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inverarity) wrote2025-03-01 11:16 am
inverarity) wrote2025-03-01 11:16 am
Book Review: Lord Foul's Bane, by Stephen R. Donaldson
Book One of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.
Del Rey, 1978, 480 pages
This is a genre classic that has long been on my reading list because I remember friends who loved it when I was younger, but the one time I tried to read it, I bounced off because of its florid prose and long meandering dialogues. Revisiting it many years later, I was better able to appreciate its merits and what made it special in its day, but man, it did not age well.
Published in 1978, Lord Foul's Bane is very much an artifact of its time. Stephen Donaldson was very obviously following Tolkien's footsteps, which to be fair almost all epic fantasy authors were back then. And at first read it feels a lot like every other Brooks/Eddings fantasy pastiche of the era. I have been told by people who read the entire series that it really delivers later on. What I will say is that Donaldson does have a way with language, and what makes this book seem meandering and full of unnecessary description, and of course, the most outrageous part that most readers talk about (I'll get to that) is clearly being carefully plotted thematically and narratively.
The things that made The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant great were things that made it unique back then but no longer. It's more morally complex than Tolkien, with an unlikeable antihero as the protagonist. "Man from Earth becomes a hero in a fantasy world" was not an original idea (The Dragon and the George was published in 1976, Three Hearts and Three Lions in 1961, and of course John Carter of Mars dates back to 1917 and even Burroughs didn't invent the genre), but the way in which the book ties Thomas Covenant to the very fate of the world he's in, while making the nature of the Land ambiguous, was kind of special.
That said, if you're one of those people who thought the endless hiking in Lord of the Rings was a slog, Stephen Donaldson apparently decided that was how you write a fantasy novel: gather a bunch of heroes and have them spend the entire book hiking to the showdown with the Big Bad.
As the book starts, Thomas Covenant is a man whose life has just turned to shit. He's a writer whose debut novel was a bestseller, and he's just finished his second manuscript. He has a beautiful wife and a baby daughter.
And then he is diagnosed with Hansen's Disease: aka leprosy.
I've seen some criticisms that the way Donaldson handles leprosy is not completely realistic, but it seems to have been consistent with medical knowledge at the time. It was known to be contagious, but just how contagious was not well understood (hence his wife taking their daughter and fleeing). There was no cure in 1978, only lifelong treatment and vigilance to prevent progression of the disease.
Covenant now lives by himself, shunned by the townspeople, who very much would like him to just go away but since they can't make him, and aren't quite up to burning his house down yet, just try to pay all his bills and deliver his groceries for him so he has no reason to ever leave his house. Covenant rebels against this, showing up in town to pay his phone bill (1978, remember) just to defy his erstwhile neighbors.
He hates everyone. He burned his manuscripts after deciding they were naive bullshit because nothing can ever be positive or good again. He's become a miserable, self-pitying misanthrope. "Leper, Outcast, Unclean!" is the catchphrase that echoes constantly in his head, expressing both his self-disgust and his mockery of the fear of those around him.
While in town, he gets (almost) hit by a police car while crossing the street. He passes out and wakes up in another world.
Covenant's arrival in the Land is in a giant cavern, where he is confronted with a "cavewight" named Drool Rockworm, who's ranting about having just procured the Staff of Law, with which he's going to conquer the Land and kill, kill, kill, blah blah blah. But it turns out Drool Rockworm is the little bad to the Big Bad, Lord Foul, the Despiser, who addresses Thomas Covenant directly in a booming stentorian voice at length, telling him his plans for the Land and how he's going to extinguish all hope blah blah blah, and then gives him a long message to take to the "Council of Lords." At this point I was kind of rolling my eyes: "Really, the villain just summons the hero to his realm and promptly announces all his Evil plans and then tells him to go tell everyone else?" Well, it turns out there is actually a reason for this, and Lord Foul is a little deeper and more devious than he seems. But, still so far very Basic Epic Fantasy.
Covenant can be forgiven for the conclusion he reaches: this is all a hallucination. The Land is not real, "Drool Rockworm" and "Lord Foul" are figments of his imagination, and he's actually lying in a coma somewhere. Convinced that he has to play out this mad dream in order to escape from it, he's all "Yeah, sure, fine, I'll take your stupid message to the stupid Council on this stupid quest, whatever."
