Stephen R. Donaldson

The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant

Stephen R. Donaldson’s Land (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever) series is one of the earliest reactions against the carbon-copy Tolkien-like works that proliferated soon after the success of The Lord of the Rings and stands in start contrast to another book published the same year — Sword of Shannara — which simply rewrites Tolkien rather than responds to it.

The first series is known as the Chronicles of Thomas the Unbeliever (more on that later), after the main character appearing in the opening trilogy. Covenant reappears in the second trilogy, but shares the spotlight with Linden Avery throughout, even to the point of being overshadowed by her at times. Avery remains a main character in Donaldson’s recent new trilogy, begun with The Runes of the Earth.

Anyone familiar with fantasy will recognize the genre’s typical elements: small bands gathering together to undertake urgent quests, a dark lord trying to dominate the world, horse-loving peoples, elves, etc. Donaldson doesn’t simply round up the usual suspects, however, and then let them play out in all the predictable fashions.

For the most part, Donaldson breathes some fresh air into the old stalwarts (though they weren’t really all that old in terms of modern fantasy when he began the series and the fact that they still feel somewhat fresh today is a testament to his creativity). The races aren’t simply the same-old, same-old elves, dwarves, and so on. His giants especially are a wondrous creation, both as a species and in their individual form. The Land itself is a marvel of description and truly feels as alive as it is meant to (making it all the more heartbreaking when that life is threatened); it is not the same dreary trudge through funny-named mountain ranges, grassy plains, etc. There are some standby plot points — the small band infiltrating the dark lord’s lair, the siege by an overwhelming army of bad guys — but these are more than balanced by the plot’s overall originality as well as by its individual scenes. His characters too, avoid falling into the realm of dull fantasy types. They are complex creations, often flawed, often frustrating, and sometimes detestable. Many grow throughout a single book and/or across the series (singular and plural), rather than appearing onstage fully formed and immune to experience.

But what sets the series most apart is not its simple quality but that aspect of Covenant’s name that lends itself to the title: Unbeliever. Covenant is that rare hero who not only doesn’t want to be a hero (after all, how many of those reluctant would-rather-stay-in-their-protected-hamlet-heroes have we seen), but who willingly chooses not to be. Even stranger are his reasons — he chooses not to be a hero not out of fear or modesty but because he doesn’t believe in Donaldson’s world creation. A leper (literally, not metaphorically) in the real world he is transported from, Covenant refuses to believe that the Land is anything but a fever dream. 

Donaldson’s choice of leprosy as his main character’s disease is brilliant, as lepers simply can’t afford a fantasy life, can’t afford a daydream or a distracted moment because the smallest bump, scratch, or cut when they aren't paying attention (they can't feel the warning pain) can end up in loss of limb and life. Donaldson goes further than simply having Covenant be reluctant, even further than having him disbelieve the whole thing (and not simply for a few pages of tension — he is the Unbeliever throughout almost the whole work). He risks turning the reader totally against his character at a very early stage when he has Covenant commit a truly horrendous act that will reverberate throughout the whole series of books.

The act itself, the way it echoes down the years and the millennia (time moves differently in the Land), Covenant’s inner struggles, the pondering of life and death, of existence and being, puts the series in the “serious” fantasy category. That doesn’t mean the story itself isn’t exciting or compelling. The books are filled with great battle scenes, tense quests, acts of wildly exhilarating desperation, high magic, stirring speeches, personal bravery (I defy anyone not to get chills when Mhoram comes into his own) as well as moments of pain and suffering, heartbreaking sacrifices, and realizations of futility that threaten to crush the spirit of the reader as much as the characters.

But with his choice of Covenant as the main character and his exploration of free will and responsibility, Donaldson raises the importance of all of these elements of entertainment. Something he does as well, though slightly less satisfactorily with Avery in the second series. While this is overall a positive aspect of the series, it can at times be somewhat detrimental, during those moments Donaldson seems too hyper-aware of writing “seriously”. Sometimes the waxing philosophical is a bit too much; sometimes his diction is over-the-top in its use of obscure words. But while these moments exist (perhaps even worsen over the life of the series), they aren’t much more than minor annoyances.

