Lord Foul’s Bane by Stephen Donaldson, Review
Lord Foul’s Bane is a particularly hard book to review. The first book in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson is sometimes unpleasant to read. Many reviews I’ve seen count that as a negative, however it was clearly part of the author’s intent. So while it may not be to every reader’s taste, I don’t think it’s fair to criticize the book for achieving the author’s intent.
The central character in the books is Thomas Covenant, a man from our world who suffers from leprosy. Formerly a best-selling author, his wife has now left him and he finds himself ostracized from society. Following an accident, Covenant wakes up in The Land, a place of magic where he is somehow healed of his leprosy and hailed as the re-incarnation of an ancient hero.
To say that Covenant reacts badly to this would be an enormous understatement. Refusing to believe in the existence of The Land, Covenant names himself the Unbeliever. He is whiny, arrogant and selfish. He also (and this is where the novel loses many readers) commits a vicious, unprovoked and unjustifiable act during the first third of the novel.
However, that act is not gratuitous. The act, Covenants failure to acknowledge it and his flawed attempt to atone for it fuel key elements of the first three books and return to haunt him in both the Second and Last Chronicles as well.
Covenant is not a hero. He is a weak and flawed man who has been reduced by the rejection of the people in our world to a point where he is only barely hanging on. All he has in the real world is his selfish stubbornness. Remove that and he is dead. So faced with the magical life of The Land where he is expected to live up to their greatest hero, he is unable to adapt or function without compromising what keeps him alive in the “real world”.
While it contains most of the trappings of traditional fantasy (rings, giants, magic, a mountain, a dark lord), the core of the First Chronicles is actually the tale of one man’s redemption. However the story of Lord Foul’s Bane is not one of redemption but a desperate attempt to refute and avoid.
It’s a tough read. I guarantee that more than once you will want to slap Covenant silly, but remember that he is not the hero of the tale. The classic hero in this trilogy is Lord Mhoram, Covenant is merely our window into that world.
Donaldson presents us with complex issues of faith, betrayal, redemption and more using the classic fantasy quest structure. It’s a remarkable work. It does have flaws though. Covenant is at times just too whiny which is frustrating to the reader. The reasons for Covenant’s resistance are not always obvious either. It wasn’t until my second reading of the book that I really got to the core of Covenants “Unbelief” and why he clung to it so determinedly.
Donaldson is also painfully verbose in his writing. I originally attributed this to it being an early work, but all subsequent Covenant novels have been written in the same style, so it appears to be a deliberate choice. It can be very distracting though.
Despite the flaws, I think this is a pivotal work of fantasy and one that shows how much more the genre can be than simply Tolkien riffs.
Eoghann Irving is amongst other things the creator and Editor of Solar Flare. He has a life long interest in all forms of science fiction and fantasy and a pressing need to share this interest with anyone who will listen. Find out more at his personal website eoghann.com..
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