The rest of the book keeps this intriguing uncertainty alive: is it possible that the Land, as incredibly vivid, alive, and detailed as it is, along with all its inhabitants, is literally a fantasy in Thomas Covenant's head? He continues to cling to this, and resists any attempt to make him believe. As he explains repeatedly, he considers this necessary for both his sanity and his physical survival. As a leper, he's spent several years unable to ever let down his guard, constantly having to check every square inch of his body, every extremity, for any hint of nerve damage, any spread of his disease, which if allowed to progress, will turn him into a deformed, rotting cripple. So this magical land where he is cured by "hurtloam" and there are giants and cavewights and Ur-Viles and magical staffs and quests seems like a trap, something that will trick him into lowering his guard, cease regarding himself as a leper who needs to be constantly vigilant, and of course, let go of his self-hatred and loathing of the world. He inevitably starts to care about the Land and his companions, and to despise Lord Foul, and yet he refuses to accept that it's real.
The first thing that made this book a hard slog was that Thomas Covenant is so goddamn miserable. He's bitter, angry, and hateful, consciously pushes away every gesture of kindness and friendship, and despite the almost preternatural hospitality of his hosts, constantly treats everyone around him like shit. He's barely able to say a word without snapping or mocking. Even later in the book when he starts to accept that, like it or not, he's a hero on a hero's journey, he is about as unheroic as he can possibly be.
For hundreds of pages, he's a whiny, bad-tempered, self-pitying asshole who you wish someone would just push off a cliff. And that's even withoutthe rape .
This happens early in the book, shortly after Covenant arrives in the Land.
The first person he meets (after he escapes the cave with Drool Rockworm and Lord Foul) is Lena, a pretty teenage girl who immediately realizes he's some sort of special messenger. She takes him to her home village, where her parents, upon hearing Covenant's tale, realize they need to take him to the Council of Lords, a trek of many days. That night, while Covenant has wandered off to have one of his many bouts of existential angst, Lena finds him and tries to comfort him.
Covenant rapes her.
It's ugly and it's not represented as anything else. Covenant literally believes this is all a hallucination. He's also been a sexually frustrated leper for a while, and in his mind, the fact that he's able to become aroused (which in the real world is now physically impossible for him) is just more proof that this is all in his head. But it's telling that in what he believes to be a fantasy world, this is how he takes it out on a girl who's been nothing but friendly and helpful to him.
This infamous scene that's a deal-breaker for so many readers is, in my opinion, perfectly understandable in context. I think Donaldson knew exactly what he was doing here. But it's not surprising that many 21st century readers can't get past it. It's one of those things that probably just couldn't be published today. Covenant does immediately feel remorse (despite being convinced it's still a fantasy), and as the book goes on, struggles to come to terms with what he did, which makes it harder to let go of his sense of denial.
But, ya know, he's still a miserable shit.
Another thing that made this book a slog was the prose. Donaldson loves him some big words. Pages are filled with "incarnadine" and "vertiginous" and "effulgent" descriptions. The dialogs are no better: Lord Foul in his opening chapter monologues like a scenery-chewing Shakespearean villain, and everyone Thomas Covenant meets talks like "Bravely said, my friend!" and "It is well, and long have we honored the friendship of your folk," and so on and so on. Besides Lord Foul and Drool Rockworm, there's a giant named Saltheart Foamfollower who travels on a Giantship, and they travel on a journey to Kiril Threndor and the heart of Mount Thunder. There is a legion of immortal, perfectly loyal warriors called the Bloodguard. There is a herd of magical horses called the Ranyhyn who only choose Very Special people to bond with. This is some real Epic Fantasy prose, yo.
Nowadays, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant would be mocked for how tropey it is, but when it was published, it was creating some of those tropes. The Land is described in really glorious detail and there is a lot of deep significance in the magic used by Thomas Covenant, and the corruption represented by Lord Foul. He is an insanely brilliant and diabolical villain. A lot of foreshadowing for later books is seeded here.
That said... I just did not enjoy this book. It was too slow, too tropey, too plodding, too much like many better books I've read since, and I wanted a giant named Stompy Stonefoot to step on Thomas Covenant. Even the part that bothers most readers didn't bother me, because that part was in my opinion the most intentional and well-planned execution I've ever read of a jolting, almost incidental scene meant to trigger the reader's revulsion, and yet it's sort of the lynchpin of Thomas Covenant's journey. But he's just a miserable bastard to spend hundreds of pages reading whine and angst. I don't think it's likely I will read the rest of the series, even if it does pay off magnificently according to its fans. (There were eventually ten books: two trilogies followed by a quadrology.)
My complete list of book reviews.
Del Rey, 1978, 480 pages
Thomas Covenant is a leper, a bitter and solitary pariah who is mystically transported to another Earth where time moves differently than ours, one in which magic takes many forms. The Land is threatened by many evils, the most immediate of which is a maddened Cavewight whose subterranean excavations have unearthed the ancient and puissant Staff of Law.
