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A review by steven_v
Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson
5.0
This is the first novel in the first of trilogy of the Covenant series. The series follows a man from our world, Thomas Covenant, as he is (apparently) transported to a magical fantasy world called The Land. I say "apparently" because Covenant is convinced throughout most of the novel, and indeed most of the series, that the experience is an hallucination -- a dream wrought by his mind after losing consciousness in an accident.
I confess that I have read this series three times before -- this last reading is my 4th -- and I am still not certain if The Land is a dream, or if it is real. I waver back and forth from book to book and even chapter to chapter sometimes. There is evidence on both sides. And I think this is one of the reasons why the Chronicles are among my favorite fantasies of all times, ranking up there with Lord of the Rings... the ambiguity adds so much to the series. And it all begins with this novel.
Lord Foul's Bane gets us off to an admittedly slow start -- we meet Covenant, who is walking into town to pay his phone bill in person to avoid being completely shut away by his community. Covenant, you see, is a leper. This is the central, defining feature of his character. He was diagnosed with leprosy about a year before the novel. His wife left him because of it, taking his son. He has no feeling in his extremities. He has to survey his limbs repeatedly to scan for injuries. And his fellow man has ostracized him. They don't even want him to come to town to shop for groceries.
The novel is slow at this early stage, and I admit the first time I read it, I almost put it down here (I was also in 8th grade, and perhaps not ready for a novel like this). The leprosy chapter, in particular, can be off-putting. But this early section is critical. It sets the stage for Covenant's later behavior. Many have complained that Covenant is unlikable. I think they are being unfair to him. As LFB clearly shows in its first several chapters, Covenant has had an unbelievable amount of psychological abuse heaped upon him by the rest of society. He has had to develop behaviors to protect himself as much as possible from this abusive treatment. It isn't just physical injury he must train himself to avoid, but the emotional injury from the cruel and unforgiving people around him.
And then he falls down and hits his head and wakes up in a fantasy world where suddenly everyone is nice to him.
It is no surprise that he thinks this is a dream -- that his mind, bereft of all human contact, has invented a place where he is welcomed, even viewed as a reincarnated hero. He thinks his mind created an escape from the emotional torture. He fears that if he gives in to this escape, and accepts it, he will either never wake up, or even worse, he will wake up having lost his defenses, which will leave him emotionally vulnerable to the relentless psychological abuse that his fellow man will continue to heap upon him due to his leprosy. Understood in this context, Covenant's reaction to The Land is not so surprising.
That said, Covenant does some pretty despicable things in The Land (I won't state them for spoilers). And he fails. A lot. But he also shows some very real humanity. At one point in self defense he kills, not humans, but twisted monsters. Even the Land dwellers around him, who swore an Oath of Peace, killed these monsters in battle, and they did not consider doing so to have broken their oath. But the killing upsets Covenant and makes him swear never to raise his hand again. He does not want to kill -- even monsters. This is not an act of cowardice. It is an act of mercy from someone who is implicitly non-violent.
Additionally, although he mostly shrugs off his most despicable act early in the novel and seems to forget about it, toward the end he is reminded of this act, and then he shows the guilt and sorrow you would expect. In later books he continues to punish himself over it (rightly so -- he was pretty awful in that moment). Here again, we can see that Covenant is not a monster -- just a man who was pushed beyond all human endurance psychologically, and who has only a limited capacity to deal with this emotional torture.
Beyond Covenant, there is much richness in this novel. Donaldson's prose style is unique and almost lyrical. It may take some getting used to, but I quite enjoy his evocative turns of phrase. He comes up with some of the most inventive similes and metaphors, and he does this on such a regular basis, that I can't imagine how he comes up with them all. Equally enjoyable is the symbolic nature of the events and even the world: The Land is a metaphor for Covenant himself, and the corruption wrought by the Despiser symbolizes Covenant's leprosy. Thus the constant struggle against Lord Foul's machinations is an externalization of Covenant's struggle against giving in to his disease -- succumbing to its inevitable conclusion of rot and decay. We get visual descriptions of this "wrongness" at multiple points in the book. Thus we can view LFB and the other books as the story of a leper's struggle against the rot of his disease, externalized as a battle to save The Land. This makes the "is it real or is it a dream?" question even weightier, and is one of my favorite aspects of the novel.
