Stephen R Donaldson - Against All Things Ending

Against All Things Ending takes a long time to get going - it's something like 70 pages in before anything even happens, the intervening time having all been taken up by the characters talking to each other and thinking about things...which isn't necessarily a bad thing, for the genius of these books has always been the way that they've dramatised both the interior and the external journeys and quests of their central protagonists, Thomas Covenant and, as the series have gone on, Linden Avery. I think that the first and second chronicles are a notch above these 'last chronicles', but the quality has only slipped a bit, and this is still fantasy well worth reading.