Why I'm Disappointed in the Last Chronicles

[Orlion]

SRD does not write complete individual works... he writes complete Series. So yes, the first novel is set-up. Once you get the whole picture, the frame changes. I remember struggling through Lord Foul's Bane the first time I read it. Thought it was poorly written. After I finished the trilogy and came back to it, I could not put it down. It became a fantastic book. That is not lazy writing, that just means that you can not really judge a series of Donaldson's by just one or two books... they all exist together or not at all.

That is one of the issues with the Last Chronicles: we still do not know the whole story, but we will soon. Then you just have to deal with the other issue like "It's not the First Chronicles!" or "It's not how I would write it!" or "It has Linden in it!" In other words, a matter of taste.

[ussusimiel]

Maybe I should keep it to myself...
...but Runes was the single worst novel I've ever read.
I'd say it was on par with the Phantom Menace, or even worse, if compared to cinema.

Plenty of people (including myself) agree with you. Maybe not the worst novel ever written, but certainly, in my experience, one of the poorest by a writer I deeply admire. Personally I think that he bit off more than he could chew. I have doggedly ploughed my way through FR and AATE (and I will read The Last Dark, but I don't have Savor Dam's faith (which I admire ), so I have no expectations of the last novel). IMO, there's just no way that the LD can redeem the previous three novels, they are just too poorly written. I'll read it so that I can be part of the buzz and excitement on the Watch when it finally comes out.

I'm still at a bit of a loss as to why he wrote them at all. They seem utterly unnecessary. I had read most of his other books (couldn't finish The Gap Series though. Sorry Orlion! ) and I'd noticed that his style (fairly overwrought to begin with) had become almost strangled in his attempts to put people (especially women) into unbelievably impossible situations. In truth I found it almost parodic (and some people's reaction to the 1st & 2nd Chrons is that the writing is borderline parodic to begin with). With the Last Chrons the result was (as I see it) a usurping of the story by the inner experience of Linden. Now Linden wasn't to everybody's taste to begin with (incipit THOOLAH ) and this move was the final straw, even for die-hard fans like myself. Without risking spoilers I will say that there is one part of FR that shows that SRD can still write when the self-imposed shackles are off, so it's not that the man has lost his writing skill. It's that, IMO, he has in this story not allowed himself to write to his strengths which are: story, atmosphere and characters (which he did brilliantly all through the 1st and 2nd Chrons).

The best thing about the Last Chrons is the meta-result of the Watch being expanded and sustained as each of the novels in the Last Chrons has come along. For that alone the books have been worth it. My faith (I too have faith, SD ) in SRD is such that I wouldn't be surprised if he wrote the novels for that alone. Well, that's what I like to think anyway

u.

[rdhopeca]

Dunno....I didn't really care for TRS or FK but the last two and a half books of the Gap Series I literally stayed up all night to get them done...some of the most captivating and "must not put down" reading I've ever encountered....