Yes, Donaldson has done well if his purpose was to create the genre’s single most reprehensible anti-hero in Thomas Covenant. Lacking Elric’s grand pathos, Cugel’s hilariously low cunning, Gollum’s consumptive wretchedness, or even Sephiroth’s really large sword, Covenant is a sniveling, ungrateful, angst-ridden, contemptible little man who acts more like a character in a kill puppies for satan game than a proper fantasy adventurer. His unpleasantness is not even relieved by grandeur–Covenant is petty, weak, and as cruel as his meagerness will allow, with no dignity to speak of. He’s not even very clever.
Unpleasant, eh? Of course, there is a reason for all this vileness. In the real world--our world--Thomas Covenant is a leper. We still have those, apparently. Once a promising young writer, happily married and working on a follow-up to his hit novel, Covenant finds a mysterious spot while typing one day. Soon he is diagnosed with leprosy and sent away for treatment (which can only slow down the slow rotting of his body). His wife abandons him, and his community works to isolate him, going so far as to pay his bills so he won’t walk downtown to pay them himself.
And then, faster than you can say “through the looking glass,” at the instant he is run down by a speeding police car, Covenant finds himself in the Land, a mythical world full of life and health, but also great peril. He is dragged before a being known as Lord Foul (who, we can assume at this point, has, is, or relates to, a “bane”), who charges Covenant with a mission: he must travel to the Council of Lords and tell them that Drool Rockworm, a Cavewight, has the Staff of Life, and that this being seeks the Illearth Stone. In short, Drool’s gonna raise some hell, Lord Foul is going to take over the world in proper evil overlord fashion, and Covenant is saddled with the knowledge.
Except a funny thing happens: Covenant doesn’t believe any of it. He thinks he’s dreaming the Land, that it’s a hallucination, or hell, or anything, really, but a real place. He goes through his entire “quest,” from the village of the stonedownors through a river-journey with a giant to Revelstone where the Council of Lords dwell and onward to take the Staff of Law back from Drool Rockworm, all in a dream-like daze, acting out of his own weird impulses to escape the strange world. The catalyst for this denial is the Land’s gradual healing of Covenant’s leprosy, which he knows to be impossible: “Nerves don’t regenerate,” he recites again and again, a weird, cynical mantra. Everything about the Land, from his conspicuous resemblance to the ancient hero, Berek Halfhand, to his wedding ring, which the wise of the Land call White Gold, he ignores as mere delusion and fancy.
Now, I have it on good authority that The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant really shook up the fantasy genre, that its maturity and “adult themes” helped revitalize a genre that was sliding into dull formula-writing and tropes so overused that no one understood them anymore. Now, that’s great: if there’s one thing that the most imaginative of all genres needs, it’s some actual imagination, and if Donaldson helped that, good for him. And the book is marked by an ugliness uncharacteristic in fantasy, specifically a brutal rape that has repurcussions throughout the story. But all that still doesn’t make Lord Foul’s Bane a very good novel.
There’s a lot of potential here, and perhaps this was the kick-start that fantasy needed in the late 70s. You can almost feel Donaldson trying very hard to write a fantasy novel that will be taken seriously. Maybe Lord Foul’s Bane was a thunderclap of innovation. Once. But it’s pretty pale today. The writing is bad in the way that only fantasy writing can be bad, with lots of long-winded speeches full of melodrama. Here’s Covenant reciting Lord Foul’s speech to the Council of Lords.
One word more, a final caution. Do not forget whom to fear at the last. I have had to be content with killing and torment. But now my plans are laid, and I have begun. I shall not rest until I have eradicated hope from the Land. Think of that–and be dismayed!
Someone get the string section. We need a dramatic chord.
The stock fantasy speech pattern is barely a problem, though, compared to the Abuse of Capitalization. At the risk of making personal judgments, fantasy that uses poor language is poor fantasy. From “Oz” to “Sobek Croix” to “Mordor”, from “Elric” to “Han Solo” to “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser”, fantasy’s ability to take us Elsewhere rests largely upon the author’s ability to convey meaning with his choice of language. Dracula is not named Wumpnut for a reason, nor is Sauron Gorthaur named, well, Lord Foul.
Lord Foul’s Bane treats us to an endless array of weak capitalizations, from the “Staff of Life” (hewn from the “One Tree”) to “Mount Thunder”, mingled with verbnouners like “Foamfollower” and “Woodhelvennin”, capped off with clumsy stock fantasy language bits like “Kiril Threndor” and “lomiallor”. Healing mud is hurtloam, stones that burn are fire-stones, and magically sticky leather is...clingor.
And the poetry! Oh God, the poetry! Donaldson’s verse may be good enough for Metallica, but the overall quality hovers between the song Frodo sings at the Prancing Pony and the kindergoth free-verse that shows up in high school notebooks.
Perhaps the reader can ignore the feeble language. It is as much a pet peeve as a legitimate grievance. But perhaps another pet peeve will catch his ire: the protagonist. Yes, anti-heroes have been cool since Batman debuted, probably before, but there is a difference between a compelling, sympathetic anti-hero and the sort of ineffectual loser that we’re offered in the form of Thomas Covenant. Now, I’m the edgy sort. I prefer an anti-hero or a flawed hero to a square-jawed crusader against villainy, all things being equal. But the sort of grinding intellectual and moral poverty that Covenant offers is neither appealing nor particularly deep or interesting. In time, his ceaseless whining reveals no more depth than the blank and thoughtless virtue of a comic book super-hero. Angst, we’ve all learned from a few bad sessions of Vampire, does not automatically equate with depth.
We spend much of the novel in Covenant’s head, listening to his little problems. This means that not only do we spend a lot of our time listening to the inner monologue of a very nasty and unremarkable man, the actual story is surprisingly brief, almost skeletal. Lord Foul’s Bane is straight from the stock fantasy adventure generator. Get a quest at A to go to B. Along the way, meet some allies. Reach B, get some more allies, get the Real Quest, and travel to X to take Y from Z. It’s a travelogue through a rather boring fantasy world, seen through the eyes of a rather dislikeable person.
There are five more books of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Perhaps, in them, the Land and the protagonist are both given greater depth, and the overall structure of the story moves away from stock fantasy cliches. And perhaps, as mentioned before, these novels kick-started the fantasy genre. But even if they did, Lord Foul’s Bane fails to live up to its reputation. It is better than most fantasy, but that’s no great achievement. There are better novels out there, with more interesting characters, richer worlds, better language, and with genuine depth, rather than the faux-sophistication engendered by wretched melodrama and overblown despair. Read it if you’re a fantasy junkie who wants a passable genre novel instead of a terrible one, or if you’re really interested in the history of fantasy fiction. Otherwise, find something else.
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