Is anyone disappointed in Runes?

Book 1 of the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

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Post by Mortice Root »

Just started reading ROTE again, but so far I'd have to say I'm not disappointed at all. I've always really liked the "real world" chapters through all of the Chrons. but I thought the entire Prologue section for ROTE was excellent. I can't imagine building tension any better than SRD did here. I don't remember the rest of the book as well, so maybe I'll feel let down as I go on, but the start was perfect.
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Post by Cagliostro »

I'm rereading for FR which I now own and have to wait because I still haven't finished this monstrosity. The beginning took me right back, as I too loved the "real world" moments. Just as nasty and powerful as the past books, and as sad. I didn't want Roger to be such a jerk. And poor Joan.

But I must say, the bits in the Land do have a very slow pace. The problems I had with it before are somewhat still with me this time. I just find it difficult to read. The early word on FR is good, so, and I expected, that this is just the setup. I just wish it could have been more interesting, and bits of it were. The end was a shock, and a nasty one at that. I trust Donaldson, and I know he is going to pick it all up. But I must say he has done better setups. I just thought I'd have an easier time reading it this time, but I didn't. Still, some interesting bits that I didn't remember from the first time reading it.

Soon I will be ready for book 2, and I'm ready to be surprised and happy.
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Post by dlbpharmd »

I have a new appreciation for ROTE now after reading FR.
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Post by ParanoiA »

Just finished Runes, and while it's a little slow after first translating to the land, I really enjoyed it. It feels like such a set up. I also really like Stave. I had a feeling he was going to come around. I've come to depend on Haruchai to ward the characters, and while Stave has been around, it hasn't quite been the same. I think Fatal Revnant will correct that.

Contrary to other posters, I'm not really impressed with the real world plots. Jeremiah and his mental state is pretty interesting, but other than that I'm fairly indifferent to it.
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Post by Alcarion »

Generally, I'm disappointed with the new Chronicles (or Last). The pacing seems rushed, less profound than what I expected from SRD. Overall, I get the feeling the plot is becoming contrived, artificial.

After finishing FR, I started feeling as if the whole thing was merely a means for SRD to finally put out all the 'backstory' for the series. Which is fine by me, of course, but tends to confuse the whole thing (for me, at least).

Generally, not as enjoyable as the previous novels.

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Runes Disapointment

Post by Truth or treachery »

Hey everyone, Im brand new here and didnt even realize there was a site like this until I stumbled onto it while looking for reviews of FR and Runes. I actually read all twelve pages of this forum (hey, they shut my warcraft down, what else was i going to do?) and pretty much had to post a reply about the disapointment in the new chronicles.

I remember searching for the TWL in my school library in 7th grade. I had just read the first trilogy and was ready for more. While this is probably a little young (considering the rape and all) I found that LOTR suddenly seemed childish and to this day every other fantasy book I have read has paled in comparison to TCTC. I believe this is becuase of a combination of things that we now, all having read the series over and over and over, take for granted. The first and most important in my mind is that we all liked the books from the viewpoint of Thomas covenant the best. He was such a miserable, cowardly character at first that the land seemed just that much more beautiful. Its people seemed so honest and worthy of respect. We wanted them to be saved so badly so they could keep living in this world that any one of us would have gladly jumped in front of a car to go visit...maybe even stay.

That first impression of the land cannot be duplicated. Also, by the time we hit the second chronicles, Covenant had grown as a person and was now doing what we were all yelling at him to do in the first chronicles. I think that contributes greatly to why everyone enjoyed the second chronicles so much. He was not only DOING something, he was powerful. He was fighting the clave and amazing Sunder, Hollian and the Haruchai the way all of us would have liked to have done. But with Covenant changed, this series becomes a step closer to an ordinary fantasy series. Hero vs. the bad guys. The only thing that distiguishes it so completely from other series is that it builds upon the land and characters we already had fallen in love with.

For example, The meeting with the giants would not have been nearly as moving if we had not known Foamfollower the first time around. How can any sort of content in runes possibly compare to that? Linden was the co-star last time. She wasnt in the first chronicles so we dont tie her in with those first impressions of the land. The land can never be as good when written from her point of view becuase she was not there in the beggining with us.

