Well, I Finally Finished Thomas Covenant...

[Jamie123]

I finally finished the last chapter of the last Thomas Covenant book! The Last Dark has been sitting part-read on my bookshelf for several years and I finally worked myself up to finishing it.

I have very mixed feelings about The Last Chronicles. I raced through first two books: The Runes of the Earth and Fatal Revenant, loving every page. (They weren't quite on a par with the wonderful First Chronicles - which I totally love - but they weren't far off.) FR ends on an amazing cliffhanger, so you can imagine how much I anticipated Against All Things Ending coming out.

When it came however, what an anticlimax! All anyone does for the first 100 pages is stand about and talk. It picks up after that, but somehow the spell of the first two books was gone. I slogged my way through it though, and again, it ends on a pretty good cliffhanger...

...and again the next book disappoints. The first two thirds of The Last Dark seemed to meander around without raising much excitement in me. I can't quite put my finger on why: some of the chapters are quite good in themselves, but somehow the whole thing still doesn't work. Maybe it was me who'd changed.

Anyway, I have to give it to Stephen R. Donaldson - the last third of the last book did grip me. Still, I was fearing an "all manner of things shall be well"-type ending (The Land has passed away like Narnia in The Last Battle, but HEY! Here we are in "heaven" and our friends who we thought had died are waiting to meet us!) Yes OK - there was some of that - but it wasn't the Narnia rehash I was dreading. Characters we'd loved and lost stayed dead. Grief was not trivialized.

I'd be interested to know if anyone else who's read these books feels the same way about them - or is it just me?

P.S. I found this cool tongue-in-cheek picture of all the characters, by Zorm, who's painted a lot of other similar pictures. (Note Lord Foul's "fang eyes" in the background!)

Edited November 26, 2020 by Jamie123

[Eddy]

The final chronicles is terrible.  Endless repetition of descriptive phrases fill endless pages and do nothing to advance the story.  Lindens battered woman affect is relentless and every character focused upon has a lousy self image that bogs the story down in what SRD apparently thinks is suspense or verisimilitude but in reality is boring and once again, does nothing to advance the story.  Even action scenes, while being chased or attacked the characters have time to relive traumas for page after page.  There is no sense of continuity or tension when the main characters are lost in reminiscenses about walking through the rooms of a house in another world.  Self indulgent tripe of the sort I can do without.

[zil2]

Welcome to ThirdHour, @Eddy!  Looking forward to Getting to know you.

[Carborendum]

Ok, this is sounding an awful lot like the later books of Dune that I just expressed my feelings about.

Thomas DIED!!!  Now they're bringing him back to life?  WTFreak!?!

I'm not reading this series.  I had never even heard that there was a third series until now.

[mikbone]

This one was really good though.

I loved the Giants, Nom, and the Ranyhyn.  6th grade would have been lots worse without these books.

I couldn’t finish the last trilogy…

Edited August 15, 2023 by mikbone

[NeuroTypical]

I remember reading those books 1,000,000 years ago. I really liked them.
 

I never managed to be too impressed with the hero Covenant though. He’s sad because he’s a leper, therefore he assaults a girl, and he’s still somehow the hero.  And his daughter coming on to him, but it’s ok because he’s in a magic place where that’s not a problem.  Ew. Just ew.

But yeah, gravelers and Revelstone and the giants’ caamora and a dozen other things were really cool.

[Jamie123]

20 hours ago, NeuroTypical said:

And his daughter coming on to him, but it’s ok because he’s in a magic place where that’s not a problem.  Ew. Just ew.

Elena is seriously screwed up. She is a brilliant magician and a great leader, but the flaw in her character (planted at her very conception) makes her easy meat for Lord Foul. I'll always remember the scene from The Power That Preserves when Covenant meets her again, now totally enslaved by Lord Foul - but all he can feel at that moment is joy. Incredibly powerful - his love for his daughter totally transcends the logic of the situation he is in.  Many years ago I tried to write a novel of my own called That Untravelled World. I never finished it, but the pivotal event in the story was inspired by that scene.

In my story the hero (I called him Jamie!!) is in a strange land in the far north which is menaced by a demon in the form of a monstrous woman. Being an "outsider" (rather like Covenant) he has the power to destroy her, but when he sees her he finds she is the "demonified" spirit of a girl he once loved, but who was murdered. His love cannot allow him to fight her and he betrays all those who are depending on him. He then goes through a period of purgation and later healing before he meets her again, when he "defeats" her - not by strength or magic, but by awakening her to who she truly is. Of course, by becoming "good" she loses her demonic powers, and  the hero must fight again to save her from the local population who still want to destroy her. I was quite excited about this at the time, but never managed to get the story finished. Still, if I had, I'd have had Donaldson to thank!

Edited August 16, 2023 by Jamie123

[Jamie123]

On 8/15/2023 at 5:45 PM, mikbone said:

This one was really good though.

I loved the Giants, Nom, and the Ranyhyn.  6th grade would have been lots worse without these books.

I couldn’t finish the last trilogy…

I liked the Giants too - though they clearly owe something to Tolkien's Ents!

I much prefer the British paperback covers from the 1980's to the American ones:

I love Peter Goodfellow's art, and if you put the backs of the three books together they combine to make a panorama of The Land which you can compare with the map inside the book.

Also you can totally see where they were going with the "boxed" title and author: compare this with the Lord of the Rings covers from the same period...

The artist here by the way is Pauline Baynes - most famous for illustrating The Chronicles of Narnia.

Edited August 16, 2023 by Jamie123

[Vort]

3 hours ago, Jamie123 said:

I love Peter Goodfellow's art, and if you put the backs of the three books they combine to make a panorama of The Land which you can compare with the map inside the book.

In case you're a Yes fan, here's a bit of a mindblower involving the album covers for Tales from Topographic Oceans and Relayer:

[Emmanuel Goldstein]

I have these and I think I might take a look finally.