I've been re-reading the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant for the first time in about twenty years. Just finished book 2, The Illearth War. God, I love how bleak and desolate these books are. Even when the good guys win, they lose. It's also refreshing to have a main character who isn't a hero, but a pathetic loser who causes constant harm to himself and everyone around him.
I find hilarity in the repetitive situations where the characters are in trouble, and they beg Covenant to save them, and he replies, quite honestly, "I can't!' Then they get out of danger with some kind of loss, and make a point of forgiving him for not helping, even though he clearly does not have any ability to do so. Then he adds the weight of that guilt to his self-loathing, even though none of it was his fault.
There's a whole hell of a lot of allegory and metaphor in these books. They're a hard read, though, because of heavy exposition and info dumps written by an author who kept his thesaurus close at hand and consulted it often. Many readers can't get past one particularly despicable act that Covenant performs early on, despite its incredible importance to the story and its deep allegories, and the fact that he spends three books beating himself up over it. If you're one of those people who understands that it's fiction, then you can just roll with it and enjoy a good story. Well, there's still the endless Tolkien-esque descriptions of landscapes, but that's a product of its time. The books came out in the 70s.
