I was complaining to my fellow fantasy-book reading friends that the Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series had been bogged down since Book 4. Last night I finished Book 9, Winter’s Heart, and I was very pleasantly surprised that something big actually happened.

This is Perrin (wolf-man) on the cover not Rand I think

Rand, aka “the Dragon Reborn” who is the only man who can face the Dark One and save the (mythical) world, cleansed the male half of the True Source. For fellow fantasy buffs who (gasp) haven’t read this series, the True Source is the equivalent to “mana” or the magical power sources found in other fantasy works and games. The Source has a male side, saidin, and a female side, saidar, kind of like yin-yang philosophy. Saidin had been tainted by the Dark One such that all men who could “channel” the Source would go mad and die, leaving only women channelers safe.

Rand talked with a philsopher and developed a theory for how to cleanse the taint off of saidin. Jordan should have more deeply and thoroughly explained the ideas behind this theory and how Rand devised it–I would have loved to read about that, but unfortunately he pretty shallowly explained what Rand was doing when he was doing it (a “tube” of saidin constricted by a larger tube of saidar, squeezing out the taint, having connected the two “poles” of evil in the world with the tubes–well okay).

Whilst Rand was trying to cleanse the Source, the Forsaken (the equivalent to the Black Riders in Tolkien but much, much more petty) were converging from all sides on him, drawn by the immense use of the Power, but Rand’s female channeler friends (the Aes Sedai) and the male channelers (the Asha’man) totally linked together and fended off all the Forsaken, humiliating them in a great way.

There is still an open question as to whether Saidin was completely cleansed, but I don’t really care; the fact that he did something truly important relative to this mythical world after many long books of hemming and hawing is worth it. I am looking forward to the last five books now that some cool things are starting to happen.