Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

I just re-read Lord Foul's Bane, the first volume in Stephen R. Donaldson's classic fantasy trilogy, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever (which was eventually followed by another trilogy, The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant). This was a favorite fantasy series of mine since I first read it when I was in seventh grade -- in fact, I read the Covenant books before I read The Lord of the Rings, strangely enough.

Thomas Covenant is a successful writer whose life crumbles when he is diagnosed with leprosy. His wife leaves him, taking his son with her; his town basically turns him into a pariah, with people literally running from him whenever they recognize him; he loses all sense of touch in his fingers and toes; and to prevent the spread of gangrene after a cut, the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand are amputated. Covenant lives on, then, almost out of habit and raw bitterness. And then, after a strange encounter with a beggar, Covenant is transported to another world, called "the Land". The people of the Land are threatened by their ancient enemy, Lord Foul the Despiser, and Covenant is thrust into the center of this struggle, because he wears a wedding ring made of white gold -- a metal not found in the Land, which is said to be able to release "wild magic" -- and because the people of the Land view him as the reincarnation of their greatest hero, Berek Halfhand -- who likewise was missing two fingers.

The various fantasy struggles in the book -- the ancient villain risen again to threaten the peaceful kingdom, the forces of good who are substantially less powerful than their forebears, the pastoral peoples whose lives are disrupted by evil -- are all standard fantasy tropes that will be familiar to any reader with any experience at all in the genre. What sets the Covenant Chronicles apart is its hero, who is so tinged with shades of gray that at times he becomes anti-hero, baldly refusing -- frequently out of selfishness -- to do the right thing, the thing we want him to do. Covenant is one of the most complex and memorable characters I have ever encountered, in any genre; his fragile grip on his own sanity defines the books, as he not only cannot bring himself to act on the Land's behalf, but he cannot bring himself to commit to believing in the Land in the first place.

Covenant-the-leper is thrust into this world, with its frequent metaphors relating to health, and it nearly drives him mad. Early on he suffers a few scrapes and bruises; these are treated with a healing mud called "hurtloam", which actually regenerates his dead nerves and restores his feeling in his extremities. Each person Covenant encounters in the Land seems to have no idea whatsoever what he is talking about when he speaks of disease; the very idea of "unhealth" is totally alien to them. He goes from a world where he is pariah to a world where he is revered almost at sight, and very early on it drives him over a certain edge as he commits a vile act that colors just about everything he does afterward. It is this act which establishes Covenant as anti-hero, and it's probably this one act that makes the book -- indeed, the entire series -- a "love it or hate it" affair.

Reading Lord Foul's Bane again after a long time -- it's been ten years since I last read it -- was a fascinating experience. I was captivated anew by the Land, and I felt even more strongly Covenant's struggle even as I wished he would commit, one way or the other. Donaldson's skill at description is also as good as I remember; his fantasy world is as effectively visualized as any. His characters are memorable as well, not just Covenant -- the Lords, for example, or the Giant, Saltheart Foamfollower. I do sometimes feel as if the Land isn't as "populated" as it should be. That's probably not a very good way of putting it, but the Land just doesn't seem to have the vastness of, say, Middle-Earth.

I also noticed, this time, some very clunky prose by Donaldson. The story is eminently able to overcome it, so it's not that big a fault, but Donaldson's attempts at poetry here really don't work. Some of them are intended to be reverential chants, some are ritual songs, others are epic tales; most of them, though, take the form of prose broken up to look like poems, with almost no attention paid whatsoever to rhyme schemes, scansion, or anything else. Of course, I am no expert on poetry, despite my little "Poetical Excursions". I have it on pretty good authority that Tolkien's poetry in LOTR isn't very good, and yet I love it; so I suppose Donaldson's poetry in The Covenant Chronicles is great stuff. But somehow I doubt it: the effect, to my ears, was no unlike that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation when Data attempts writing poetry and ends up with verse about his cat's "taxonomic nomenclature".

I also have to report something that's become a pet peeve of mine: Donaldson is one of those writers (or perhaps he was, since the Covenant series is over 25 years old now) who insists on avoiding said in his dialog attribution. Characters in Lord Foul's Bane never "say" anything; they're constantly "jerking out" or "grating out" or "growling" their utterances, and at one point there is a particularly unfortunate one: a character actually "ejaculates" a sentence. Ouch. So where one can read Tolkien just for the glory of his language, that approach really doesn't work with Donaldson. He's much more concerned with character in general, and internal struggle in particular, so his work has to be appraised on that basis.

Time was when I would have moved right into the second book, The Illearth War, but I'm not going to do that just now. Mainly, because I want to try breaking up the series a bit, and appraising each book separately (the Covenant books lend themselves to this much more than does LOTR). And also, well -- my copy of Illearth War is already in a box.