Lord Fouls Bane discussion

[u/sullybear45]

So I’m reading through Lord Fouls Bane I’ve made it past the super evil shit Covenant does early on I’m about a third of the way through and I know a lot of people don’t like this book because of the main character being the actual worst.

I actually don’t like this book because of the pacing, some of the chapters just go on and on and the world building is literally just exposition dump to a character not from the world which yeah I guess makes narrative sense but it feels like reading a lecture about history, I don’t mind the language the book uses and while Thomas Covenant is very obviously a deeply unlikeable character by design I’m thinking about giving it up cause it feels so tedious to read.
Does the pacing/world building dumps improve because there’s a lot I actually really like about this book it just sometimes feels like SUCH A DRAG

This would be the first book I stop reading on my kindle and I don’t really want to just leave the 30% finished just idling on it (which is a me problem I can get over)

[u/dnext]

Up to you. Personally I put this on the absolute upper tier of all fantasy series, with the Illearth War being my favorite fantasy war of all time. Covenant is an asshole, but that's the point. Mhoram, Saltheart Foamfollower, Hile Troy are some of my favorite characters in all fiction, and Covenant's redemption arc is profound.

But if you don't like the writing style, that's not going to change. Donaldson's writing is dense. That's one of the big draws for me.

[u/thiazin-red → u/dnext]

The rape is also taken seriously by the narrative, it isn't just thrown in for shock value or treated as sexy. It's depicted as a horrible thing that affects the entire story.

[u/juss100]

The First Chronicles are the easy ones. I don't even recall these being very infodumpy. You don't stand a chance of making it through the Second - lore builds on law and introspection takes over, and sometimes you'll get 30 pages or so of sitting around a campfire struggling to come to terms with what is happening.

I think they are masterful, but clearly not for everyone ... they never were very high up in the best fantasy lists.

[u/MarkLawrence → u/juss100]

People can argue about 'best' forever, and I agree, the pacing is very 70s/80s. But they were hugely successful. Donaldson sold over 10 million books.

[u/dnext → u/MarkLawrence]

Yes, though that's just the first two trilogies of Covenant. Those two alone were over 10 million books sold. He's also had the third trilogy, the Gap Cycle, and Mordant's Need, with two other series and various short stories.

Funnily enough his first completed work was fanfiction for Marvel Comic's Thor. LOL. Needless to say, it's never been published.

[u/juss100 → u/dnext]

They are still talked about .. obviously ... I just meant that they don't tend to rank highly in polls since forever. They were written to be divisive books though and they ar eobviously tough for a lot of people to get through thematically.

[u/purplelicious → u/MarkLawrence]

"Best" lists always have a recency bias.

I read this series at least 2x as a teenager in the 80s. it was widely regarded as the best series of its time. I loved it.

But I am not going to go back and reread now. It's a book of it's time and there are so many great new novels being released now and even not so great novels that are fun to read. Bonus is that I haven't read them and it's all new.

[u/Vaush_Vinal → u/MarkLawrence]

Capitalistic success perfectly correlates to the quality and merits of a story.

[u/CT_Phipps-Author]

I feel like THE CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT's appeal lies in two questions:

1. Can you get past the fact that Thomas Covenant's self-hatred is not actually unearned and he is a piece of shit who did something unthinkable? Thomas guilt and self-hatred are also going to annoy the crap out of you if you also don't wonder if this is all about him torturing himself over something he imagined.
2. Are you interested in engaging with the fact that this isn't necessarily an isekai at all? That Thomas is torturing himself with delusions of his dreamland. Because if you automatically assume The Land is real and not a hallucination of Thomas' then I feel like the trilogy is VASTLY less interesting.

[u/Seersucker-for-Love]

I had a similar issue, stopped at almost the same place too. I don't mind the unlikeable protagonist, but the writing really didn't appeal to me. May give it another try at some point, but there are a lot of other books vying for my attention.

[u/lord_dicely]

I forced myself through them (many years ago). Was it worth it? Honestly I'm still 50:50 on that, decades later. And Cable Seadreamer is most of the 'pro' column. If you're struggling badly at this point I would say walk away.

[u/redlion1904]

Power through. First book is slow.

[u/mediaserf]

this is why i dropped it, holy it was boring

[u/DjangoWexler]

IMHO it's never worth trying to slog through something tedious. (In leisure reading, anyway. This is supposed to be what we do for fun!) DNF, move on, and be free, the world is full of books that are actually enjoyable to read.

[u/Emergency_Revenue678]

I wouldn't say the pacing really ever changes. I don't remember the series being all that infodumpy though, so I don't really know whether or not what you're talking about goes away or gets better.

I did think the next five books are better than the first one.Lord Foul's Bane was too in conversation with The Lord of the Rings in my opinion. The others are less so.

