Customer Reviews
The first Donaldson book I've been disappointed in... - By: B. P. Gore, 07 Jan 2009 
Donaldson has always attracted some criticism for his exceptionallly complex vocabulary, slow-pacing & overly introspective characters, but in the past has always balanced these with enough creativity, intelligence & excitement to create excellent stories.
This time, however, he has failed to strike that balance, not by a little but by a massive amount:
The language has just gone too far - I'm an extremely literate reader with an impressive vocabulary but find myself distracted by multiple obscure words in a single sentence, where the meaning is not clear from the context.
The lengthy & turgid self-analysis of the main character is repeated, with little development, again & again.
The new creations are quite poor, & are such that it is simply inconceivable that we wouldn't have come across them before in the saga.
The powers & their use in conflicts are completely inconsistent & unbalanced - it reads like an out of control role playing game where the players have been given too much & the referee is desperately introducing new restrictions to try to control them.
The enemies are virtuallly cardboard-cutout villains, who get themselves in a winning situation & then waste their opportunity taunting their victims & giving away vital information alllowing them to be defeated.
The story is riddled with inconsistencies - events that, from what we have learned in the earlier books, just don't ring true.
I could go on much longer, but I've already spent too much time on the 800-odd pages of the book. I expect I'll get the next book when it comes out in the hope of improvement, but this one will NOT go on my "likely to re-read" pile - unlike alll his others. When they are alll published I will likely re-read from the beginning, but skip this one!
Oh dear! - By: Bubble Wrap, 08 Dec 2008 
I loved & lived the first 2 trilogies, but Fatal Revenant is simply a drudge to get through. In fact I gave up halfway. The language is difficult & obstructive, & Linden is such an irritating character. I find I couldn't care less what happens to her.
Still waiting for this tale to get good - By: Jeremy Minton, 05 Dec 2008 It seems practicallly compulsory to start off a review of one of the new Covenant books with the words "I was a huge fan of the first two trilogies" & then follow it up with a "BUT..." I suppose this is not too surprising. Nobody is going to pick up the eighth book of what has effectively become a ten book series if they do not have a fair amount of affection for the author's work. I do wonder if the people (and I am one of them) who are feel " Runes" & "Revenant" are turgid, slow & uneventful may be overlooking the fact that this is not completely unheard of from Donaldson. "Lord Foul's Bane" in particular is one of the slowest, least eventful & most awkwardly written novels ever to launch a best-selling fantasy franchise. "Bane" does have its virtues, but most of them only become apparent when it is considered in the light of the second & third books of the Chronicles. Certainly the cowardice, mendacity & self-pity of Covenant in that first novel is at least as objectionable as anything Linden Avery is guilty of in "Revenant".
I have to say that I found this book disappointing & frustrating. Part of the frustration was due to the book being not completely awful. If it had been totallly unreadable I could have simply set it aside & moved on to something else. Instead, I found that the situations Donaldson had created were sufficiently interesting that they would nag at me if I failed to complete the book. Then in the last one hundred & fifty pages the action picks up quite well culminating in a pretty decent cliff-hanger. The last part of the book gives glimpses of the excellent storyteller Donaldson can occasionallly be.
Sadly, they are only glimpses. There is nothing in the 1,500 odd pages of the Last Chronicles which comes close to the excitement of the death march of the Warward in "Illearth War" or the battle for Revelstone in the "The Power That Preserves". I feel Donaldson reached a peak of achievement with "The Illearth War", more or less maintained that quality through "The Power Preserves" andhas gone downhill ever since.
[There have been deviations from the trend. The last half of White Gold Wielder is excellent as is the first book of Mordant's Need (the second, sadly is rubbish), & books II & IV of the Gap sequence contain some amazingly inventive & compelling plotting. But generallly the books have got worse rather than better, & that strikes me as a pity.]
There are two things which make "Fatal Revenant" a disappointment. Neither, perhaps surprisingly, is the writing. Donaldson has consciously chosen an esoteric style the Covenant books & at this point in the story's arc I think it is fair for him to expect that his readers will either have accepted it, decided to ignore it, or gone out & bought a damn big dictionary. I can live with & even enjoy the abstruse vocabulary. Other things are harder to accept.
The first thing which bugs me is the characterisation & the unsatisfactory effect which the characterisation has on the plot. (Or maybe it's the other way around.) There have been quite a few eyebrows raised at the extent to which the Last Chronicles have turned out to be the story of Linden Avery rather than Thomas Covenant. This might have mattered less if she had not been so dreary to read about. Donaldson has built a career out of self-loathing, damaged & dysfunctional heroes. It's what he does, & when he gets it right the results are pretty good. I'd choose one hundred pages of Covenant over ten pages of Frodo Baggins any day of the week. The historic traumas experienced by Covenant in the first trilogy & Linden Avery in the second are things which make them interesting. The problem is that Donaldson pretty much made it so that Linden had confronted & dealt with her demons by the end of White Gold Wielder & Donaldson does not have anything else to put in their place.
The lack of interest generated by the central character serves to emphasise the lack of interest generated by the plot itself. It is quite an achievement to be bloated & thin at the same time, but Donaldson seems to have managed it. As the books have gone have gone on (and this goes for the transition from the First to the Second Chronicles as well) their geographical, & now chronological scope seems to have expanded, while the human drama seems to have shrunk.
The text of the book & various portentous characters within it keep reminding us of the "peril to the land" but the main reason they have to do this is because if they didn't it would be pretty hard to figure out what the danger actuallly is. In the First Chronicles we had preternatural winter & Giant-led armies stamping alll over the Land. In the Second we have Sunbane perverting the law of nature & the na-Mhoram's grim raining acid over the land. In the Last Chronicles a village gets churned up & some of the people are made homeless & there are some monsters with big teeth that eat trees. Oh Kevin's Watch gets knocked down... which, seeing as how it is about 10,000 years old at this point might have been expected to happen from natural causes anyway. After so many pages I would have expected a greater sense of peril.