More dangerous to the free people of the Land is the Gray Slayer, Lord Foul, the Despiser, who intends to destroy the actual foundations of the Earth that he might wage war against the universe’s creator. And Foul’s intended weapon in this conflict? None other than Thomas Covenant himself.
This is a genre classic that has long been on my reading list because I remember friends who loved it when I was younger, but the one time I tried to read it, I bounced off because of its florid prose and long meandering dialogues. Revisiting it many years later, I was better able to appreciate its merits and what made it special in its day, but man, it did not age well.
Published in 1978, Lord Foul's Bane is very much an artifact of its time. Stephen Donaldson was very obviously following Tolkien's footsteps, which to be fair almost all epic fantasy authors were back then. And at first read it feels a lot like every other Brooks/Eddings fantasy pastiche of the era. I have been told by people who read the entire series that it really delivers later on. What I will say is that Donaldson does have a way with language, and what makes this book seem meandering and full of unnecessary description, and of course, the most outrageous part that most readers talk about (I'll get to that) is clearly being carefully plotted thematically and narratively.
The things that made The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant great were things that made it unique back then but no longer. It's more morally complex than Tolkien, with an unlikeable antihero as the protagonist. "Man from Earth becomes a hero in a fantasy world" was not an original idea (The Dragon and the George was published in 1976, Three Hearts and Three Lions in 1961, and of course John Carter of Mars dates back to 1917 and even Burroughs didn't invent the genre), but the way in which the book ties Thomas Covenant to the very fate of the world he's in, while making the nature of the Land ambiguous, was kind of special.
That said, if you're one of those people who thought the endless hiking in Lord of the Rings was a slog, Stephen Donaldson apparently decided that was how you write a fantasy novel: gather a bunch of heroes and have them spend the entire book hiking to the showdown with the Big Bad.
"Leper, Outcast, Unclean!"
As the book starts, Thomas Covenant is a man whose life has just turned to shit. He's a writer whose debut novel was a bestseller, and he's just finished his second manuscript. He has a beautiful wife and a baby daughter.
And then he is diagnosed with Hansen's Disease: aka leprosy.
I've seen some criticisms that the way Donaldson handles leprosy is not completely realistic, but it seems to have been consistent with medical knowledge at the time. It was known to be contagious, but just how contagious was not well understood (hence his wife taking their daughter and fleeing). There was no cure in 1978, only lifelong treatment and vigilance to prevent progression of the disease.
Covenant now lives by himself, shunned by the townspeople, who very much would like him to just go away but since they can't make him, and aren't quite up to burning his house down yet, just try to pay all his bills and deliver his groceries for him so he has no reason to ever leave his house. Covenant rebels against this, showing up in town to pay his phone bill (1978, remember) just to defy his erstwhile neighbors.
He hates everyone. He burned his manuscripts after deciding they were naive bullshit because nothing can ever be positive or good again. He's become a miserable, self-pitying misanthrope. "Leper, Outcast, Unclean!" is the catchphrase that echoes constantly in his head, expressing both his self-disgust and his mockery of the fear of those around him.
While in town, he gets (almost) hit by a police car while crossing the street. He passes out and wakes up in another world.
Is the Land real?
Covenant's arrival in the Land is in a giant cavern, where he is confronted with a "cavewight" named Drool Rockworm, who's ranting about having just procured the Staff of Law, with which he's going to conquer the Land and kill, kill, kill, blah blah blah. But it turns out Drool Rockworm is the little bad to the Big Bad, Lord Foul, the Despiser, who addresses Thomas Covenant directly in a booming stentorian voice at length, telling him his plans for the Land and how he's going to extinguish all hope blah blah blah, and then gives him a long message to take to the "Council of Lords." At this point I was kind of rolling my eyes: "Really, the villain just summons the hero to his realm and promptly announces all his Evil plans and then tells him to go tell everyone else?" Well, it turns out there is actually a reason for this, and Lord Foul is a little deeper and more devious than he seems. But, still so far very Basic Epic Fantasy.
Covenant can be forgiven for the conclusion he reaches: this is all a hallucination. The Land is not real, "Drool Rockworm" and "Lord Foul" are figments of his imagination, and he's actually lying in a coma somewhere. Convinced that he has to play out this mad dream in order to escape from it, he's all "Yeah, sure, fine, I'll take your stupid message to the stupid Council on this stupid quest, whatever."