You won’t fall in love with Thomas Covenant. In fact, though I find he grows on you, you may never even like him. But that doesn’t mean you won’t find his story compelling. And you will, I believe, fall in love with the Land and many of its denizens. If you find it difficult to get through the opening of book one, Lord Foul’s Bane, try to keep going, even if it means skimming a bit (something I don’t normally advise). More importantly, even if you don’t like book one, give book two a shot for at least awhile. You’ll find more characters to balance Covenant’s despair and angst (not to mention his whining). Highly recommended. —Bill Capossere

The Runes of the Earth

Fans of Stephen R. Donaldson's earlier work in the Land will find much to like here. Much of what was so good in the first two trilogies is here: conflicted characters; examinations of power and guilt, sense of loss, familiar etc. That's both a positive and a negative, however, as there is a distinct sense of been there done that. Not overpowering, as the story does expand, deepen, and in general differ in slight, subtle ways from its predecessors. But the sense remains through much of the book, as once again the Land is under assault, once again characters are ignorant or unwilling, once again a character wrestles with use/control of power, once again a character is taken hostage, once again we deal with Stonedowners and Ranhyn and Bloodguard, once again Kevin Landwaster has lessons to tell us. Again, the book manages, I think, to evade this as a major pitfall, but one is willing to give a bit more slack to the first book in a projected trilogy/tetralogy; one hopes the rest of the books move down more original paths.

The opening is a bit slow, as Linden Avery's life since the last book is summarized and she is set down the path toward reentry into the Land. Part of the slowness comes from too much unnecessary introspection on her part, unnecessary because it's redundant (we've heard it already), repetitive (goes on too long in the same vein), or because it is telling us something we should probably be shown. A bit of it also seems somewhat contrived, but as its main purpose is to get her to the Land we can accept its arbitrariness.

Once in the Land the story picks up and becomes much more compelling as Avery learns of the Land's new ills (loss of the Staff of Law, time storms, a ban on earthpower, and more) and picks up some allies and of course some enemies in her attempts to save the Land and her hostage son. As usual with Donaldson, half the fun is the shiftiness of what it means to be ally and/or enemy.

For longtime readers of Donaldson, there will be some moments of annoyance as he goes over past Land history that we've all read about or even better seen occur. Most times he goes a step further, filling in some backstory or forward-story, adding a few details, but it seems much of it could have been streamlined. I suppose that was for the benefit of those who haven't read the previous books (a quite detailed prologue is available for them) but I'm not sure I understand why anyone would pick this book up not having read those others. Not only do characters, themes, and plots repeat or expand upon those from earlier, but the whole thrust of the series revolves around the love of the Land and unfortunately, in this book, the Land is pretty pallid. One just can't understand why it's so important that Avery save it unless one has seen it in all its first trilogy glory. Sure, Avery keeps telling the reader why it's important and tries to recall the past glory (though she never really saw it fully herself), but that's a very poor substitute. For that reason alone I'd never recommend this book as a starter (plus, reading the first six cuts down on the wait time for the sequel to The Runes of the Earth).

Flaws in the book are relatively minor. Sometimes it's a bit contrived, sometimes a bit rushed, sometimes too familiarly predictable. As mentioned the Land itself no longer glows, and “Kevin's Dirt” is just an awful letdown in terms of sheer language; I mean, this is the same guy who gave us the Ill Earth War, The Ritual of Desecration, the Unfettered, the Unhomed, and Lord Mhoram's Victory. Is “Kevin's Dirt” really the best he could do? But this, like the other flaws, are insignificant in the book's hold on the reader and if one hopes to see some more expansive character and thematic lines, the first two trilogies bode well for such expansion, making The Runes of the Earth both a welcome return and a hopeful beginning.
—Bill Capossere

