Robert Jordan's Never Ending Story

SPEAKING VOLUMES

saga. I, for one, am grateful to have been there at the beginning.

With a long-running fantasy series, either you read all the books in sequence "" or, if you're born at the right time, you read them as the author writes them. With classics like J R R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, most of us did it the first way. To read in tandem with the author as he writes, timing is all. You have to be the right age when the first book comes out. Then you must commit the next five to ten years to patient waiting while the author writes the next few volumes. It's a very specific pleasure, almost unknown to readers who confine themselves to mainstream literature, and it accounts for the fanatic loyalty of many fantasy readers.

When the first book in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time saga came out in 1990, I had no idea that the epic would become part of my life for the next 17 years. The Eye of the World was fuelled by a big idea "" in Jordan's words, what if you woke up one day and found that you had been appointed saviour of the world?

This is the basic premise behind most fantasy series "" any book that refers to its main character as The Chosen One, The Anointed, The King Of The Mountains or suchlike works on this premise. But Jordan's gift was to try and imagine what this would be like from the point of view of the hapless protagonist: how would you change? How complex would your social and political world become? In his hands, The Wheel of Time became a story-cycle, a close modern equivalent to the classic saga of the ancients. I remember finishing the first book and marvelling. How on earth did this come out of the mind of a Vietnam vet whose previous work had included minor contributions to the "Conan the Barbarian" oeuvre?

Jordan had picked up the DFC and a Bronze Star in Vietnam, returning from his tours of duty to attend The Citadel. He was a nuclear engineer in the US Navy before he started writing in 1977. On his Dragonmount blog, he explained the two nicknames he had in Vietnam "" 'The Iceman' and 'Ganesha'.

In one of his pictures, he's sitting on a log with three dead NCA laid out just beside him. He's sitting there because it's convenient, not because he killed the men; to him the bodies are part of the landscape, nothing more. "The young man is glancing at the camera ... he is cold, cold, cold. I strangled that SOB, drove a stake through his heart, and buried him face down under a crossroad outside Saigon before coming home, because I knew that guy wasn't made to survive in a civilian environment. I think he's gone. All of him. I hope so. I much prefer being remembered as Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles."

As the next eleven (yes, eleven) volumes unfolded in The Wheel of Time series, it caused a brief rift in the marital lute. I'm a style purist: the later books, where Jordan provides endless detail on the world of Aes Sedai and the Dragonborn, left me cold. My husband is an architectural reader: to him, the careful tying up of every loose end and the countless allusions to legend are the whole point. I complained bitterly that the characters were caricatures, that the series was imploding under its own weight. But I kept going; I'd started by loving Robert Jordan's vision, and I couldn't bail now.

As Jordan began work on the twelfth and last volume in the series, A Memory of Light, he was diagnosed with a rare disease ""cardiac amyloidosis. Through the chemo, the many rounds of treatment and the increasing tiredness, Jordan tried to finish the book. In June 2007, he wrote on his blog: "I am trying to put every spare moment into A Memory of Light. There aren't too many of those spare moments right now." He joked through his illness, invited comments on the "dragon rag" wrapped around his newly shaven head, shared recipes for gumbo.

When he couldn't update his blog, his brother Wilson stepped in. "MOL... has been finished in his head for years," Wilson wrote in a post just before Robert Jordan died, recounting how Jordan "became the Gleeman and told the bones of ALL" of the story in a two-and-a-half hour session.

He left behind detailed notes, maps, a codex: enough for someone to finish his story. He also left behind a list of things he wanted to do before he died "" take dancing lessons, golf, and learn to skydive. He wanted to do that last without assistance: "I WANT to jump out of the bloody plane!" he wrote. For most of his life as a writer, that's exactly what he did.

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