The Fires of Heaven

Rating 3 of 5

The Fires of Heaven is the fourth book in Robert Jordans famous Wheel of Time book series.

My reviews of the series

• The Eye of the World
• The Great Hunt
• The Shadow Rising

As these stories are rather long, rather then review the plot I’m just going to refer Wikipedia.

Of the four books so far The Shadow Rising just slightly worse then The Shadow Rising, it almost got 4 of 5 but after thinking on it a bit I knocked it back to 3 of 5.

The Fires of Heaven is kind of a slow book. Most of the plot is built around the huge pitched battle that happens between Rand and Couladins Aiel for Cairhien.

Perrian is completely omitted from the book, which is ok, but the problem is we get a lot of very mid-story telling around Nynaeve and Elayne. The Nynaeve character is exhausting. She’s so self centered and bossy and you have to read chapter after chapter of her “pulling her braid”. Its just too much.

The Asmodean and Moiraine sub-story is good. Asmodean is evil but cowed and its interesting to see how his character interacts with Rand and the other characters. Its disappointing he’s killed at the end of the story. Its nice to see Moiraine stop being a jerk to Rand. So much of the story is people being jerks to Rand and trying to push him around because “The think they know better”. Which often is true but that they’re trying to manipulate Rand rather then work with him feels a little exhausting at times. The fact that Moiraine is the first person to realise that he needs to worked with Rand rather then manipulated him is good. Its too bad they kill her at the end of the story in the battle with Lanfear. Moiraine will be missed.

The battle for Cairhien is good. Mat’s slaying of Couladin builds his character up. My main gripe with this section of the story is that given prior troop numbers in the books I think having 160,000 Aiel warriors in the battle just makes no sense. In this case the book is rather weak peice of fantasy as nothing is said to address having that many soldiers in the field. And frankly I’m tired of the Aiel and their stupid leather bucklers they would have hit the armored pikemen and died in droves nor would they have been successful breaching city walls or sieging a major city like Cairhien, but whatever.

Sadly The Fires of Heaven really starts to turn into fantasy romance. Rand’s trist with Aviendha is an acceptable and maybe needed plot point. I do find Rand pulling three women into his orbit a bit of cheese at times but I’ll accept it in the sense that he’s bascally a 19 year old boy who his bending the fabric of reality around him, of course he’s going to want beautiful women in love with him. But all the other stuff is getting a little thick. Morganse and her soldier rescuer, Siuan and Gareth Bryne, the continued cheesey long distance romanace between Lan and Nynaeve. Is so much of it really needed? Does everyone need to be falling in love?

I have mixed feelings about the ending of the book. I was sad to see Lanfear go, but I think the way Robert Jordan did it is acceptable and Moirane needing to sacrifice herself so to kill Lanfear is a good trade. I did not care for Rands sudden jump Caemlyn and his battle with Rahvin. It just didn’t feel like the right time for that battle and Rand just being able to “jump” there and fight him makes you feel like “why bother with all this walking and fighting”. I would have rather it not happened this way. I do think Rand did need to get out of the mire of Cairhien and having him “jump” to Caemlyn to avenge Morganse who isn’t really dead was good. I think it does set the story up for more things. So I’m ok with it even if I’m not happy about it.

I did like how Nynaeve finally collared Moghedien in Tel’aran’rhiod, it was a nice twist at the end of the book and it didn’t feel too forced. I think putting Moghedien in the control of Nynaeve makes for good story progression, because the ongoing conflict between Moghedien and Nynaeve needed to come to some sort of end. I kind of hope this is the begining of the end of Moghedien and we can move on to dealing with the other forsaken because her story has gotten a bit old.

The Fires of Heaven is a novel with a few really good and exiciting parts and a lot of dullish parts. It kind of melds into something that is good but not great.