I’ve been reading Lord Foul’s Bane lately, the first of Stephen R. Donaldson’s epic fantasy series The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, which I picked up in hardcover at the last library sale, drawn in by the “S.C. Wyeth” jacket illustrations (they reminded me of Richard Pellegrino’s cover art for Jay Lake’s Trial of Flowers by way of Maxfield Parrish). Lord Foul’s Bane is essentially, to borrow a term from Farah Mendelsohn, a portal-quest fantasy (like C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz) deepened by adult themes and situations: suicidal depression, hopelessness, hallucination vs. reality, and sexual violence.
If you’d asked me a few weeks ago my opinion of Lord Foul’s Bane, you would have received a kneejerk negative answer. My last attempt at reading Donaldson was more than twenty years ago, and unpleasant, so I’ve all but blocked it from my mind. I remembered that the protagonist is a leper, catapulted into Fantasy Land when he’s hit by an ambulance (actually a police car, it turns out), who, convinced that he is dreaming (and quite out of the blue), rapes the first girl he meets, then spends the rest of the book (and presumably the series) regretting it (this happens much later in the narrative than I’d remembered, about eighty pages in, and consists of a couple very short paragraphs punctuated by several more of self-loathing and shock). In part, my recollection was tainted by memories of the guy who’d insisted that I read it, a badly-mustached fellow obsessed with certain scenes in Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. In several ways, the combined experience and association put me off Fantasy until many years later when I read China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (which, oddly enough, deals with many of the same themes, to better effect).
Originally published in 1977, Lord Foul’s Bane is arguably one of the most influential fantasy novels of the modern era. “Arguably” being a key word, since Thomas Covenant is an unlikable protagonist, to say the least, with his constant outbursts of “Don’t touch me. Can’t you see I’m sick?” He’s the sort of fellow who rapes his teenaged guide and then, a hundred and nine pages later, rhetorically asks of his antagonist, “What do you do for an encore, rape children?”
At seventeen, I dismissed the series as “overwrought and overwritten”, the “work of an author with a thesaurus in his left hand.” Today, I’m no longer put off by the vocabulary, even if “chiaroscuro” is overused (a master’s degree has its uses), and I’m finding the experience far fresher and more literary than I’d recalled.
Unfortunately, “fresher” doesn’t necessarily translate to “well-written,” as Donaldson regularly utilizes an errant strategy of repeating descriptions twice, telling the reader that a wall is “high and broad enough for Giants” on one page only to describe a doorway as “large enough to admit Giants” on the next. This occurs throughout the book, reinforcing the impression that what the novel really wants is an attentive editor. Lord Foul’s Bane is datedly adverbial, and Donaldson is prone to simile, which can be quite painful. And speaking of painful, it’s worth noting that the roster of characters includes the eponymous Lord Foul, Drool Rockworm, and High Lord Kevin (but my friends call me “Kev.”). Even so, there are glimpses of magic behind the complex, philosophically-dense text, and, in spite of its many flaws, it’s clear why Lord Foul’s Bane has been a fan favorite for three decades.