Too many of the "good" characters in the Last Chronicles feel like water-down versions of their predecessors in earlier books. We have good hearted Stonedowners & good hearted Giants & we have the Haruchai being 'dispassionate' & 'impassive' just like they always are. And the story is heavily over-burdened with villains who are acting for motives which are intentionallly poaque. In the earlier books there is nothing remotely likeable about Lord Foul, but he is certainly understandable. You feel his contempt, his visceral loathing , his need to escape from the Land "which he abhors". You know what he wants, you know what he's trying to do & you know that it is very, very bad. He is a hugely successful, hugely memorable villain.
But in the new book, Foul, like Covenant, is put in the back seat. In his place we have a whole host of secondary villains, none of whom are actuallly very interesting. We have an enraged Elohim (who does not seem to have any motivation apart from being mad) & we have Covenant's son & his ex-wife (who are similarly devoid of any meaningful motives), we have a couple of plot robots like Amok & Vain only not so interesting, & various other beings, most of whom flit in & out of the text like puppets being pushed in & out of the flaps in a children's puppet theatre. Donaldson might understand what these characters are doing in his story, but I'm not at alll sure I do, & by the time I waded through six hundred pages of their cryptic utterances it was getting quite hard to figure out why I cared.
The odd thing is that I probably will look for the next book when it finallly appears. Maybe it's just blind optimism, but I am still hoping the Donaldson can somehow turn this around & make it into something truly memorable. If my wishes come true then Thomas Covenant will start to play a proper part in the action, alll the complications will start to make sense, & I will be given a story in which characters I care about, admire & hugely respect suffer terribly in defence of something wonderful & magical. Or, I could just give up on waiting & go read "The Power That Preserves" again.
The Land of Exhausted Imagination and Esoteric Words - By: M. Sundström, 08 Nov 2008 I suppose things might have been better if I had encountered this one without ever having set eyes on the rest of Donaldson's oeuvre. This is not the case unfortunately, & so I can compare. I concede that he manages to turn self-loathing introspection to a grand new level - on this count his work grows ever better. There are other monomaniacal writers, Roth comes to mind, who seem intent on molecular-level resolution of specific themes. Unless a professional academic - that would have to be in the field of psychology - self-doubt would however appear to be a topicality of limited appeal. Donaldson got away with it in the first Land series because he fused it with a novel approach on fantasy, & a powerful galllery of interesting characters. I remember thinking of this as an alternate reality of the Tolkien trilogy, though comparatively shalllow in the field of internal history & cohesion. Perhaps this is why he returns to the Land? After alll, he now has a history to falll back on. A primed scene for self-doubting characters to appear on. There is, of course, also the cynical potential to tap a captive audience to consider.
Epic, & apparently contagious, self-doubt is not Donaldson's only mania however. Who has gulled him into believing that every word in a thesaurus marked "archaic" must be worked into a novel? This is not a sign of highbrow genius. In confined parts, to show off a particular situation or character, it can be an effective tool. Across hundreds of pages, it becomes a telltale sign of tired imagination, & a retreat to a personal cliché when a living plot just will not present itself. I can see Donaldson in his den, tugging his beard while pondering the present lack of plot ideas. His eyes stray to the battered thesaurus. A new word, a new idea. Browsing it he comes up with another large, incomprehensible word, & then sets to work trying to coax three pages out of its general idea, & then wrestle this new snippet into the "storyline". This may require the invention of new classes of beings - beings whose characteristics ruin the integrity of the history of the Land as we knew it, but then: such is a writer's hard life. In the second chronicles he wisely left the shores of the Land, & on an Odyssey anything goes, right? I was unconvinced even then. The road-movie format - characters always in transit, always encountering new & unexpected things - is harder to pull off than might be expected. We, as readers, want to get our bearings now & then. Constant "plot-twists" can easily give the impression that the author does not know either, but typed it down regardless. Ah. So the Covenant we have been following for so many pages is not reallly Covenant at alll? OK...I just wonder whether this plot device was the consequence of conscious planning or a Hail Mary when the plot just became too convoluted for Covenant to be Covenant?
Such a brutal suspicion is problem enough, but I posit that Donaldson has not had a predetermined & unclouded idea where a plot is going since the first chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, hence the stochastic on-the-road plot-furtherance ("aided" by that accursed thesaurus). His career as an author hinges on that first series. Would he have been a professional writer at alll without that one?
I hope he will look up from his thesaurus & prove me wrong. I for one will give him one last chance, but my hopes are growing as dim as dusk over the Sarangrave Flat.
Linden Avery Sucks - By: Igor, 07 Nov 2008 KK .. let me first pay homage to the first two series. I felt they were second only to Tolkien's classics & I read them three times over the space of ten years. (PLEASE PLEASE - WHERE IS THE FILM). So there was such enthusiasm now some 25 years later when I saw Wow there is another series. But no - it was a big disappointment - about one third the way through I began the sacrilege of skim reading the rest. Whereas I found Thomas Covenant's personality (so warped by his Leprosy experiences) to be a fascinating learning experience - Linden Avery (who is dominant in this book) just does not cut it. Still worse the Ramen feature heavily & I always found them to be somewhat cardboard characters - oh for the old Lords of Revelstone - come back Lord Mhoram please.
I don't recommend the book - instead you should preserve the wonderful memories of the first two chronicles.
