Closure
After almost a quarter century of waiting, thirteen prequels, nearly four million words, two authors and one tragic death, let us neither beat around the bush nor be coy. The main theme of this final entry in The Wheel of Time series is closure. A Memory of Light exists for just one purpose and one purpose only: to bring everything to a satisfying conclusion. The series has its fair shares of up and down, highlights and low points, excitement and slogs, but anyone willing to invest the time it takes to read every word opens up the final book wanting just one thing: closure. They want a story that ties up all remaining loose ends and brings the long-awaited battle between good and evil to a climax that is both gloriously satisfying and a little sad. But more than anything else, they just want to close the back cover secure in the knowledge that it isn’t just some trick non-ending designed to squeeze at least one more word out of the saga.
Good Triumphs Over Evil
Imagine if at the end of Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader kills Luke and Leia, and Han Solo remains forever encased in his carbonite freeze-frame prison. Good versus evil is the oldest plot in literature and the number of times that evil permanently triumphs over good can probably be counted on the fingers of one hand of a Simpsons character. (At least, that is, the literature that ever sold well.) The thing about fantasy novel series in general—and one spanning a mammoth length comprised of multiple volumes, especially—is that suspense as to how things turn out is never really in doubt. It may take Bilbo an excruciating long time to dump that ring, but nobody ever for a moment, even near the vey end, really expects he is going to take off with it and turn into another Gollum and let all the other bad stuff that almost happens actually happen. Same deal here. The Wheel of Time is about as big as it gets in the war between good and evil, but it is far from a spoiler to feed you the skinny here: good wins out.
Time Spent
The final entry in The Wheel of Time series clocks in at more than 350,000 words. Here’s the kicker: that doesn’t even qualify for the top three of the longest books in the series. As the final book in a long series, one of the themes of this single volume should, by all rights, apply to the series as a whole as a representative of the entire effort. And, appropriately, that theme is the strong suggestion that there are efforts and tasks and goals in life that demand our most precious natural resource: the investment of our time. At this point, to set out upon the task of reading The Wheel of Time really and truly is not that different from the tasks the characters themselves set for themselves. The only real difference is degrees of danger.
Reading the entire series just to reach this final volume is unquestionable an adventure, but one can say there is really any danger involved? Absolutely: every single second spent engaging in this saga is a second that could potentially be spent doing something else. Something that may earn money or introduce you to the love of your life or fill you with a sense of greater accomplishment. To commit to reading knowing in advance everything ultimately is going to turn out for the best is an undertaking not to be dismissed lightly. But when you are done you will have memories that will continue to suddenly light up your brain when you least expect it.