So i guess the point of all this is basically to defend SRD as he moves into new territory. Imagine if we suddenly had TC back in the drivers seat and cruising through the land on a new adventure. I dont think that would do the series justice. There have been many criticisms of SRD and runes that I feel come from the basic "We want TC back!" feeling that, I must admit, I cant help feeling too. The proof of this is a super spoiler so...
Spoiler
The end of both runes and FR have been such amazing cliffhangers because we were suddenly thinking "Yes! TC is back!
I REALLY hope the spoiler button works there. But think about it. Why else were we practically salivating to get the next book? SRD has twice done this to us now. He KNOWS what we love about the books most probably because he loves the same things. If anything he has grown as an author and once we have read all 4 books, we will look back and say "Damn, that was frickin awesome!"

So dont hate Linden becuase she isnt covenant and dont hate SRD becuase he is doing what he has always done in providing us with something unique. You cant compare the last chronicles to the first ones because those can never be recreated. You cant compare them to the second chronicles because those built on the emotions we had for the first ones. You can only relax and enjoy the ride one last time. I bet if you think about it, somewhere in the back of your mind, you were impatiently waiting for what I refered to in the spoiler to happen while reading both Runes and FR and it killed the experience for you a little bit.

I better stop now even though i dont think Ive put down half of my opinions on it. But this scroll bar is getting suspiciously smaller and I believe I have written enough for 3 posts.
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Post by wayfriend »

Welcome, TnT. Nice post.
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Post by High Lord Tolkien »

I'm torn between thinking that Runes sucks even more because of how good FR is.
Or that FR is so good because Runes was so boring.
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Post by dlbpharmd »

Runes is even better now after FR.
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Post by Seppi2112 »

On re-read I noticed two things:

1) Esmer seems like much less of a dick now that I know what he is and how embattled he is.
2) There's not much happening outside of Linden's head. All of the progress for Linden is emotional and internal - and when she finally DOES open her mouth its just to voice her uselessness.

I'm not joining THOOLAH with that lol, but it has to be said. LA spends more time thinking and considering than doing in ROTE...
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Post by GeneWolfeBookFan »

I found Runes of the Earth and Fatal Revenant, which I just finished, very satisfying books to read. My interest was not just the story, plot, action, and imaginative elements (which are stock standard aspects of fantasy/science fiction novels) but also the emotional development and detail of the "processes". That adds an extra dimension making the story unusually evocative. And as I found with the 1st and 2nd chronicles the emotionally focussed perspective that SRD uses makes these books memorable compared to most mainstream fantasy literature out there.

If you are disappointed with "Runes" (but love the overall series and concept) I suggest rereading it before Fatal Revenant assuming its been a while since your first read Runes. You should get more out of it. Much the same can be said with books by Gene Wolfe, they have to be reread to get the full appreciation.

Having read Lord Foul's Bane in 1980 or so, I have to be surprised and pleased that I'm still enjoying the series 27 years later!

Oh by the way I'm new to the Kevinswatch forums. Hello from Tasmania :)
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Post by dlbpharmd »

Welcome!
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Post by stormrider »

Hi! Welcome!
GeneWolfeBookFan wrote: If you are disappointed with "Runes" (but love the overall series and concept) I suggest rereading it before Fatal Revenant assuming its been a while since your first read Runes. You should get more out of it. Much the same can be said with books by Gene Wolfe, they have to be reread to get the full appreciation.
I reread the entire series right before FR came out because I wanted to make sure I remembered everything. Sadly, I still hated Runes. It's possible that I might enjoy it more now that I've read FR, but I just don't know if I can handle reading it again. (FR, on the other hand, I will reread as soon as I get the chance.)
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Post by Atrium »

My feelings toward ROTE are ambigous. On one hand i think Donaldson introduces some great new characters (Roger, Esmer, Anele and even poor Jeremiah looks promising). On the other hand, the Land part of the story just seems a bit... uninspired. I get the feeling that Donaldson has a great story in mind for us, but doesnt really want to hand out the goodies yet. We get mysterious clues about new dangers, a lot of talk and even more introspection and finally he throws the wild card of time travel into the game. (I never really understood why Linden needed to go back in time for the Staff of Law.)

The main antagonists of ROTE, the demondim, are very sketchily made. I never got a feeling for them. They neither scared nor interested me much as they were described in the book. Just some new mindless bad guys starting a riot in a time thats not even their own. And the reappance of the illearth stone just felt like cheating to me.
Spoiler
In contrast, i loved the short encounter with the viles in FR. Here i feel that they serve the story both by their dramatic appearance and interaction with Linden and by hinting at more things to come as the plot unravels.
Frankly, introducing time travel in a fantasy story is a risky enterprise. It challenges the whole fantasy dramaturgy, thats not supposed to be about laws of physic, but rather magic, heroism and evil. I would rather not have to worry about Linden altering the lands past and its consequences. But to be fair i think Donaldson handles that problem more elegantly in FR.