The rest of the book keeps this intriguing uncertainty alive: is it possible that the Land, as incredibly vivid, alive, and detailed as it is, along with all its inhabitants, is literally a fantasy in Thomas Covenant's head? He continues to cling to this, and resists any attempt to make him believe. As he explains repeatedly, he considers this necessary for both his sanity and his physical survival. As a leper, he's spent several years unable to ever let down his guard, constantly having to check every square inch of his body, every extremity, for any hint of nerve damage, any spread of his disease, which if allowed to progress, will turn him into a deformed, rotting cripple. So this magical land where he is cured by "hurtloam" and there are giants and cavewights and Ur-Viles and magical staffs and quests seems like a trap, something that will trick him into lowering his guard, cease regarding himself as a leper who needs to be constantly vigilant, and of course, let go of his self-hatred and loathing of the world. He inevitably starts to care about the Land and his companions, and to despise Lord Foul, and yet he refuses to accept that it's real.
Unlikeable Protagonist? Check, with a vengeance.
The first thing that made this book a hard slog was that Thomas Covenant is so goddamn miserable. He's bitter, angry, and hateful, consciously pushes away every gesture of kindness and friendship, and despite the almost preternatural hospitality of his hosts, constantly treats everyone around him like shit. He's barely able to say a word without snapping or mocking. Even later in the book when he starts to accept that, like it or not, he's a hero on a hero's journey, he is about as unheroic as he can possibly be.
For hundreds of pages, he's a whiny, bad-tempered, self-pitying asshole who you wish someone would just push off a cliff. And that's even without
Spoiler: Skip this section if you care
This happens early in the book, shortly after Covenant arrives in the Land.
The first person he meets (after he escapes the cave with Drool Rockworm and Lord Foul) is Lena, a pretty teenage girl who immediately realizes he's some sort of special messenger. She takes him to her home village, where her parents, upon hearing Covenant's tale, realize they need to take him to the Council of Lords, a trek of many days. That night, while Covenant has wandered off to have one of his many bouts of existential angst, Lena finds him and tries to comfort him.
Covenant rapes her.
It's ugly and it's not represented as anything else. Covenant literally believes this is all a hallucination. He's also been a sexually frustrated leper for a while, and in his mind, the fact that he's able to become aroused (which in the real world is now physically impossible for him) is just more proof that this is all in his head. But it's telling that in what he believes to be a fantasy world, this is how he takes it out on a girl who's been nothing but friendly and helpful to him.
This infamous scene that's a deal-breaker for so many readers is, in my opinion, perfectly understandable in context. I think Donaldson knew exactly what he was doing here. But it's not surprising that many 21st century readers can't get past it. It's one of those things that probably just couldn't be published today. Covenant does immediately feel remorse (despite being convinced it's still a fantasy), and as the book goes on, struggles to come to terms with what he did, which makes it harder to let go of his sense of denial.
But, ya know, he's still a miserable shit.
Incarnadine and Vertiginous
Another thing that made this book a slog was the prose. Donaldson loves him some big words. Pages are filled with "incarnadine" and "vertiginous" and "effulgent" descriptions. The dialogs are no better: Lord Foul in his opening chapter monologues like a scenery-chewing Shakespearean villain, and everyone Thomas Covenant meets talks like "Bravely said, my friend!" and "It is well, and long have we honored the friendship of your folk," and so on and so on. Besides Lord Foul and Drool Rockworm, there's a giant named Saltheart Foamfollower who travels on a Giantship, and they travel on a journey to Kiril Threndor and the heart of Mount Thunder. There is a legion of immortal, perfectly loyal warriors called the Bloodguard. There is a herd of magical horses called the Ranyhyn who only choose Very Special people to bond with. This is some real Epic Fantasy prose, yo.
Nowadays, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant would be mocked for how tropey it is, but when it was published, it was creating some of those tropes. The Land is described in really glorious detail and there is a lot of deep significance in the magic used by Thomas Covenant, and the corruption represented by Lord Foul. He is an insanely brilliant and diabolical villain. A lot of foreshadowing for later books is seeded here.
That said... I just did not enjoy this book. It was too slow, too tropey, too plodding, too much like many better books I've read since, and I wanted a giant named Stompy Stonefoot to step on Thomas Covenant. Even the part that bothers most readers didn't bother me, because that part was in my opinion the most intentional and well-planned execution I've ever read of a jolting, almost incidental scene meant to trigger the reader's revulsion, and yet it's sort of the lynchpin of Thomas Covenant's journey. But he's just a miserable bastard to spend hundreds of pages reading whine and angst. I don't think it's likely I will read the rest of the series, even if it does pay off magnificently according to its fans. (There were eventually ten books: two trilogies followed by a quadrology.)
My complete list of book reviews.