Against All Things Ending: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 3

More of the same caterwauling and self loathing that the first 2 books had. Action scenes were awesome and Donaldson's writing really shined here. But unfortunately the book goes from self loathing diatribes that last 50 pages, then a grandiose narrative on mundane activities such as packing up the horses which lasts another 50 pages, then an awesome action scene which lasts 10 pages, rinse and repeat. Also what's with the word puissance? Jeez Donaldson literally says this every 20 or so pages, or some variant of it, he must really like this word.Overall a far cry from the original trilogy, which is still etched into my mind as the absolute best series of any trilogy I've read. The self loathing and very imperfect character of Covenant is why I fell in love with the series, but Donaldson just tries too hard to make both Covenant and Avery hate themselves. Heck they saved the Land multiple times, they can cut themselves some slack. Too bad there is no Prozac in the land, although you'd think that the other multitude of foods and salves they have to cure stuff would work on them, or maybe the staff of Law might alleviate their dire depressions.Audible review: Meh, they lost Scott Brick for this book for some reason and Tim Reynolds isn't up to snuff. He doesn't do a terrible job, he actually does a good Covenant voice, but the rest of the characters aren't voiced well and the speech is quite muddy and not understandable at times. The Haruchai sound like robotic high school nerds as well, kind of odd. Can't wait to get back to Scott Brick in book 4.

A somewhat tedious third book in this four volume trilogy, this picks up with Covenant and Linden trying to stop the Worm of the World's End, which Linden accidentally released when she revived Covenant and recreated the Staff of Law.I found this all a bit tedious myself and so I can't really summarize much else in the book. It's just not all that well written, it's terribly wordy, and veers from one bout of self loathing to another (which I had really thought Covenant had gotten past a long time ago).I can't recommend it at all, unfortunately, unless you're just dying to see how it all ends. Only the very hard core fans need apply.....

Let me first say that there is no bigger Linden Avery fan than me, I consider her to be one of the most perfectly drawn characters in modern fantasy. But this book? Ohmigosh. It is no Illearth War, or One Tree or even Fatal Revenant. It has taken me over two years to finally complete this book. The middle section is turgid and ponderous even by regular Stephen Donaldson standards. The arcane language I am OK with, but this book cried out for an editor, especially in the middle section. And the most annoying thing is the author's insistence, seemingly on every page, to tell you where 12+ characters are all standing relative to each other. If you reach to the middle of the book, and for me that was very very difficult and required captive plane journeys for me to get there, you will find yourself yelling out loud "GET ON WITH IT!"

I have read all but the last of Mr. Donaldson's Covenant books. This one was perhaps the most intense (and dense) of the group. Mr. Donaldson's style is to make his characters make speeches to one another rather than make conversation. These speeches are sometimes difficult to follow because of the syntax used. In other cases, the referential material is lacking thereby making the writing less than intelligible. Some of the words used are archaic and must be looked up in order to understand what the author has his characters say. Mr. Donaldson gives his characters in this volume very little time between attacks of non-human actors such that the reader can become weary of the action. He also introduces new non-humans at the drop of a hat--as soon as one group is defeated, another group comes from nowhere. Like the others in this series, this book is a struggle to read. However, I look forward to the culmination of Covenant's, Linden Avery's, and others' adventures in the last volume (which I have already obtained).

The Saga of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever continues with "Against All Things Ending. The book begins with Linden Avery's continued search for her lost son. In desperation she invokes the magic in Covenant's white gold ring (given to her at the end of book six) to bring Thomas Covenant back to life so that he made aide her in her search for her son. Covenant has long been apart of the Arch of Time since his death during a battle with Lord Foul, and his resurrection sees his illness renewed and his mind fractured so he is of little help to Linden. However, in resurrecting Covenant she has also woken the Worm of the World's End. An act which will end all time and the existence of all in the Land. Lord Foul applauds this act as he seeks to free himself from the Creator and the shackles of time. But he needs Jeremiah's magic as well as the destruction of the Land.

