And so the Wheel of Time finally rolls to a halt. After fourteen volumes in what was intended to be a ten-book series, and the literal death of the author. It has been a slog, a brain-rotting plod through some of the worst prose ever to appear between two covers. Jordan had no discipline, seemed to think a plot meant merely moving characters around on a map, or, occasionally, not moving them, and used quirks and silly habits to define each of his cast, who behaved like teenagers. Sanderson, who wrote the last three books, is little better. He may treat the characters like adults, but he doesn’t understand what a chapter is. In A Memory of Light (2013, USA), there is a chapter which describes every skirmish of the Last Battle over a single day and is nearly 200 pages long. And is then followed by three much shorter chapters, also covering the Last Battle on that same day. Sanderson’s prose is also somewhere around the same level as Dan Brown or RA Salvatore:

Simply rob anyone who was not poor. Of course, that would just make everyone poor in the end.

… a skim of ebullience over sombreness.

The beasts yelled, howled and screeched depending on the orifice they’d been given.

Cooked bodies. To them, it was like the aroma of fresh bread.

… as the trumpets sounded in the air.

The houses had the feel of mice clustered together before a cat.

The Last Battle is the centrepiece of the novel, it’s what everything has been leading up to over thirteen fat books. It takes place on the Field of Merrilor, which is actually a random piece of ground on the border between two countries. No reason is given for the name, or why a random section of countryside should deserve a name. In real history, battles are named for nearby towns or villages, such as Waterloo. The nearest town or village to the Field of Merrilor is– oh, there isn’t one.

While all this is going on, Rand is battling the Dark One in some sort of place outside of time and space. This fight seems to involve each of them showing each other what the future will be like if either of them survives, and shouting at each other IN ALL CAPS.

The whole thing is dragged out so much, it’s mind-numbingly boring. We know the good guys are going to win because Mat is a tactical genius – despite the fact the bad guys hugely outnumber them and have an actual superhero leading them. There are, of course, other battles going on elsewhere – three of them, in fact. But they’re soon lost and everything shifts to the Field of Merrilor. I’ll say one thing in Sanderson’s defence: he finds some novel uses for Travelling (but then everything else the Aes Sedai and Asha’man do is just your standard AD&D battle magic).

Pretty much all of the central cast survive to the end of the book, although Sanderson throws a few bait-and-switches in order to make it happen. The Forsaken… I’d completely lost track of who was who. They’ve changed names and appearances throughout the series. Nor did they seem to do much except whinge at each other. In fact, for much of the novel, if not the entire series, the biggest hurdles the good guys had to face were other good guys. The Seanchan invasion. The Children of Light. All the various factions. And, after all that, the bad guys turn up in overwhelming force, with hundreds of thousands of Trollocs, every other nasty creature that’s been named in the previous thirteen books, and an actual army, with its own wielders of the One Power, from some other part of the world that’s been mentioned perhaps twice in the entire series…

The Wheel of Time is not a good series, and A Memory of Light is not a good novel nor a good end to the series. I’m glad I finally finished the series. I’m also slightly astonished I bothered to read it all.