GOLLUM said:
No you'll find there's a number of people here who have read this series including myself.
Donaldson's series for me is one of the landmark series in the past 30 years within the Fantasy Genre. I really enjoyed this study into the psychology of the human condition within a fantasy backdrop.
The other thing you'll quickly find is that a lot of views are fairly polarised with this series. In other words many love the series and plenty of others dislike it as much for the disposition of T Covenant than for any other reason.
You may want to get one of the moderators here to move this thread over to the S. Donaldson section of the Authors forum where there's plenty of discussion on this author and his books...
Nice to see another Donaldson fan on board!..
I'm not as enthusiastic about this series as Gollum, for a change. Unlike the bulk of complaints about the series, I loved Thomas Covenant as a character. And I loved Donaldson's writing of the real world. Other than that, I thought it was distinctly mediocre - the Land was basically a copy of Middle Earth, and no one outside of Thomas Covenant and Linden Avery is well characterised. The plot is again a copy of LotR. Its full of cliches, but with one difference. I can understand the reasoning behind this, but I think the metaphor was carried too far, and an original world and plot would have made the series far better. A very skilled writer could use this effectively, but IMO Donaldson isn't that skilled - he's better than average in his writing, but certainly not close to the top writing in the genre. The novels are about Covenant obviously - but Donaldson lacks subtletly at getting his point across. The character development seems to happen in jumps, rather than as a gradual progression, unlike in say, Gene Wolfe.
I can find no sympathy or relevance to the main character
I hear this very often, and completely disagree that this has any bearing whatsoever on the quality of the book, though I understand that people may prefer books with sympathetic characters. In most cases, if there are sympathetic characters, I'm likely to find the book suspect in its characterisation from the start - they can be well written, but the chances are it's an unrealistically romanticised view of the world with simple archetypes. Sympathetic characters have been done well - eg Eddard Stark in ASOIAF, Corwin in Amber, Fitz in Farseer, Achamian in Prince of Nothing, Ammar in Lions of Al-Rassan - but it tends to be the exception for me. I far prefer Jaime as a character to Ned in ASOIAf, as I far prefer Covenant as a character to Lord Mhoram.
If you need a really simple explanation as to why I don't love them, I think it's probably because of what I'd read before - I'd already read Martin, Erikson and Bakker. And I had high expectations - I expected Donaldson to be as good as these. IMO, he wasn't, he was closer to Tolkien in quality (if you know me, that's not a compliment).
beautiful world full of realistically-written people?
I can't actually think of any of the native inhabitants of the Land who were realistically written - Covenant wasn't a native, and characters such as Lena, Elena, Mhoram, Saltheart, Lord Foul had no credibility for me.