Fatal Revenant

Donaldson raises the stakes so high in Fatal Revenant that it was difficult, at times, to see how he was going to pull it off. I'll be honest: I doubted that he could do it, and I'm a true, dedicated (not obsessive, thank you) fan. However, after turning the final page of Fatal Revenant and sadly setting the book aside, I'm more than a little embarrassed to admit that my ability to express my emotions and thoughts had been significantly diminished. Rational cogitation evaded me entirely, and I felt like the teenager I was when I first stumbled on Stephen R Donaldson in the early 1980s (gulp). All that ran through my mind, in a continuous loop, for about five minutes, was "Dude! This is awesome!" And it was. It is. I hold Donaldson to a higher standard than most writers, because he's earned it. Not only did he meet meet my already inflated expectations, he by far exceeded them. To say that I'm anxiously awaiting the third book, Against All Things Ending, is like saying that as a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan, I really want them to win a World Series. (Against All Things Ending will likely arrive first...*sigh*)

At the end of The Runes of the Earth, Linden Avery discerned six figures riding to Revelstone. "One was Jeremiah; her son beyond question... The other stranger was unmistakably Thomas Covenant." If you're a fan, you've been waiting three years to find out how or why Jeremiah seemingly regained control of his mind, and why Covenant is corporeal (he's supposed to be dead, after all). Donaldson will answer your questions, and the answers will stagger and satisfy you, and leave you gasping for more. In typical Donaldson fashion — and something he's been getting better and better at over the years — the answers, or solutions to the problems, aren't what they seem. Nothing is. Hellfire <wink> — Covenant, alive? Jeremiah, talkative and energetic? Surely this is impossible.

The book opens with Linden facing a corporeal Covenant, and a responsive Jeremiah. Read the first few chapters carefully. Don't speed through them in a mad desperate dash to start the marathon run to the finish, because if you do, several events leading up to the ending, and the ending itself (Donaldson has become, I daresay, the master of the cliffhanger) might not make a bit of sense to you. For that matter, the entire book should be read carefully. After finishing this book I see more and more why Donaldson thought that he needed to take time away and work on other projects before coming back to this. Most fantasies — his First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant included — are fairly straightforward in their presentation. That's why The First Chronicles had such a broad appeal. They most certainly were not simple — when you scratched the surface, there was surprising depth — but you could, at thirteen years of age, read the books and fully enjoy them without looking into the vast abyss of nuance Donaldson wrote with. While I don't want to say that young readers should be wary of these books, they have layers and layers of subtlety and subtext. I expected Donaldson to write a book that made me think, but I wasn't expecting to be addled and befuddled, and I just want to say THANK YOU to SRD for writing a book that that caused so much cerebration.

Linden needs answers. The Demondim are at Revelstone's gate. The Mahdoubt is nowhere to be found. Covenant and Jeremiah are too foreign for her to trust completely, and so Esmer is her only resource. His duality often prohibits him from speaking clearly, and his aid often creates more problems than it solves. The book starts out with a simple (yeah, right) quest, and her companions are two who should bring more delight to her than any: Covenant and Jeremiah. But they do not, because she cannot physically touch them, something she longs to do, for reasons I'll let Donaldson dramatize. But imagine Linden's grief. After ten years in the "real world," and several audacious days in the Land (The Runes of the Earth), Covenant and Jeremiah stand before her, restored. The only man she ever loved, and her son. Essentially, this book is about the choices she makes. Perhaps she was dubbed "The Chosen" for more reasons than we know.

The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant began with Donaldson setting the pieces on the board with great care. Since the First Chronicles, Donaldson's writing has at times reminded me of a chess master. He is meticulous in the placement of his pieces. When I finished reading The Real Story: The Gap Into Conflict, the first book of his five-book space opera, The Gap Series, I couldn't see how he was going to get five books out of it,  yet he did, and the universe that he unveiled to his grateful readers was breathtaking in its conceptual amplitude. It was like being inside the tiniest Russian doll, and escaping, to find that there's a larger doll, then a larger doll, etc., and finally you escape and you're in, well, Russia. Maybe not as exciting as warm and inviting as Hawaii, but you get the idea.