On a more overall level, i think the big problem that Donaldson faces when writing Covenant sequels is that he, in effect, killed off his main protagonist already back in TWL. And im not talking about Covenant, but the Land. I would hazard the guess that what initially made us all fall in love with this story was the Land itself. Its powerfully drawn, vibrant protagonists (Mhoram, Elena and the other Lords, stonedownors, Haruchai, Giants) and antagonists (ravers, Drool, urviles, Foul). And the landscape itself, charged with significance and health. The Land was something worth defending from evil, that was what made us alternately curse Covenant when he scewed up, and cheer him on when he occasionally set his feet on the right path, the one we knew he was destined to thread.

In the second trilogies the Land is raped, and serves only as a place of torment for its poor ignorant inhabitants. That was a tough blow, but at least it made us mad as hell and wanting blood and retribution from the responsible. In the last cronicles we get hints of partial restorations, but the people of the land is still painfully ignorant. In fact no one seems to know whats going on except the bad guys and the Elohim, and they of course are not letting US know. So in ROTE we follow Linden as she stumbles on from one encounter to the next. Never really figuring out whats going on here. And never really getting the chance to re-embrace that old love of ours, the Land. How can this book be anything but a frustrating read?
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Post by ninjaboy »

I agree and disagree whole-heartedly with the previous post.

So much of the 2nd Chronichles takes place far away from the land... And is there any mention of the Woodhelvinnin at all? I think it was all Stonedownors.. Anyway I agree that the Land itself is a big love for me, and the death of the last Forestal and the breaking of the laws of life and death were also big blows...

After the 2nd Chronichles all I really wanted was Linden to return to the land and make everything as wonderful as it was in the beginning...

But Oh No! Kevin's Dirt! Oh No! No Staff of Law! Oh No! The Haruchai are Evil (well, unhelpful at the least). Cail and the Merewives had a SON?? WTF???

I loved the book - I loved reading it.. I know it's been out for years, but I only read it after FR came out (which I immediately followed it with). I love Stave, thae Waynhim & Ur-Viles, but most of all the Ramen and Ranyhyn... If the great horses were gone for good I probably would be too.. Can only cope with so much loss..

But the only problem with the book is not a lot happens. She finds Alele, Masters catch her, flees the masters with Anele & Liand, Meets the Ramen & Esmer, Goes back in time & gets the Staff, recaptured by the Masters...
It's mostly Character development and introduction of characters ad themes, which is great and essential, but after 730 pages there wasn't a lot of movement.. She only really went from Kevin's Watch to the Verge of Wandering, which is a tiny portion of the Land, and then by magic appeared at Revelstone...
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Post by ninjaboy »

I never really said which part of the previous post i agreed or disagreed with, did I?

The question about the Necessity of Time Travel to get the Staff... They probably could have just got the Ur-Viles to help them find the Cave of the Waynhim in the 'present' but then the Manethrall's eagerness to do something so crazy wouldn't be displayed.. And nor would the Ur-Vile's willingness to help Linden.. Liand wouldn't have seen the horrors Linden is capable of.. And Esmer's betrayal at calling the Demondim to attack them wouldn't have happenned, and even if it did it wouldn't have left them outside Revelstone with the whorde of Demondim on their tails... But the main thing it shows is that Linden is willing to use Evil means to attemp Good ends..
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Post by amanibhavam »

So much of the 2nd Chronichles takes place far away from the land... And is there any mention of the Woodhelvinnin at all? I think it was all Stonedownors.
A Woodhelven would've been impossible under the Sunbane so it's no surprise that only Stonedowns had survived.


If I have any gripes with the Last Chronicles so far it is that it seems to lack those very humane characters like Mhoram, Foamfollower, Bannor, Sunder whom I could relate to. So far in this rendition only Stave, the Mahdoubt and (surprise) Esmer approaches that for me; similarly this series seems to be lacking those uplifting, cathartic moments that helped me to bear the prolonged sufferings, like Lord Mhoram's victory, Covenant's healing in Morinmoss, the caamorra in Coercri etc.
Having said that, I still love FR and have just started it for the second time, so that I can maybe capture things that have eluded me during first reading - with SRD every single sentence may have meaning for the future...
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Post by dlbpharmd »

amanibhavam wrote:
So much of the 2nd Chronichles takes place far away from the land... And is there any mention of the Woodhelvinnin at all? I think it was all Stonedownors.
A Woodhelven would've been impossible under the Sunbane so it's no surprise that only Stonedowns had survived.
True. Remember that afte First Chronicles there was much sharing of lore in the Land, so that when Covenant and Linden arrived in TWL, there were utensils and other items made from wood in Mithil Stonedown. But, there were Woodhelven in the 2nd Chronicles, most notably Stonemight Woodhelven.
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Post by EssPee »

I was dimly aware that Donaldson was at work on a new set of Covenant books, but didn't manage to beam in until a few weeks ago when I got both ROTE and Fatal Revenant from the library. I've just finished reading them back-to-back.

