The novel opens with a stone brilliant prologue, in which we're appraised of the Dark One's activities following the first book's climax. (Tolkien is still the 800-pounder since the movies, more like the half-tonner.) Compared to books like Drake's aimless Lord of the Isles or Harlan's interminable The Shadow of Ararat or Newcomb's godawful The Fifth Sorceress, The Great Hunt was frequently a pleasure. I suspect Jordan takes as much heat as he does because he's the genre's 700-pound gorilla. I have read fantasies much, much worse than this.

And I was pleased, after plowing through some tedious and prolix opening chapters, to find myself settling into a story that was, as my British friends might say, a bit of all right. But he hasn't produced a stinkburger either. In The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan hasn't given fantasy any sort of masterpiece his prose is still often atrociously overwritten, needlessly bloating many passages that should have been conveyed more succinctly. The fact is that when any artist provokes sharply polarized opinions love him or hate him the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Since Jordan is such a powderkeg of controversy in fantasy, with readers falling four-square to either one side or the other of the quality question with little grey area inbetween, I figured I ought to forge ahead with the series and see where I stand in the debate. I admit it's taken me a while to get up the gumption to continue with Robert Jordan's massive (and seemingly endless) Wheel of Time saga.

The great hunt for the horn