Donaldson's characters aren't always likeable. (Covenant's first act in The Land in Lord Foul's Bane was to rape a girl and there's a fan group who call themselves THOOLAH, The Holy Order of Linden Avery Haters.) But that's kind of the point. Would you rather be reading about morally altruistic characters like Richard and Kahlan from Goodkind's universe? I prefer my characters to not only have grey spots on their morality gauge, I like them to be real. Whine all you want about Linden's whining (regarding her son), but find me a mother that wouldn't be doing and thinking and struggling exactly as she is. Good luck. (I mean no offense to THOOLAH members, or Goodkind fans.)

Donaldson picks and chooses words carefully, and nowhere do we see his wordsmithing at play more than in the Covenant series. Some readers might find that his books require too much work to get through. But, if you do the extra work required, you're more often than not rewarded. Sometimes you'll find hidden humor, sometimes added depth. In my experience, it's rare to find a word that he absolutely shouldn't have used, or that he should have replaced with a simpler synonym, because the word he chose is precise. Not all synonyms mean the same thing.

A sentence that I was initially frustrated with became beautiful when I went one step beyond looking the words up and thought about how they were used, where they were used, and then, of course, why. Some fine folks at Kevin's Watch were most helpful in this. That particular sentence appears on page 229 of the American hardcover edition: "'You can hear me,' she pronounced, speaking now in lambent chrysoprase and jacinth rather than saffron blots." I won't tell you what I found, because doing so would be giving away a REAL gem in the book, but I'm pointing it out to make sure that YOU do the work I was initially too lazy to do. It will help you appreciate the scene. I promise. 

When I saw the cover art for Fatal Revenant — a figure of a wizardly-looking chap bearded and robed in snowy white — I cringed. It was bad enough that Del Rey tried to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings movies by releasing mass market paperback editions of The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant with pastel covers displaying a yellow gold wedding ring. (They hoped that the new readers of fantasy that the LOTR movies gave birth to would see a gold ring while perusing the shelves at their local bookstore, and think, Hey! I need to read this Tolkien knock-off — which it most certainly is not.) The problem there is that our buddy Tom wore a white gold wedding ring, and it is the nature of the alloy of white gold that formed the paradox of "white wild magic gold" in The Land. Now we are treated to what looks to me, and probably every fan of fantasy extant, Gandalf the White or, as depicted in the films, perhaps the figure more closely resembles Saruman. Let me reassure you that neither Gandalf nor Saruman appear in this or any other Covenant book. Who is it then? I'm not saying, but even a casual reader of the Covenant series should be able to make a good guess.

Happy Reading. Donaldson himself said that we would be going on a ride. I am more anxious, now, given how high he has raised the stakes, to see the third book than I was this one. The time until Against All Things Ending gets released will go very slowly. —Todd Burger

Against All Things Ending

Against All Things Ending is Stephen Donaldson’s third entry in the four-book series THE LAST CHRONICLES OF THOMAS COVENANT. Or, as one may think of them, his ninth book in the long-running series detailing the story of Covenant, and later Linden Avery, in the fantastical world known as The Land. I’ll refer readers to the plot summaries in our reviews of the prior books — mostly as refresher notes, since nobody should be picking this book up who hasn’t read the previous two, and in my mind, nobody should be reading the “last” chronicles who hasn’t read the previous two chronicles. Not only would you be lost in basic plot and character points, but you’d be missing many of the thematic and philosophical underpinnings of the story and the direction of its long narrative arc.

Those themes and subjects remain familiar in Against All Things Ending: guilt, power, powerlessness, innocence, the “crime of power,” self-doubt, self-loathing, the balance of wonder and horror in the world, and more. This is, as I said in an earlier review, “serious” fantasy. Even those who generally sneer at the genre would be hard pressed to call Donaldson’s work, and especially this book, “escapist fiction.” This is both strength and weakness for the series. At its best, the series raises and explores in thought-provoking, stimulating fashion profound issues of human existence and interaction with both other people and with the universe at large. At its worst, it can devolve into introspection that can be overly repetitive or that veers too close into self-pity and whining. At its best, it balances its more philosophical and psychological aspects with stirring bursts of action and imagery that can leave one breathless. (I offer up Mhoram’s Charge as one scene that has been etched indelibly in my reading mind for decades.) At its worst, it presents us with perfunctory moments of action that seem to serve the mere purpose of breaking up the self-examination.

