The Runes of the Earth is Book 1 of The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson, and it is the ambitious finalé, a trilogy of chronicles which will be ten books, in the end. I didn’t like the cover at all, but I would have bought it even if it were pink! It was a great moment – the return to fantasy of one of the masters.
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I didn’t enjoy Stephen Donaldson’s foray into science fiction (the Gap series), which was sad because I really believe Mr Donaldson has a real talent for fantasy. Some of the best pieces ever written are in his short story collection (Reave the Just, and the Killing Stroke) as well as his Mordant’s Need books. He is diabolically devious, his plots keep me guessing and his characters are often personifications of psychological qualities (like despair, spite, innocence, service) which makes the conflicts and their resolutions powerful and unsettling. None more so than the Thomas Covenant series, where the archetypes battle it out on the rarified stage of the Land. I couldn’t imagine how Mr Donaldson could devise a way to make a Third Chronicles believable, since the main character (it’ll always be Thomas Covenant) is dead.
The solution is very clever indeed. The Land is being destroyed by areas where reality is disrupted, where time is warped. And so, in a way that just ratchets up the frustration and tension, we have a limited access to Thomas Covenant himself.
This is not an author who just recycles old stories and villains and keeps going back to a tired formula. Not at all. Every cycle of Thomas Covenant story has raised the bar, and the bar is so high now I wonder if Mr Donaldson doesn’t fear going to work in the morning. It must be immensely difficult to plot this story out. Time travel plots always lead one to impossibilities, and the modern audience is well acquinted with the theory, so to do it well one needs a special touch.
It is a pleasure to read.
The Runes of the Earth is written in the same style as the earlier books, the Land is instantly familiar, the urgency and desperation of the plight is greater than ever before.
Donaldson goes to great lengths to establish the story in the real world first, which I suppose is for the benefit of those readers who haven’t yet read the first two Chronicles, but I wouldn’t recommend reading this as the first book. You will miss too much. There are ways in which Mr Donaldson has developed the story from where it left off in the previous trilogies that are just superb.
[... but. I must say that the whole story comes grinding to a halt in the next book, as a consequence of the labyrinthine tangled plotting, with a hell of a lot of explaining going on. See my review of FATAL REVENANT]
[... then the series is strangled to death. Oh dear. See my review of AGAINST ALL THINGS ENDING]
Rob
July 9, 2010 at 4:29 pm
That’s the thing with Donaldson – he takes you right into his world and you don’t leave until the very last page. Even then, there’s something left behind.
It certainly helps that Covenant is such a different kind of hero.