Jordan, Robert: New Spring: The Novel. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2004. 334 p. HB. ISBN 0-765-30629-8.

Six or seven years ago, Tor Books (Tom Doherty Associates) convinced Robert Silverberg to edit a collection of original novellas set in popular fantasy series published by (who else?) Tor Books. Silverberg came up with a total of eleven stories, by eleven different authors, set in such universes. Naturally, Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” universe had to be included, and Jordan obligingly (and, no doubt, against a check for a handsome sum of money) ponied up “New Spring”, a story of some 80 pages set in the WoT universe but some 20 years before the events recounted in The Eye of the World, the first book of the series. “New Spring” tells us how the Aes Sedai Moiraine and her warder Lan Mandragoran, whose appearance in Emond’s Field in the second or third chapter of Eye set off the events of the series, first met.

More recently, as the series itself limps along towards its inevitable conclusion ⁽¹⁾, some well-meaning person at Tor convinced Jordan to take time out from the main series to write a set of three “prequels” to fill in the gaps. The first one of these is an expansion on the theme of “New Spring”. ⁽²⁾

I expected New Spring: The Novel simply to be “New Spring”: the novella, with padding. Surprise, this is not the case. There is some padding, most notably a much fuller description of the journey from the pond where Moiraine soaked Lan to the city of Chachin, but this adds only about 10-15% to the earlier published material, expanding it to around 100 pages out of more than 300. The first two thirds of the book are completely new material. After a first chapter in which we see the end of the Aiel War from Lan’s point of view, he is shelved by the author for most of the next two hundred pages in favor of Moiraine’s graduation from Accepted to Aes Sedai, the start of the search for the Dragon Reborn, troubles in the White Tower, the discovery of the existence of a Black Ajah, ⁽³⁾ and ultimately Moiraine’s flight from a Tower plot to set her on the Sun Throne of Cairhien. In the process we learn more about Moiraine’s relationship to her fellow Accepted Siuan Sanche (though Jordan never makes it explicit whether the term “pillow friends” means, among the Aes Sedai, what a lot of readers have thought it might mean) and we see the test by which Moiraine attains the shawl, as in the main series we got to see (at least twice) the test by which Novices advance to Accepted.

By and large, this novel — which is about half the size of one of the main-series novels — is perhaps more interesting than the more recent novels in the series. I hate to say it, but to some extent the padding in the last third contributes to that. Moiraine spends much of the first two thirds of the book being bored, and the uninvolved reader may follow suit, as she sits at table and takes down names or wanders through the town talking with her seamstress and her banker. ⁽⁴⁾ Nevertheless, and largely thanks to that last third, the book is overall interesting. My only major complaint would be that Jordan should have cut out fifty pages of the first part and used it to pad out the last 10-20 pages at the end of the novel; the climax is far too quickly pushed for an 80-page novella, and much too much so for a 300-page novel, particularly given the slowness of the earlier part of the book.

I like Jordan, but that is getting to be more of an acquired taste than it once was — and that evolution is best shown, I think, by comparing the part of this book published in 1998 to the new material.

⁽⁴⁾ Jordan is, IMHO, one of the best descriptive writers of fantasy. But this talent, like all talents, is a two-edged sword. Describing, at the length of a couple of sentences, the apron of a servant girl who will never reappear strikes me as being excessive — unless, of course, one is being paid by the word, which I don’t think is the case here.