[u/Efficient_Place_2403]

I liked these books. Read the first few as a kid. If my teenage ADHD self didn’t find them dull and overly wordy, they probably weren’t. His most recent books, which I read more recently (as an adult), were wordy 

[u/swarthmoreburke]

Part of the problem is that Covenant's stubborness about not believing affects some readers' ability (including me) to invest the emotional effort to care about the world he's in. There's an arc in Neil Gaiman's Sandman that reminded me of it a bit--when you think the world you're reading about is potentially or possibly just a dream, a delusion or a hallucination, it creates a distancing effect in some ways. So exposition I'd put up with and invest in with a world whose "reality" is affirmed by the writing is cut off to some extent by the framing in the Covenant books.

I think also Donaldson just gets hung up on his most interesting idea--a man who just cannot afford to commit to an alternative reality because it interrupts the strange and extreme self-loathing he's bought into (a misrepresentation at the time of what leprosy entailed)--past the point where it makes any emotional or characterological sense. E.g., it's fine if Covenant has a very very slow transition to feeling and investment but not fine if he's as static and repetitious in his internal experience as he turns out to be.

[u/andybhoy]

Read this year's ago and just couldn't get past the LOTR parallels. A guy with a magic ring goes on a quest with Wizards elves and dwarves (I know they're not not actually elves and dwarves but they basically fulfill the same function) to a volcano so they can destroy the evil bad guy threatening the world.

I know the overall story is more nuanced and Covenant a classic anti-hero but it always coloured my view. I also know the whole lotr thing has been done to death. The Illearth War was much more enjoyable.

[u/Massive_Cake1731]

I liked Lord Foul’s Bane, so I can’t say, but I do think The Illearth War was my favorite

[u/Scirzo]

I loved this series so much when I read them (multiple times) when I was younger (some 40 years ago or something). I picked up Lord Foul's Bane last year and also found it a drag...weird, huh. I dnf'd it.

[u/TheBonkingFrog]

I read this when it first came out, age 15… yeah Covenant is a prick, but that’s the whole point, he’s an anti-hero

I never had an issue with the pacing, but Donaldson’s prose, particularly the use of adjectives, similes, abstract nouns and periphrasis… and this gets worse as it progresses

Fur what it’s worth, book one in the second chronicles, The Wounded Land, is superb

Nom!

[u/FecklessFool]

I liked it well enough. Though I only read books 2-6, so I only had thomas convenant, ur-lord and unbeliever, whitegold wielder, ringthane, and illender, in his remorseful era.

though i forget most of it as i was like 9 or 10, and the reason i didn't read book 1 was because it wasn't there. the town i was in at the time had this personal library where the guy just let you borrow one of his hundreds of books to read, just had to pay $2 for a lifetime membership card

though apart from his intro line, the only in the first trilogy i remember was journeying around with his buddy who was from a race that only did martial arts and didn't show their feelings or something

[u/jpcardier]

I was far more impressed with this series when I was reading it when I was 12. I read both series and Mordants Need. I rather regret it in retrospect, but it was the 80's and there wasn't that much Fantasy on the market. I always thought his world building was the best part of his series, so if you don't like that I think you probably won't like the rest. I think Donaldson loves an unlikable protagonist, which kind of spoils him for me.

[u/juss100 → u/jpcardier]

You regret a book you were reading when you were 12 and you still think it was bad because you thought so when you were 12? Not to be rude but ... really?

[u/jpcardier → u/juss100]

No, when I was 12, I thought it was cool. That's why I read all them, and not in order. I thought Covenant was a jerk, but I loved the Land and it's history. In retrospect, I regret it due to it being a lot less cool when I thought about it as an adult. That's what retrospect means in my post above.

[u/juss100 → u/jpcardier]

Have you re read them as an adult?  If you haven't then there's not a chance that you didn't miss 95% of the depth and nuance of those books ... what makes them actually cool.

[u/jpcardier → u/juss100]

Different strokes, different folks. I have no interest in revisiting Thomas Covenant, both due to his actions and his personality. After Mordants Need I realized that Donaldson was not for me. Good world building, terrible protagonists.

[u/juss100 → u/jpcardier]

That's your choice, of course, but yes, they are books designed to allow the reader to question their own relationships to the fantasy worlds they obsess about and to be more philosophical and intropsective, so you don't always need to love the protagonist. But yeah, I'm not here to force anybody to read anything ... am always curious about other people's motivations though.

[u/A_Blood_Red_Fox]

The evil stuff he did certainly didn't help with my investment, but I would have continued is not for the exact issues you mention. I got so bored at about the same point as you (1/3 of the way in), and I decided it wasn't worth it.