately clear that this has put yet another strain on their friendship, and it has brought home to Rand just how precarious his situation remains, even (especially) now that he has Callandor in his grasp.
What’s particularly striking, and more than a little sad, about this whole gruesome situation is just how quick Mat and Perrin are to assume that it’s Rand finally going mad and trying to kill them. By this point, of course, they’ve all gone through quite a lot, but even so it’s quite shocking to see the extent to which their pre-existing friendship with Rand seems to have become a part of the past, safely consigned to history by the exigencies and threats of the present. Mat, and to a lesser extent Perrin, have clearly separated Rand-the-Dragon-Reborn from Rand-the-boy-I-grew-up-with. Just as importantly, however, their change of point of view is a clear testament to just how deeply ingrained the fear of men who can channel is in this society, to such an extent that even childhood friends would find it quite easy to believe that someone they’ve known and been friends with from their childhood could so quickly and fundamentally turn against them.
It might be a surprising change, but it also makes a great deal of sense. All three young men are really groping their way blindly forward. After all, it’s not as if anyone knows just how long it takes for a man who can channel to go mad, particularly one who is as powerful as Rand. For that matter, no one really knows just what path the Dragon Reborn is supposed to go on, and it’s this uncertainty–as much as the ever-present threat that any man who can channel must inevitably pose–that helps to explain what almost seems like very shitty behavior from both Perrin and Mat.
At the same time, these two young men are also grappling with the reality that their fates are irreversibly tied to Rand. No matter how hard they try to escape, and no matter how much they might wish it were otherwise, the truth is that they are all going to have to be there at the Last Battle. There’s a very long and dangerous road before that, of course, as Perrin’s encounter with the axe and Mat’s with the playing cards demonstrates, and it’s going to be all that they can do to survive that long, even if they are fortunate enough to have some allies (Faile, in Perrin’s case).
It’s not until Moiraine shows up, though, that we finally get some strong insight into just what caused these strange events. Rather than being engendered by the Forsaken–which, to be fair, is a pretty good deduction by Rand, given how dangerous and how powerful they are–they are instead due to bubbles of evil that seem to be able to sneak out of the Dark One’s prison. Frankly, the idea that there are bubbles of evil just floating along waiting to attach themselves to someone in the Pattern is even more terrifying than the Forsaken. After all, you can fight against a person; it’s much harder to do something against a metaphysical evil that doesn’t have a corporeal form and just seems to work according to its own logic. Even ta’veren, hell, even the Dragon Reborn, might find themselves hard-pressed to really fight back against something like this.
Speaking of Moiraine…the strain between Rand and the Aes Sedai is becoming more evident the longer that the two spend time together. I’ve been very explicit about the fact that I love Moiraine and happen to think that she is the most level-headed and smartest of all of the characters that we meet, and I stand by that. Rand, on the other hand, is as stubborn and mule-headed as anyone else from the Two Rivers, which means that he’s not going to do anything just because she tells him, too. While this mulishness is very much in keeping with the character that we’ve come to know remarkably well over the past couple of books, I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t also drive me crazy. There are so many times that I just want to reach into the book and shake some sense into him. I mean, come on, Rand, what makes you think that you know better than an Aes Sedai?
Speaking of irritation, I can already feel my habitual annoyance at the gender politics coming to the surface. It starts right away with the way that Faile constantly seems to be playing a game with Perrin, a game to which he doesn’t know the rules. At the same time, it gets quite taxing spending so much time in the head of someone who clearly has absolutely no idea what to make of women. What could be cute in other circumstances becomes very quickly cloying, and the confrontation between Berelain and Rand is even worse. It’s not just that her attempts to seduce him are hamfisted; it’s that Rand is even more inept at contending with the opposite sex than Perrin. I know that I, for one, am very grateful for the way that the Amazon show has largely dispensed with all of this in favor of more mature relationships.
Even so, I do appreciate the way that Jordan effectively demonstrates the very real human stakes of the existential conflict that is already taking shape. For better and worse, these are characters that we’ve grown to know and to care about during the course of three novels, and this makes their enmeshment in a greater cosmological and existential conflict feel even more important and meaningful. And, as Mat’s point of view makes particularly clear, the politics of Tear are going to be as tortuous, and as treacherous, as those in Cairhien. As time will tell, though, it’s the Aiel who will exert the strongest immediate influence on Rand, and they will help him to discover the secrets of his own past, and of theirs.