“When you knew you were going to hang, the only thing to do was grin at the noose.”

I recently watched an interview with legendary genre moviemaker John Carpenter, wherein he posited that he can admire an extremely flawed film if it was directed with control and authority. He differentiates between Spielberg’s Jaws (a film directed with authority) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (a film that got away from him, according to Carpenter). Shortly after hearing the horror maestro’s off the cuff remarks, I was pondering Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time saga, and it struck me that the series might be unenjoyable because of Jordan’s ultimate lack of authorial control. That is to say, while it is quite obviously flawed in many ways, I am prevented from finding any pleasure in reading it not because of those flaws, but because the author has no clear vision, let alone a commitment to it.

At the time of writing Crossroads of Twilight, the tenth bloated door stopper in the series, the only thing Jordan was doing semi-passably was adding aesthetic trappings—a magic orb here, an esoteric name there; a mystical dreamworld here, a fancy castle there; an allusion to a deeper theme here, a reference to a mystical religious tradition there. There’s definitely a flavor to his world that is hard to ignore. But this is a knockoff model of fantasy without any life or breath or mystique of its own.

Moreover, Crossroads represents an absolute nadir in terms of plotting, pacing, and character development. To wit, three-quarters of the novel is dedicated to cataloging other characters’ reactions to the climactic events of Winter’s Heart. There is no throughline, and the pattern of barely advancing the story across hundreds of pages is repeated once again as the reader is subjected to mind-numbingly repetitive and poorly written flavor text: haggling over grain prices, taking baths, sipping exotic teas, considering tenting materials, admiring buxom ladies and whatnot, only now this is extended to extremely peripheral characters. Oh joy. It finally provides a cliffhanger barely worthy of a soap opera episode.

Thankfully, Crossroads is considered the last book in the mid-series “slog” (that is, if we’re willing to grant that the slog does not encompass the series as a whole). The internet assures me that some things actually happen in the next book.