ROTE was, in short, a real slog. I appreciate that this novel is mainly about setting a lot of balls in motion for the later books, but that's still really no excuse for a book in which the characters do very little but wander aimlessly. Yes, there was the quest for the Staff of Law, such as it was, but that aside, Avery and her companions were mostly just battered about by circumstance.

Which, in the absence of an overarching narrative, I found frustrating in the extreme. As others have mentioned upthread, in ROTE we have no real idea of the stakes, on either a personal or global level. Avery wants to rescue her son, but as presented here, that's both an incredibly abstract goal at this point -- she doesn't even know where he is, much less how to get there or what it will take to overcome Foul and any other guardians -- it's also woefully insufficient for a 560-page work of epic fantasy, even one that's only the first of four books. As for the Land, it's certainly not what it once was, but neither does it seem in danger of imminent destruction

What SRD does instead is present us with big, cerebral mysteries involving beings of which we know relatively little -- Anele's various possessors, the Elohim, Esmer, the Demondim and the ur-viles -- while marching his characters through a Land that's curiously devoid of color or interest. I found it all unaffecting in the extreme, particularly with no overarching sense of peril and relatively few reasons to care what happens to most of the characters we do meet. (Even the Haruchai and their mild form of Earthpower fascism, which could have been an engaging concept, is virtually impossible to work up any emotion over.)

The big mysteries might end up being interesting in time, but narratively speaking, it seemed a big mistake for the author to spring all this stuff on readers without really setting the emotional stage first.

Finally, a word on the prose. SRD may have changed as a writer since the second trilogy, but I've also changed quite a bit as a reader, and I don't seem to have the patience I once did for his labored style and self-consciously "writerly" voice. It's been quite a while since I looked into the first and second trilogies, but a lot of the stylistic quirks I recall from them are still here, especially the overused (and often jarring) similies and SRD's insistence on never using a one-dollar word when a ten-dollar one will do. And then there's the repetition -- characters constantly rethinking something that's just been said, for instance, or quoted speech interspersed with mental interjections that simply recast previously expressed thoughts or conclusions.

All that said, I obviously continued to read -- it helped a great deal to pick up the first two books at the same time, as otherwise I'm not sure I'd have been all that excited about getting into FR -- and the second book is a big step forward in a narrative sense. Not so much stylistically, but SRD is who he is and I don't expect him to change, even if I like grousing about his writing.

This is already way in TL;DR territory, so I'll hold off on my dislike of SRD's "real world" scenes and my fundamental complaint with his whole leprosy metaphor (short take: it's a bacterial disease that's been curable with combination antibacterial therapy for decades). I haven't had a chance to fully explore the site, so apologies if some of these topics have already been explored elsewhere.
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Post by dlbpharmd »

Welcome to the Watch!

We've discussed many of your criticisms over the years, but I want to point this one out specifically:

EssPee wrote:
This is already way in TL;DR territory, so I'll hold off on my dislike of SRD's "real world" scenes and my fundamental complaint with his whole leprosy metaphor (short take: it's a bacterial disease that's been curable with combination antibacterial therapy for decades).
Wikipedia article:
Multidrug therapy (MDT) and combining all three drugs was first recommended by a WHO Expert Committee in 1981.
And:
Because this treatment is quite expensive, it was not quickly adopted in most endemic countries. In 1985 leprosy was still considered a public health problem in 122 countries.
Since 1st Chronicles were written in the early 70s, your complaint that leprosy has been curable for "decades" doesn't really hold up. Also, I believe you have to remember that Covenant's world and "our world" aren't the same. Lastly, SRD relied heavily on his father's knowledge base in treating patients with leprosy in India, thus the use of dapsone (DDS) as monotherapy.

IMO, the use of leprosy as a metaphor and a polar opposite to the the beauty and health of The Land works very well and is one of the aspects of 1st Chronicles that has always drawn me back to the series.

What is TL;DR?
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