The Dragon Reborn

The third book in The Wheel of Time series, The Dragon Reborn is a bit reluctant to move the story forward, recycling old themes, personal struggles, and even climactic fights. Its narrative strength, then, comes in the decision to abandon Rand to focus on his friends, finally giving them a chance to shine.

The story follows the events of The Great Hunt: Rand has been declared the Dragon Reborn and is surrounded by a small but devoted army. Convinced that he must act alone and quickly, Rand flees his camp and travels to the city of Tear to acquire a mythical sword that has the power to end the war with the Dark One once and for all. But the novel doesn’t follow Rand, turning the spotlight on his friends instead: we follow Perrin as he goes after Rand with Moiraine; Egwene and Nynaeve as they hunt for the Aes Sedai that betrayed them; and Mat as he travels to Andor to deliver an important letter.

The first chapter is about Perrin, who is still struggling with his supernatural side. He’s afraid of his connection with wolves, pushing it away every chance he gets, afraid that it will consume him whole. This connection is so strong that it creeps into his dreams and even the descriptions of the people he meets. When Perrin is watching a strange woman ride up to where he’s hiding, for example, the narrator says, “if she was alarmed at meeting armed men in the heart of mountain wilderness, though, she gave no sign. Her hands rested easily on the high pommel of her worn but well-kept saddle. And she did not smell afraid.” This is when we discover that we are reading Perrin’s assessment of her: it’s not that she didn’t look afraid, but that she didn’t smell afraid. Perrin himself realizes the importance of the verb, so he immediately chastises himself for using it, thinking, “Stop that!”

We can get glimpses of what Perrin is really thinking in how he describes other characters. Take Rand, for example. First, Perrin observes Rand’s clothes, especially the red coat and the embroidered golden sleeves: he’s noticing and maybe even resenting the wealth they represent. And then the focus turns to the symbol of the dragon on Rand’s cloak: here, Perrin uses the term “serpent” instead of “dragon”, revealing his distrust and fear of what the title represents.  It’s not a surprise, then, that when Perrin goes near Rand, we see a character conflicted about how he should feel about his friend, barely recognizing him as such anymore:

“A man who could channel the One Power. A man doomed to go mad from the taint on saidin, the male half of the True Source, and certain to destroy everything around him in his madness. A man – a thing! – everyone was taught to loathe and fear from childhood. Only… it was hard to stop seeing the boy he had grown up with. How do you just stop being someone’s friend?“

Being the Dragon Reborn, the chosen one, means that Rand is losing the very people he cares about even before going mad. The title pushes Perrin to dehumanize him, to see him as a thing, a creature, as if the real Rand had been replaced by a monster. It’s the same with Mat, who uses a very harsh analogy: “Discovering what Rand could do had been like finding out his best friend tortured small animals and killed babies. Once you finally made yourself believe it, it was hard to call him a friend any longer.”

However, despite judging Rand, both Perrin and Mat share the same internal struggles with the Dragon Reborn. They all want to deny their fate: if Rand wants to be a Two Rivers farmer instead of a chosen hero, Perrin also clings to his previous profession while Mat tries to travel around the world carefree. They all try and fail to suppress their supernatural side, with Perrin trying to shut down the wolf voices in his head while Mat dismisses the dagger’s taint on him as mere “luck”.

They are all tempted by glory and easy way outs, but they know deep inside that their current course of action – fighting against the darkness – is the correct one. That’s why they hate Moiraine so much, it’s because they know she’s right, which means they have to do something they would rather not. And that’s precisely why they are heroes: this internal struggle, this desire to deny fate and go back to their normal lives is what prevents them to seek out glory. Their unwillingness to become a hero is the very element that shields them from the temptations of darkness.

When Moiraine asks Perrin or Rand to do something, their answers are very much alike: “It has to be done, doesn’t it,” Perrin says in one scene, “I will come.” While Rand tells her in another, “I will fight the best I can,“ he explains, “Because there’s no one else, and it has to be done, and the duty is mine.” They use the same resigned words that reinforce the notion that they are fighting the darkness not because they want to, but because they know it’s the right thing to do.

Even Mat, who seems the most inclined to give in to power and glory, always does the right thing in the end. There’s a great scene where he explains to his traveling companion that he only helps people that can pay, because “only fools in stories do something for nothing.” But then he immediately proceeds to help a family in financial need. In other words, Mat is a hero just like Perrin and Rand, with just one tiny difference: he helps people, too, but while screaming to himself, “Burn me for a bloody fool!”

However, if their reluctance to accept their fate is their strength, it can also be a weakness. It makes them hesitate, it encourages them to push friends away and avoid information that could help them, all because it reminds them of who they are – which they loathe. Their animosity towards Moiraine, for example, pushes them to keep secrets from her, forcing the Aes Sedai to make plans and act without important knowledge.

Perrin, just like Mat and Rand, wants to be in control of his life. In an apt metaphor for a blacksmith, he explains his frustration, “My life is more than iron to be hammered into shape.” No wonder they all hate Moiraine so much, as she’s a living reminder that people have no control whatsoever: the Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills, after all. When Perrin tells her that he’s not going to lose his mind and turn into a wolf, Moiraine simply shakes her head and says, “You speak as if you can make all your own choices, Perrin.”

