Stephen R. DonaldsonThe Illearth War: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Book 2

I first read the 1st trilogy when it came out late ‘70s. Being a big LOTR fan, this was my 1st foray into something with an anti-hero who you could loath and sympathize with at the same time. No spoilers, it is a great read.

Staring back down the corridors of Time to when I was a skinny, long-haired aberration, I first read this book. I enjoyed it immensely but over time it was forgotten. I've been on mission like some insane knight errant to read all the wonderful things I can no longer remember. This has been a most enjoyable experience.

I'm in the middle of a re-read -- my first, since the 70's, when I read it as a kid.Good Lord, does it hold up and then some! This is every bit as excellent as I remember, maybe better.This is like watching one of the very best old Star Trek episodes and it doesn't feel old at all but fresh and new -- and you suddenly realize that it's better than anything else on TV.So much originality, so much craftsmanship.If they ever got around to filming these books it would be a smash hit on par with LORT and GOT.If it were me, I'd start with Wounded Land, and but flash back a lot to the major events in Illearth War and Power That Preserves. And It would be a mini-series -- roughly 10 eps per book, including flashbacks to the first trilogy. This book is amazing, and really, for me THIS was what hooked my on Covenant, this book. The whole Amok storyline, the Hile Troy as Warmark and then ending in Garroting Deep -- all of it, deeply magnificent.

I've read better fantasy but The Illearth War is five-star material nonetheless. This is the sequel to Lord Foul's Bane, in which Thomas Covenant first discovered the Land and assisted in the recovery of an important magical artifact. This time around he again gets transported from the "real world" to the Land but while Covenant is only a few weeks older, 40 years have passed in the Land and the struggle against Lord Foul has become desperate. Foul is about to march against the Lords, who simply aren't prepared for what's coming!The novel is slow to get going and most of the highlights come in the second half. The first half provides a lot of backstory and character development. We meet the important woman Elena, who develops a close relationship with Covenant (for good reason too, as you'll learn to your surprise later in the novel). Hile Troy, a military tactician who claims to also be from Covenant's world, leads the war effort and plays an even more central role in this book than Covenant. Lord Mhoram is a leading character this time around. Trell, the former loving gravelingas of Mithil Stonedown, is now a tragic and unpredictable character. The mysterious creature Amok holds a key to ancient and terrible power.The second half of the book is where the action really hits. Donaldson gives us three simultaneous plot lines to follow; each is exciting and keeps you turning the pages. My favorite plot line was the mission to Seareach but all three are excellent! Just as in the last book, scenes of battle and gore are depicted admirably. Settings are described in lavish detail but the prose never gets exceedingly verbose unlike some other fantasy out there (*cough* Wheel of Time *cough*). The ending ties things up nicely, yet leaves the big picture unresolved and hence leads perfectly into the sequel.Though still bitter from his experience as a leper, Covenant seems to have lightened up a bit. In fact in a couple parts of the book he actually feels genuinely happy, albeit briefly. Unfortunately, as in Lord Foul's Bane, most of the other characters aren't too unique and their personalities tend to be uniformly strong and heroic. Troy is an interesting one though.Overall, top notch fantasy and certainly not to be missed after reading Lord Foul's Bane!

I believe this is the best book of the first trilogy. Other people with ample time will have more to say about the book itself. What I want to comment on is the Kindle edition. Although the book deserves 5 stars, the Kindle 'translation' of this book (and Lord Foul's Bane) has been a mess, and would deserve less stars. I'm constantly running across incorrect words. They aren't necessarily misspelled - they are just simply the wrong word (as compared to the actual paper-bound book). It's as if they used OCR (optical character recognition) after scanning a paper-bound book, and let the computer make all the decisions - without any human editing. Since these books are filled with special 'made-up' words used only in The Land, a lot of the special words are replaced with correctly spelled English variants. People who've read the book previously will immediately pick up on this. Additionally, many standard words are replaced with other words - as if the scanning process couldn't quite distinguish what a particular word was, so it guessed. A quick example - in one section of the book, it's "... marge of the Sarangrave" and a few pages away it's incorrectly "... mange of the Sarangrave." There are quite a few of these translation errors. Not enough to stop me from buying Kindle editions in the future, but enough to trip a person up every once in a while when you stumble across one. I wish there was a means to highlight and report errors as we encounter them, so they can be corrected in the Kindle editions of books. Still, the story is great, IF you can get beyond Donaldson's omnipresent need to use a thesaurus for *way* too many words that should instead just be the common words we're all used to. :-)

