"You want me to tell her? She'll crack my pate if I mention a thing like that! I think the woman was born in Far Madding in a thunderstorm. She probably told the thunder to be quiet. It probably did."
One of the most surprising and pleasant aspects of reading this fantasy series is that despite all the contemplative philosophizing about the character defects of women by men and of men by women, this world is much more gender-neutral than the one we know. The women characters here are by and large every bit as strong and powerful and fearsome as the men. Obviously, the subtext here about telling thunder to stifle itself and it doing so carries certain misogynistic undertones, but they are undertones borne out of the spirit of respect, not denigration. The treatment of gender in the novels has long been a subject of debate precisely because it can be difficult at times to reconcile the more contemplative philosophical statements made by men about women with the actual characterizations the author presents. But that debate even exists if symptomatic of the great leap forward the series takes in the genre. After all, how many strong female characters can you name that appear in The Lord of the Rings?
“You can never know everything, and part of what you know is always wrong. Perhaps even the most important part. A portion of wisdom lies in knowing that. A portion of courage lies in going on anyway.”
No matter the situation—but especially in situations that crop up throughout this fantasy series including this particular book—there are always going to be things that can’t be known for sure and it is only good strategy to admit that lack of knowledge. Ignorance isn't stupidity, but making plans based on ignorance sure is. The point being that no matter how hard an author struggles to create an entirely invented world there is no way of doing that without creating parallels to the real word. All good fiction no matter how imaginative and creative is dependent upon that attachment to the known knows here and the unknown unknowns there.
Night fell. On the hilltop, the wind blew dust across the fragments of what had once been a ter'angreai Below lay the tomb of Shadar Logoth, open to give the world hope. And on distant Tremalking, the word began to spread that the Time of Illusions was at an end.
Tremalking is an island on one of the continents in this invented world. It might have be interpreted by readers as having an Easter Island-ish sort of feel due to the fact that located there is a very important statute of a female buried deep in the dirt so that only the head is visible. (Its male counterpart is located elsewhere.) This particular quote represents the final paragraph, excluding the Glossary. As always with the books in the series, the final imagery is ambiguous but filled with portent. Although extensively outlined, it is very difficult to write books in a series simultaneously so unless Jordan was a super-savant it is to be expected that the next entry in the series had not yet been written—certainly not to any great length—by the time he penned these closing words to this novel.
This represents one of the prickly problems of writing an extensive series: none of the intermediary novels can really represent a climax to the story since so much more is to come and even the ending itself cannot be too set in stone regarding what is to come since plotting is a fluid thing. Jordan is quite adept with his conclusions as illustrated here. The imagery carries a foreboding presence without making the mistake of spelling too much out precisely that must be lived up to in the actual events which are to follow. Unless a reader is already familiar with the significance of Tremalking, however, this ending might as well be gibberish.