God knows when I started reading the first books in the Thomas Covenant Chronicles. Suffice to say I was a lot thinner, and had a lot more hair. This, the penultimate instalment,is typical of the chronicles which have spanned several decades. Led by heroes whose self-doubt make impossible situations worse, they face a never-ending series of fascinating foes as they battle their old enemy.There are times when Donaldson's prose makes you want to skip whole pages (and I did) so you can get on with the story. However, the strength of the overall narrative, and the depth of the characters keeps you going.There's also the factor that anyone who has invested so much time getting to this point in the chronicles feels an imperative to see it through. I don't find Donaldson's work as gripping as other modern writers, in that "un-put-downable" fashion. It is more of a classic style of writing which holds your attention for the longer term.At the end of the book, I found myself needing a break, but then went back and bought the next, and final (?) instalment.

I was so waiting for the final book to come out and,....... here it was. First chapter, ok, as per usual SD creates the really boring bits and the character's traits. Like ALL his books, if you can wade through the first two or three chapters without screaming " GET ON WITH IT!" then the rest of the book is absolutely gripping at every level. This one, I had to re read the beginnings a few times to make sure I was reading about Thomas Covenant. Ok, I'm beginning to get a handle on this and it must be that Stephen Donaldson didn't really want to write any more about Covenant, having made such brilliant writing from his former trilogies. I wondered if it was his publisher who was pushing him to write more stories on this topic. Because to me, even after the fourth chapter I couldn't get into this book at all. The story doesn't flow. It is so back and forth and side to side and by far, too many chracters to keep a mental picture of; I swear it must be GHOST WRITTEN. This isn't the Stephen Donaldson I know of old. Has he employed loads of writers, similarly like TV writers to pad out and make a small story so big? Way way too many offshoots to a story that, to me has lost its way big time. But,(sorry bad grammar) like many other followers, I have read the book to its end. Only to find there's one more book to, sincerely I hope, wrap this all up. Similarly, like a few other comments about the hope it may be made into a film,. I trust it will be only be for the first two trilogies. In conclusion, the title " Against all things ending" is a strange and now, penultimate finale!.....Rant over!

Well, I'm part way through the penultimate book in the final chronicles of Thomas Covenant (not that he figured much in the previous two volumes) and my god, it's been a slog. Various reviews have made mention of Donaldson's rich, eloquent and inherently epic style of writing, whilst also less kindly pointing out his tendency towards over-verboseness. I've certainly been more aware of the latter as I've trudged, sometimes painfully, through this particular instalment of the Thomas Covenant saga. Here, Donaldson clearly subscribes to the maxim of why use one word when you can use 18,296 instead. There are often huge, flowery segments of narrative where he labours the point to such an extent that you find yourself wishing he'd just bin off the thesaurus and get on with it...While I'm here, there's another thing which occurs to me about this quadrilogy and the preceding trilogies (which I do love incidentally, despite their fundamentally noxious protagonist). The Chronicles in their totality cover a period of the Land's history spanning thousands of years and yet the world described has never advanced one iota in all that time. Think about how much our world has changed in just the last 30 or 40 years never mind the last 4,000 and yet the peoples of the Land still haven't even managed to come up with the wheel! Poor Lord Foul has toiled for millennia to bring about the destruction of the earth when all he had to do was encourage the evolution of a technologically advanced civilisation to bring about the ultimate desecration. Just like we're doing!