In the end, you're probably never going to love the Thomas Covenant character, in the sense that you'd want him over to dinner -- though I certainly loved other characters in this story that much, such as Bannor, Mhoram, and Foamfollower. Still, I developed a grudging respect for the man by the end of this novel. Between that and my adoration for the beautiful world Donaldson invented, I was happy to move on to the 2nd book after reading this one.
I confess that I have read this series three times before -- this last reading is my 4th -- and I am still not certain if The Land is a dream, or if it is real. I waver back and forth from book to book and even chapter to chapter sometimes. There is evidence on both sides. And I think this is one of the reasons why the Chronicles are among my favorite fantasies of all times, ranking up there with Lord of the Rings... the ambiguity adds so much to the series. And it all begins with this novel.
Lord Foul's Bane gets us off to an admittedly slow start -- we meet Covenant, who is walking into town to pay his phone bill in person to avoid being completely shut away by his community. Covenant, you see, is a leper. This is the central, defining feature of his character. He was diagnosed with leprosy about a year before the novel. His wife left him because of it, taking his son. He has no feeling in his extremities. He has to survey his limbs repeatedly to scan for injuries. And his fellow man has ostracized him. They don't even want him to come to town to shop for groceries.
The novel is slow at this early stage, and I admit the first time I read it, I almost put it down here (I was also in 8th grade, and perhaps not ready for a novel like this). The leprosy chapter, in particular, can be off-putting. But this early section is critical. It sets the stage for Covenant's later behavior. Many have complained that Covenant is unlikable. I think they are being unfair to him. As LFB clearly shows in its first several chapters, Covenant has had an unbelievable amount of psychological abuse heaped upon him by the rest of society. He has had to develop behaviors to protect himself as much as possible from this abusive treatment. It isn't just physical injury he must train himself to avoid, but the emotional injury from the cruel and unforgiving people around him.
And then he falls down and hits his head and wakes up in a fantasy world where suddenly everyone is nice to him.
It is no surprise that he thinks this is a dream -- that his mind, bereft of all human contact, has invented a place where he is welcomed, even viewed as a reincarnated hero. He thinks his mind created an escape from the emotional torture. He fears that if he gives in to this escape, and accepts it, he will either never wake up, or even worse, he will wake up having lost his defenses, which will leave him emotionally vulnerable to the relentless psychological abuse that his fellow man will continue to heap upon him due to his leprosy. Understood in this context, Covenant's reaction to The Land is not so surprising.
That said, Covenant does some pretty despicable things in The Land (I won't state them for spoilers). And he fails. A lot. But he also shows some very real humanity. At one point in self defense he kills, not humans, but twisted monsters. Even the Land dwellers around him, who swore an Oath of Peace, killed these monsters in battle, and they did not consider doing so to have broken their oath. But the killing upsets Covenant and makes him swear never to raise his hand again. He does not want to kill -- even monsters. This is not an act of cowardice. It is an act of mercy from someone who is implicitly non-violent.
Additionally, although he mostly shrugs off his most despicable act early in the novel and seems to forget about it, toward the end he is reminded of this act, and then he shows the guilt and sorrow you would expect. In later books he continues to punish himself over it (rightly so -- he was pretty awful in that moment). Here again, we can see that Covenant is not a monster -- just a man who was pushed beyond all human endurance psychologically, and who has only a limited capacity to deal with this emotional torture.
Beyond Covenant, there is much richness in this novel. Donaldson's prose style is unique and almost lyrical. It may take some getting used to, but I quite enjoy his evocative turns of phrase. He comes up with some of the most inventive similes and metaphors, and he does this on such a regular basis, that I can't imagine how he comes up with them all. Equally enjoyable is the symbolic nature of the events and even the world: The Land is a metaphor for Covenant himself, and the corruption wrought by the Despiser symbolizes Covenant's leprosy. Thus the constant struggle against Lord Foul's machinations is an externalization of Covenant's struggle against giving in to his disease -- succumbing to its inevitable conclusion of rot and decay. We get visual descriptions of this "wrongness" at multiple points in the book. Thus we can view LFB and the other books as the story of a leper's struggle against the rot of his disease, externalized as a battle to save The Land. This makes the "is it real or is it a dream?" question even weightier, and is one of my favorite aspects of the novel.
In the end, you're probably never going to love the Thomas Covenant character, in the sense that you'd want him over to dinner -- though I certainly loved other characters in this story that much, such as Bannor, Mhoram, and Foamfollower. Still, I developed a grudging respect for the man by the end of this novel. Between that and my adoration for the beautiful world Donaldson invented, I was happy to move on to the 2nd book after reading this one.