Man, it’s depressing - I’m halfway through and nothing’s been “roynish” yet! (Made up for it with a billion "carious"es, though.)
For background, I picked up the first trilogy when I was 12 or so and loved it - I still do, every so often I reread it. The second one, I reread when I heard about the new one - the first book destroyed my poor little heart, the second book I always stall out on in the middle and have to force myself to finish, and the third one I can never remember what happens in it. So obviously I approached this one with some reservations.
So far, I’m not unhappy, but I’m not precisely excited either. I’m interested in seeing what happens, though, and what’s been happening, so I suppose that makes it a success. And while I hate books that feel, six books down the line, that they have to start explaining everything (Dark Tower, I’m talkin’ to you!), but since Donaldson is almost entirely innocent of this sin I was so happy to learn what was really up with the Demondim and the ur-viles and the Waynhim, as long as he dosen’t keep explaining everything that was mysterious. I always thought the level of explanation was appropriate for people who Weren’t From Round Here, but not so exhaustive as to obviously be for a distant Constant Reader.
But how can you have ur-viles that aren’t roynish? Don’t tell me Donaldson has lost his thesaurus! (Or his Dartboard O’ Words, at least - one epithet per noun.) I know that ought to be really obnoxious to me, but having read these things for half my life it seems more in the Homeric style to me - wine dark sea, wise Odysseus, carious fangs, roynish ur-vile loremaster. I realize fully that this is totally me excusing the fact that the writing is for crap (which is funny because the Gap series could have been written by a different person - flawed also, but a completely different style.)
It improved, overall, and I’ll definitely be reading the next one.
I was completely thrown by the cliff-hanger ending. I was completely unprepared for a non-self-contained story until I got close to the end and realized there weren’t enough pages left to finish the story. And the ending! Damn you, Donaldson!
I used to be in the “Donaldson swallowed a thesaurus” camp until this book. What I’ve figured out is, he clearly doesn’t have a thesaurus. He uses some fairly obscure words, but he uses the same ones over and over again - roynish being a great example. In this book, the word formication appeared FOUR TIMES in one page’s worth of text. Four times!! He couldn’t come up with some other word?
I enjoyed it, and am looking forward to the next book. There was some definite “breaking of the mold” taking place here, which I really enjoyed.
Yeah, it’s not a thesaurus, it’s a dartboard. But at least this time he took off the particularly Donaldsonish ones off. Although I do miss roynish. It’s funny, the rest of his books aren’t like that at all - you wouldn’t think the Gap books were written by the same person, in terms of language.
Verdict: I liked it, although it was no First Chronicles. It got me interested enough to want to know what’s going to happen, which is doing pretty good in the epic fantasy realm. Worth reading, if not a special favorite.
Wow, thanks for the heads-up, Qadgop! I had no idea that Covenant story was going to be continued. This definitely goes on my Christmas list now.
I vividly remember reading Lord Foul’s Bane when i was in the seventh grade, and waiting eagerly for each of the next volumes to come out in paperback (we never had the money to buy hardcover in my family). And i’ve read them all a few times since since then, too.
While we’re on Donaldson’s vocabulary, where did ‘celerity’ go? He used it umpteen million times in the first trilogy, generally to describe the Bloodguard in action. And our old friends the Haruchai are very present in the new book, yet I didn’t see ‘celerity’ pop up once.
I finished The Runes of the Earth last night, and I think this is my favorite Covenant book thus far. (As Qadgop said, “Yeah, Covenant died, but when your daughter breaks the law of death, whatcha gonna do?”) And for me, that’s saying a great deal, because the first trilogy was one of the few books that made a difference in my life at the time I read it, rather than just being a thought-provoking read. After six books of extremal intransigence every which way, we have characters with just a little ‘give’ in them, at last, and I think that’s a good thing.
Here’s hoping the rest of the Last Chronicles lives up to the promise of its first book. My minimal experience with followup trilogies is that a good first volume isn’t a good predictor of the quality of the rest of the series. One of those followup trilogies was the second Covenant trilogy: my experience was similar to ZSofia’s, with the qualification that I thought the first book was very gripping. But I felt the whole thing got overblown and hyperbolic after that: for me, The One Tree has been extremely difficult to wade through on a re-read, but I’ve managed it, but in the 21 years since I originally read White Gold Wielder, I’ve never been able to re-read it. (The other followup trilogy I’ve read was David Brin’s second Uplift trilogy. Absolutely stunning first book; second and third books were OK but forgettable, IMHO.) So who knows whether the rest of the Last Chronicles will continue to be good…when they get here, that is.