"Against All Things Ending" seems to be a bit of a marmite book - you either love it or hate it. In fact the whole Last Chronicles is a bit like that.I have been reading & enjoying Covenant since the late 1970s. The first trilogy was astonishingly brilliant. The second was just as good. So I was looking forward to this latest (and last) trilogy. The trouble seems to be that it consists of 4 books. This means that each book is sonewhat slow & padded out. Read some of the other (very well written) reviews here & you will see that the consensus is that the pace is wrong, the book is too long & Linden features too much & is too busy self-flagellating.However, it is still a Covenant book. The number of words which I have never heard before (a regular feature of all the Covenant books) is particularly high, making the meaning of some of the passages pure guesswork. But I can live with that. There are still bits where you despair of the characters & want to give them a slap - this is typical Covenant. There is a complete absence of humour - also typical Covenant. There are bits where you raise your fist in the air & shout "yes!" - unfortunately unlike the earlier series, they tend to be telegraphed in this one.I still love the Chronicles. I will still read the last book when it eventually comes out. However, there is no doubt that the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant overall have been somewhat diminished by the Last ones. Sadly, in some ways I wish Donaldson had stopped at the Second Chronicles...

I finally made it through this after my third attempt. I read somewhere that Donaldson has stated that he originally conceived of the Last Chronicles when he was writing the second series of Thomas Covenant novels, but that he felt he wanted to grow and develop further as a writer before he tackled the complexity of what he envisaged for completing the series. Sadly however, I am not convinced he has improved as a writer in the intervening years. Like many here I read the first six novels in the mid-1980s and was so drawn into the world of `The Land' that as soon as I finished White Gold Wielder, I went back and read through them all from the beginning again. Just to make sure I was not overly romanticising the appeal of the original novels, I started reading Lord Foul's Bane again last night and easily made the first 125 pages before going to bed. In comparison, I really struggled getting into 'Against All Things Ending'. Unlike some, I am not going to blame the character of Linden Avery for this. I have never understood why those who condemn Linden Avery for her `self pitying whining' seem to have been quite content to tolerate precisely the same character traits in Thomas Covenant. Covenant was quite an objectionable and unlikeable `hero' throughout the First Chronicles. What made the first two series wonderful (for me) was the Land itself and the character's and races within the world - the character's imposed from `our world' have always been a bit of a pain in the arse (with the possible exception of Hile Troy!).What the first two trilogies seem to have over the Last Chronicles is simply pace, or at least a decent balance between passages of soul searching introspection and actually progressing the plot. In short, they were quite well edited. Conversely, there seems to have been almost no editorial control at all over the Last Chronicles. I did eventually get into the first two novels of the new series and was looking forward to the third, but in this novel in particular there are narrative longueurs which seem to stretch on interminably for pages at a time - most of which seems to involve the characters standing around in some desolate area debating each other's motives and/or the reasoning behind those motives. Also, Donaldson, has come up with some dodgy names in his time ('Kevin's dirt!' for goodness sake, even `Lord Foul'was a bit crap) but `she who must not be named' is just childishly awful. Surely one of the all-knowing Insequent would have at least had a name for the bloody thing.It is not all bad, when the action finally does move forward, there are some dramatic moments and Donaldson has no qualms about killing off some of the characters he has developed during the first two novels of the last chronicles. I thought the revelation about Galt being Stave's son was a nice touch. I am really warming to Stave as the `renegade' Haruchai. However, the giant's this time around do not seem as involving or engaging as Saltheart Foamfollower or Pitchwife. I am still somewhat undecided about the introduction of so many previously unheard of races/characters, but in comparison to the somewhat self indulgent lack of editing, this is not a major issue. The book finally sets the scene for what I hope is a truly epic conclusion in the fourth book, it just takes an unnecessarily long time getting there. So only two stars from me, a long time Covenant series fan. I am sure you could have trimmed several hundred pages out of this novel, without really losing anything.

It's took me six years to read this book and what a slog it was. Nothing really happens much just pages and pages of boring thoughts and dialogue. It was like wading through treacle. As I read into the last part of the book I thought it would pick up a bit , but sadly, no. It's a shame because the first few books in this series are fantastic. I've heard the final book The Final Dark is much better. But at the moment I haven't got the heart to read it.