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A review by lesserjoke
Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson
5.0
On the surface, this 1977 novel is a Narnia-style portal fantasy, in which a person from our reality travels to another and gets caught up in an epic quest. The lush worldbuilding is as intricate and achingly beautiful as anything in Middle-earth, and there are even some specific Tolkien parallels to be drawn (although that mostly comes across as author Stephen R. Donaldson engaging with the same archetypes, rather than emulating The Lord of the Rings directly). I love the distinctive culture and sense of history to this realm, and I think I would enjoy reading stories set there no matter what.
What really elevates the series, however, is Donaldson's marriage of that setting to a deep psychological drama driven by his protagonist's anguish. Thomas Covenant suffers from leprosy, a debilitating condition that cannot be cured but can merely be managed by strict self-discipline and constant monitoring of one's body for the damage that dead nerves won't report. Lepers can't afford to lose themselves in delusions that would distract from self-care, and so when Covenant finds himself magically translated to the Land and healed of his illness, his only recourse is to insist that he's dreaming and reject the role of prophesied hero that has been thrust upon him.
The "all just a dream" trope can be hacky when deployed as a conclusion, robbing the preceding events of their import, but by frontloading it as a question, Donaldson reverses that traditional equation and navigates a delicate tension. If the Land has a genuine existence and the self-styled Unbeliever doesn't act to save it, he will have doomed its people to an awful fate. Yet if it's instead a lie that he lets seduce him, his mental health may never recover. Although the later volumes increasingly lean towards the interpretation that everything is real after all -- as does the immediacy of the world here and probably the typical reader's expectations of the genre -- the weight of Covenant's dilemma and what it drives him to do is sharply poignant.
Most controversially, an early chapter of this first book sees the tortured antihero attack and rape a sixteen-year-old girl, whom he takes as another figment invented by his own subconscious to torment him. It's an ugly act that he grows to repudiate and decidedly not something we're meant to endorse, but I can understand how that's not an element everyone is prepared to tolerate in their escapist literature. And while the assault has dire repercussions that follow, it's somewhat problematically positioned by the text as primarily afflicting the rapist himself, rather than his victim or her community.
Ultimately Lord Foul's Bane and the wider saga it begins explore the philosophical thesis of whether the actions we take in our dreams can be understood morally; whether hate must be resisted and beauty preserved at any cost to the soul. It's a nuanced theme in a grand locale, full of fierce characters and dazzling magics, and it's what makes this work a true postmodern classic.
--Subscribe at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke to support these reviews and weigh in on what I read next!--
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What really elevates the series, however, is Donaldson's marriage of that setting to a deep psychological drama driven by his protagonist's anguish. Thomas Covenant suffers from leprosy, a debilitating condition that cannot be cured but can merely be managed by strict self-discipline and constant monitoring of one's body for the damage that dead nerves won't report. Lepers can't afford to lose themselves in delusions that would distract from self-care, and so when Covenant finds himself magically translated to the Land and healed of his illness, his only recourse is to insist that he's dreaming and reject the role of prophesied hero that has been thrust upon him.
The "all just a dream" trope can be hacky when deployed as a conclusion, robbing the preceding events of their import, but by frontloading it as a question, Donaldson reverses that traditional equation and navigates a delicate tension. If the Land has a genuine existence and the self-styled Unbeliever doesn't act to save it, he will have doomed its people to an awful fate. Yet if it's instead a lie that he lets seduce him, his mental health may never recover. Although the later volumes increasingly lean towards the interpretation that everything is real after all -- as does the immediacy of the world here and probably the typical reader's expectations of the genre -- the weight of Covenant's dilemma and what it drives him to do is sharply poignant.
Most controversially, an early chapter of this first book sees the tortured antihero attack and rape a sixteen-year-old girl, whom he takes as another figment invented by his own subconscious to torment him. It's an ugly act that he grows to repudiate and decidedly not something we're meant to endorse, but I can understand how that's not an element everyone is prepared to tolerate in their escapist literature. And while the assault has dire repercussions that follow, it's somewhat problematically positioned by the text as primarily afflicting the rapist himself, rather than his victim or her community.
Ultimately Lord Foul's Bane and the wider saga it begins explore the philosophical thesis of whether the actions we take in our dreams can be understood morally; whether hate must be resisted and beauty preserved at any cost to the soul. It's a nuanced theme in a grand locale, full of fierce characters and dazzling magics, and it's what makes this work a true postmodern classic.
--Subscribe at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke to support these reviews and weigh in on what I read next!--
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter