Loved these books. Have read it many times. I mean, yeah, Donaldson can drag on some… but the history of the Land, the descriptions, the Giants, just loved it all.
I read each book as it was released (I was a teen/young adult) and I’m putting my fingers in my ears and I’m humming to myself to drown out the naysayers.
Oh man, that’s funny stuff. Episode 40 sure clobbers the notion that Stephen Donaldson doesn’t have a sense of humor.
As for the OP – it’s hard to explain. Even 30 or so years ago, I knew that Lord Foul’s Bane was derivative and overwritten, but at the same time, there was some gold among the dross. Hidden within the 3000 page vocabulary lesson, there were some good action scenes and some creative characters.
By the time I struggled through the second series, though, I was pretty much done. There’s only so much futility you can handle. It was pretty clear that no matter how much white gold wielding go done, the people of the Land just seemed unable to keep the place up without outside intervention. There didn’t seem to be any point in intermittent heroic self-sacrificing heroism if the end result was going to be eeeevil popping up again like a Whack-a-Mole game.
I read the Sword of Shannara 30 years ago during the famous Blizzard of '78 when the state completely was shut down for 4 days. To this date, those are some of the most regretted days of my life. Seriously, it’s not even the worst book I’ve ever read in my life, but it was one of the biggest wastes of time – stylistically and plot-wise – there was nothing even slightly nutritional in the book. It was the literary equivalent of spending a week eating stale Twinkies.
BTW, “penultimate” probably doesn’t mean what you think it does.
Truly scary to contemplate that there might be another Shannara-ish pastiche of Tolkien to come. shudder
:smack: You’re right. Updating the key-value pair.
OK. So, after a long, long pause, I finally forced myself to finish LFB, and now I’m about halfway through The Illearth War.
The main character absofuckinglutely ruins it. Thomas “I’m soooooooo Emo” Covenant is infuriating, and infuriatingly dull. He’s the sarcastic Goth girl in high school who cuts herself and rebuffs all attempts at friendship, and then has the stones to write bad poetry in her journal about how she is (with apologies to Winona Ryder) “utterly alone.” Fuck her. And fuck Thomas Covenant.
It’d be different if he were at least interesting to read about. But each and every passage about him is full of “don’t touch me!” and “I’m a leper!” and “Outcast Unclean!” After the first 300 pages or so, it’s painful and tedious to read about, and reveals, in my mind, a severely stunted worldview on the part of Donaldson. It might have been interesting when I was a stonely loner in high school, but now it’s just transparent and foolish.
Thematically, the whole thing seems to be a junior-high level critique of the modern world. Everything is gray. Nobody has any compassion. Everybody in our world is soulless, selfish, and bitchy. The world itself is dull and lifeless. Blah blah blah. No one cares about the land. It’s too childish to be an effective critique, and too detailed to be an effective allegory.
It’s basically crap.
That said, I’m going to plow my way through the first trilogy, and then likely forget I ever read it.
I’ve taken to wearing my white gold wedding band, and pounding my forehead into the coffee table late at night, in the vain hope that I’ll be transported to the Land, just so I can slap Covenant until he dies. And I keep my .45 around, so I can blow Bannor’s brains out if he tries to interfere.
Oh, and one other thing: the other guy from our world? Hile Troy? Geezus, Atiaran really was a fuck up, wasn’t she? The best she could do in terms of military genius was a wargamer? A wargamer?! Really? Did he warp in holding his trusty hex-map book and a d20? Was Donaldson playing an old Avalon Hill game, and suddenly was like, “Hey, yeah!”
Oof.
Why? If you don’t like it, you’re not likely to change your mind at this point. So why continue? It’s not like you’ll get special bragging rights, or there’s some kind of secret club you’ll be inducted into – it’ll just be your time, wasted.
You don’t like it. It happens. Find something you do like, and move on.
That said… Covenant’s outbursts seem transparent and foolish to you, because that’s how you’re taking them. It’s a set-up by Donaldson, and you’ve fallen for it.
If you want to see the author’s intent and opinion of Covenant, take a look at how Mhoram and Foamfollower, and Bannor react to him. They know what’s what.
The others – High Lord Elena, in particular – think they’re in a fantasy-land story. And Hile Troy is specifically there as a stand-in for the reader self-inserting into the story. All the stuff he does and says is how a stereotypical reader would react and try to “fix” things.
If you’ve ever read an Internet screed by some fanboy complaining about how stupid the people in whatever fictional work are behaving, and how all their problems would have been instantly solved had they just done what fanboy suggests – that’s Hile Troy.
