Posted 05 February 2018 - 04:40 PM
To see the Covenant books as strict "good vs evil" is to miss the deeper meaning that Lord Foul is a metaphor for the Despite within Covenant, and indeed, within all of us. The first two trilogies I thought were pretty good the first time I read them; what Donaldson does to The Land between the First and Second Chronicles is masterful. (As Covenant says, "How do you hurt a man who's lost everything? Give him back something broken.") On a reread (probably simply because I was older) they only improved in beauty and meaning. And the Last Chronicles, though fairly glacially paced, are just as powerful, intricately tied to all of the previous books, and make up just about the best series finale you could ask for. Definitely not to everyone's tastes, since Donaldson's prose is centered more on the psychological than external action (which is not to say it lacks for action.) But I would unhesitatingly call it one of the best fantasy series ever written.
"Here is light. You will say that it is not a living entity, but you miss the point that it is more, not less. Without occupying space, it fills the universe. It nourishes everything, yet itself feeds upon destruction. We claim to control it, but does it not perhaps cultivate us as a source of food? May it not be that all wood grows so that it can be set ablaze, and that men and women are born to kindle fires?"
―Gene Wolfe, The Citadel of the Autarch