Back in Tar Valor, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Elayne receive a less warm welcome than they expected. They are chastised for having fallen into a very obvious trap and not expected a very obvious betrayal, but are tasked by the Amyrlin Seat to hunt those who betrayed them nonetheless. They are now aware that some of the Aes Sedai are working for the Dark One, the so-called Black Ajah, which means that they don’t know who to trust: any Aes Sedai, from the more openly hostile to the kindest soul, can be secretly planning to kill them off. “Light, you’re becoming suspicious of everybody. Better that than dead,” Egwene thinks. This suspicion gives their story an atmosphere of paranoia, as they begin to understand that the White Tower has turned “from a place of safety to a dark woods full of pits and snares.”

Egwene, however, remains too naïve and is often slow to catch hidden meanings. There’s a scene where the Amyrlin Seat reprimands her friend in an obvious ruse to get them alone to talk, and she defends the friend, ruining the plan. Eventually, she learns that her dreams have great meaning, that they reveal to her hidden truths about the world and its people, but she rarely understands them even when they are pretty self-explanatory. One time, she wonders what the dream of Mat shouting, “I am coming,” at her can possibly mean…

She and Elayne are also prone to talk about men and marriage – Egwene even does it right after someone tries to murder her from the shadows – and they often need Nynaeve to bring them back to reality. “If you two are finished with girlish chatter,” the Wisdom says, “there are important matters to talk about.”

Nynaeve is indeed built as the wisest of the three, not only because of her incredible prowess with magic – she learns how to use it just by watching someone once – but mainly because she’s quick to get the implications of what is being said or not said. She notices when someone doesn’t ask a question they should have asked, and is aware of how the Aes Sedai, who cannot lie, still manage to mask the truth with their words. Nynaeve, however, tugs her braid whenever she’s anxious – an obvious tell that lets anyone in the room read he – and, since she’s anxious all the time, there’s a lot of braid tugging in the book.

Egwene’s internal struggle is about choosing between family and duty. She undergoes a trial that cements the importance of Rand in her life: her fears in the past, the present, and the future are all about him. He needs her help and she can’t give, either because she’s incapable of doing so, or because she isn’t allowed. Rand represents the dream of having a family – with a daughter aptly named Joya – but to choose him means that she must abandon her own dream of becoming an Aes Sedai.

Family, in this context, is framed as the selfish choice. The Aes Sedai are all about serving the whole world, so choosing to care for one’s own and remain oblivious to the problems of the world is something that is openly disapproved by those in Tar Valon: “I hope the lives they live are far from happy. I have no sympathy for any who run from their responsibilities,” an Aes Sedai says to Egwene, talking about the novices who opted to chase their comforting dreams instead of becoming an Aes Sedai.

This paragraph contains spoilers. Rand, meanwhile, appears at the end of some chapters, always on the verge of attacking his friends, who he suspects to be darkfriends in disguise. His descent into madness is a quick one: it’s shocking when we witness Rand using his magic to make the corpses of the people he just murdered bow to him, (“He set them in a line, facing him, kneeling, faces in the dirt. For those who had faces left,” the narrator notes). These are the corpses of people he killed – and beheaded – just because he suspected them to be darkfriends.

The novel is structured in a way so that each character’s journey converges to the city of Tear for the big climax. But the main problem is that the big confrontation at the end is just a repeat of the one that closes the previous two books, with an added twist that make the whole affair even more uneventful.

The situation that Egwene and Nynaeve find themselves in is also familiar, even if almost by design: their terrible plan is to spring another trap by the Black Ajah, but of course things don’t go according to plan. The two women are prone to find themselves held captive and having to free themselves while other people come to help them: this happens more than once in this novel alone. And if the whole theme of “they are all alike, with similar internal struggles” adds irony to the way Perrin and Mat judge Rand, it also makes the narrative repetitive, going over the same issue three times.

Finally, the prologue also feels out of place. If the one in The Great Hunt opens with a meeting of the servants of the dark, The Dragon Reborn opens with a meeting of the self-proclaimed servants of the light – and there’s little difference between the two. The character we are following is just as paranoid and afraid as the one meeting with darkfriends in the previous book. The Lord Captain Commander of the Children of the Light doesn’t let anyone with swords get near him, even his own people – a sign that he fears being stabbed by his own allies. He should be walking the path of light, but it seems full of distrust and tension, as if a death blow could come out of anywhere: “Prickles ran across his skin, as if he were in battle and had suddenly realized that every man for a hundred paces around him was an enemy.” The prologue emphasizes how the children of the light and the darkfriends are just two sides of the same coin. But, unfortunately, the children of the light don’t have a big role to play in The Dragon Reborn, and are quickly forgotten by the narrative, which makes this prologue feel like it belongs in another book in the series.

Nonetheless, The Dragon Reborn is still a competent fantasy novel and better than The Eye of the World: it’s a bit repetitive and has a problematic climax, but the new focus on the side characters makes up for it.

November 23, 2022.