I suspect Donaldson’s choice there isn’t as incidental as you’d believe. Particularly given how things turn out.
(personally, I don’t blame Atiaran for that one – it’s too likely another of Foul’s little ploys to destroy Covenant)
[tangentally relevant hijack]
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/erf0016.html 
[/tangentally relevant hijack]
JRB
My time. My choice.
Do you really think I don’t know that the book (and the Land, and the Despiser) is really about Covenant’s self-conflict, and that he’s eventually going to have to come to terms with his Dark Side (Lord Foul,) and that this whole thing, apart from the objective facts as presented in the books, is likely entirely metaphorical for Covenant’s self-loathing and the process he has to go through in order to give himself permission to keep on living in the real world? Of course I know. It’s transparent and foolishly obvious. Which is making me angry that it takes SO FUCKING LONG to get to the point.
In other words, no, I haven’t “fallen for” anything.
I’m aware, and it’s frankly one of the only interesting things I’ve seen in the trilogy thus far.
OMG - Spoilers possible.
I’ve said before that I don’t like Illearth War. I’m a fan of the series (and started re-reading it again just because of this thread) and I think it’s the weakest of them all. Troy pisses me off, the sweetness and light of Elena makes my teeth ache, the battles are pathetic, just not my favorite book. I did like that she manages to screw the pooch bigtime, but the ending was a bit … what’s it called? Deus ex machina or something?
Power That Preserves is better, IMHO. Tommy pulls his head out a little bit and doesn’t just wander around whining the whole time.
“Leper outcast unclean” got old by, I dunno, chapter 2 of LFB
What can I say? I like it. I am even enjoying the latest series, having finished Fatal Revenant not long ago.
I don’t love it, not like I love JRRT. But it’s a solidly entertaining read for me, with more depth than most of what I find in current fantasy.
I find I enjoy the reactions & the histories of the support characters the most, to be honest.
I actually think his Gap science fiction series was better than the TC Chronicles, and is among some of the best SF I’ve read too.
I don’t tend to recommend the series to anyone, because the reactions are so widely varied. But if one is seriously interested in the Fantasy genre, I consider it a must-read.
Not quite what I meant. Put simply: Donaldson is writing Covenant so that he annoys the reader. You are annoyed. And that was what he wanted.
Covenant’s whining is just one more thing – like, the infamous thing with Lena in Lord Foul’s Bane – that Donaldson puts in to make Covenant unappealing. In the Covenant books, it’s part of his trying to turn the escapist fantasy novel tropes on their ears. In his later books – the Gap series, in particular – it seems Donaldson is just fascinated by using utterly unlikable protagonists (whom he tries to get you to grudgingly like).
But, yeah, Donaldson wants people to be irritated by Covenant. Hell, Covenant wants people to be irritated by Covenant, so it’s kind of a nice literary flourish, that.
Also, I wouldn’t say you’re spot-on about the metaphor that Donaldson is telling; half spot-on, maybe. Covenant also needs to give himself permission to get on with accepting his fantasy world, as well as get on with living in the real world. And that is what Donaldson is trying to reflect back on the reader.
:smack: I suppose we hate in others what we hate in ourselves, eh? I’m annoyed with Covenant because I’m a stubborn, intransigent SOB too. And I just realized that I came off like an utter prick in my last post. Sorry about that.
I concur, book one of the Gap was weak, but as a whole the series rocked, I am finding the last chronicles OK, but Linden isn’t may favourite protagonist, I preferred TC. Bring on book 3.
Yes, one could say you were a bit of an ogre.
Eh, no worries. And hope I didn’t come off as a raging fanboy, either.
Although I like the Covenant chronicles, I kinda think Donaldson is a bit dickish, writing them to so thoroughly yank the chain of fantasy fans. He takes every opportunity to set them up, then to kick the chair out from under them. I’m fairly convinced that he wanted reader outrage.
I’m actually kinda amused because he wasn’t as good a writer in Lord Foul’s Bane, and so sometimes inspires reader boredom. But fortunately his writing improved.
It was definitely that emotion that made me give up on LFB and not look back. From the posts in this thread I think I’ll skip old Stevie’s works altogether.
Well, sir, I finished it. And surprise surprise, I didn’t hate it. In fact, I liked it enough to start the second set of books. Even though Donaldson’s writing is frustrating at times, I liked the way he tied up all the characters’ loose ends in a meaningful way, all to bring the plot to a conclusion. Triock, Pietten, Elena, Mhoram, Trell, Saltheart (a caamora via lava? Badass.) All ended up serving the plot. I can appreciate that.