For the most part, throughout the series, Donaldson has tipped to the right side, which is why I’m still reading about Thomas Covenant decades after I first met him. Unfortunately, Against All Things Ending tipped the wrong way for me and, for one of the few times in my Donaldson reading experience, I had to really push myself to finish. There were too few stirring or beautiful moments, too few original conceptual arguments or explorations, and too many (and too long) scenes of Linden Avery lacerating herself for her actions. Or her inactions. Or her untimely actions. Or her... well, you get the point. In a book one, or a book two, this would have been tolerable, though I probably still would have argued for some editing. The problem is we’re nine books into Donaldson’s explorations of the themes and subjects mentioned above and there just wasn’t new material in all this. It is often insightful (the first few paragraphs or pages at least). It is often precisely and eloquently expressed. And thus it would make you stop and linger over the lines you just read and really think about them, really make you question how power works in the world, how individuals really carry (or not) their burdens. Or at least, it would, had you not already stopped and thought about all of that in earlier books. And here it just goes on scene after scene after scene, and often paragraph after paragraph after paragraph within those scenes. Not only do you want to scream, “I get it!”, you want to scream “I got it in Book 8! Or book 7!” I can deal with bleak; I can deal (to a point) with self-introspection, self-doubt, self-pity even, the morass of depression and paralysis, etc. But don’t ask me to deal with all that without purpose, and that’s unfortunately what I felt here, because none of it cast any further illumination.

Covenant’s arguments with the Haruchai don’t feel different enough from the arguments he or Avery had with them in the past, the sacrifices made don’t feel all that different from the sacrifices we’ve seen in the past. Despair in all its sundry forms seems to wear all the same garments we’ve seen in all the times we’ve watched characters face it down in earlier books.

The feeling of being swamped or worse, bored (due to familiarity) by all this was exacerbated because those aspects that usually balance these heavy psychological scenes are themselves repetitive. They can no longer rescue the reader from the swamp because they’re all too familiar and so feel rote, like we’re all just going through the motions. The impact of the Giants’ ability to laugh, their love of story, their capacity for grief, their steadfast fellowship and trust — all of that gets diminished in impact each time it is pulled out and again, by book nine, that’s beginning to add up to a lot of times. The same holds true for the other of the Land’s denizens: the Stonedowners, the Haruchai, the Ramen, the Ranyhn, and so on.

I could happily pull paragraphs and scenes out of context and have a great intellectual meal out of them, could present them to a class and get a great discussion going. But as part of a fictional context, as part of a narrative of plot and character, Against All Things Ending doesn’t succeed. Oh, things happen. Plot moves forward. Some characters die, some new ones arise, some change. But there’s no sense of movement. No sense of progress. It’s a bridge novel, but it feels like a bridge suspended in mid-air, unconnected to land at either end of its length.

The book is sort of like that friend who at first you really enjoyed having over but who now just won’t go home, so you’re only kinda listening to them tell the same stories you heard last time he was over, nodding your head here and there, dipping into the conversation now and then, all the while looking forward to bed and the night’s conclusion.

Though that is, to be honest, a little unfair or overly dismissive. There is excellent writing here. Precise, if sometimes arcane, use of language and simile and metaphor and symbol (nobody sends me to the dictionary more than Donaldson, and I rarely feel disappointed in doing so or feel it’s purely for the sake of showing off). Expression of deep thought. Much of weight and importance. But as a reading experience? Outside of a few scenes I can’t say it was enjoyable. Which at times can still work if it’s intellectually stimulating or engaging enough, which is its own form of enjoyment I suppose. But one still lacking here due to the over-familiarity of its content. For those reasons, it’s difficult to recommend, though it’s hard to see how fans (and who gets to a book nine save fans?) get to the concluding novel without it. So the best I can say is read it, but don’t feel bad about skimming sections. You’ll know which ones when you get to them because you’ve seen them before. —Bill Capossere