The huge popularity of The Lord of the Rings led in later decades to a boom in similar epic fantasy. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a trilogy subsequently expanded with further volumes, is one of the earliest and most interesting examples. The Illearth War is the second part of the original trilogy, which was retrospectively dubbed The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.I suspect what would have struck most readers when the First Chronicles first came out in the late 70s would have been just how different Donaldson’s work is to Tolkien’s. Donaldson has a deeply unsympathetic, flawed and psychologically complex protagonist hero, and the sort of grim realism found in popular contemporary epic fantasy. For a reader today the similarities to Tolkien stand out more. Though I am not a fan of that brand of epic fantasy, overall Donaldson does enough differently to keep me interested throughout this 500-page volume as well as its equally long predecessor.Thomas Covenant is a successful writer whose life has been wrecked by the devastating condition of leprosy. In the first volume, following an accident that renders him unconscious, Covenant wakes to find himself in a sort of Tolkeinesque world. Unable to entirely believe or entirely disbelieve the veracity of his experiences, he is uneasily drawn into events in a world where the inhabitants seem intent on regarding him as a magical saviour. In this volume a similar event brings him back to the magical world, The Land. Though this is only a matter of weeks after the first incident, in the Land 40 years have elapsed and war with dark forces is now reaching the stage of an open clash of armies.I liked the book a lot, even more than the first volume. It has more pace and less scene setting, with interesting new characters which are to some extent foils to the exasperating Covenant. It can be very grim reading at times. However Donaldson gives us something that is original (despite the heavy debt to Tolkien) and distinctive, complex and intriguing. The books are well known for their unsympathetic protagonist and that is very true. Covenant is certainly no heroic personality, not even an anti-hero. He is an original and clever creation nevertheless, not easy to understand and impossible to like (at least after two volumes). Some readers apparently find Donaldson’s prose style a barrier, finding it too purple. I like his style and I particularly liked the rather arcane vocabulary he frequently deploys, which I think is ideal for this kind of fantasy writing. I recommend you try this trilogy if you are interested in epic fantasy.

I loved Lord Fouls Bane so I grabbed this one as soon as I had the time and dived back into the world.The good: it starts strong, it moves Thomas’s personal story along in the real world and makes him a far more sympathy character this time. He doesn’t growl “Hellfire!” every page anymore. It introduces nome interesting new characters like Elena. It raises the stakes of the war.The less good: although it starts strong, it branches out into several sub-plots that aren’t as interesting. We spend much of the book through the eyes of Hille Troy, which I didn’t enjoy quite as much. Covenants story is also interesting, but is a little slow and feels a little repetitive from the first book (ie: a quest into a mountain to find a magic artefact)But the ending was satisfying and it was a good enough story to make me want to come back and find out how it all ends. Worthwhile reading.

Read these, books quite a number of years ago now, but over the years and quite a few house moves I lost all 6 somewhere, possibly lent them out and never got them back etc. I decided to revisit "The Land" and enjoy them all over again. If you like fantasy and have never read this series I would give them a go you won't be dissapointed.

I read the chronicles of Thomas Covenant when I was much younger & was always frustrated that Covenant had all this power but didn't use it. I'm reading it again twenty years later & now understand more of the reasoning. It is good to be back in the Land and I'm enjoying the books more than before. Still love the characters Mr Donaldson has created especially the Bloodguard.

Well written p