Just Finished Reading The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan

The Great Hunt is the second book in Robert Jordan's lengthy The Wheel of Time fantasy series. I'm determined to go ahead and try this series out: so far, so good.  Two books down, twelve to go...

The objects of the "great hunt" are two items: the Horn of Valere, a device when blown would call into service an army of the dead from eons past (sound familiar, all you Tolkien fans?).  The other is an enchanted (with evil) dagger that one of the protagonists, Mat, is bound to and must possess in order to avoid death.  Rand, the main hero in this epic, is more interested in recovering for his friend the dagger, which along with the horn has been taken by Padan Fain, a powerful servant of the dark lord (and Rand's arch-nemesis) Ba'alzaman.  The quest takes Rand and his party to a land recently conquered by a cruel society invading from across the ocean.  It is here that the struggle to recover the missing items reaches its climax, culminating in another big confrontation between Rand and Ba'alzamon (I'm beginning to suspect that this will be the case at the end of each book).  A subplot within the story is the ordeal of the women Egwene, Nynaeve, Elayne, and Min as they are betrayed into slavery to the conquering Seanchan by an Aes Sedai named Liandrin and struggle on their own to escape.  There are several other characters who figure into the story, including some from the first book Eye of the World and a few newly introduced here.

If there is a theme to be examined here in The Great Hunt, and in the Wheel of Time series as a whole, it is the struggle between the notions of free will and predestined fate for an individual.  Rand, like so many other protagonists in other series (Richard Raul, Frodo, Harry Potter, Neo, etc.) is deemed "The One", upon whom everyone else depends to deliver them from the clutches of the evil one.  And like the others I've mentioned, he rebels against his seeming helplessness to resist the various forces that relentlessly drive him toward accepting the role of savior that he so strongly wants to deny.  With the Wheel of Time alluded to by the series title, time itself is circular and reincarnation the rule: Rand is forced into confrontation after confrontation with his evil counterpart through life after life...it reminds me of an old Star Trek episode in which two men from different universes are forced into eternal battle in a kind of "middle" zone, between one who wants to cross a boundary and cause complete annihilation of everything, and the other who sacrifices himself to prevent this and save all of creation.  I expect more of the same in future books.  I like this series so far, but I also see so many subplots going on with so many characters (with a lot more to come, I'm confident) that it's starting to resemble the chaotic world in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series.  I'm beginning to see how, in the end, it might well take up to fourteen volumes in order to just tie up all the loose ends...