*****
Let me say first I know nothing about Stephen Donaldson as a person, or how much of his writing comes from his imagination and how much is from his own experience, so please treat my comments about his writing as metaphorical rather than personal.
Thirty one years and many lifetimes ago, I stood beside Thomas Covenant at Foul's Creche, as he confronted one of many fantasy Dark Lords I'd watched get taken down in that period of my life for adolescent entertainment. This month, surreally for me, Thomas and I both found ourselves right back at Hotash Slay, and this time the evil to be purged is the ex-wife. Talk about growing with your audience. I don't have an ex-wife but enough of my friends do to make me feel rather middle aged to find Thomas Covenant exploring the theme. But then Covenant has always been different. I'm so glad to finally have him back.
Anyway I don't know how the author feels about his ex, but if I were to learn he had divorce issues, it wouldn't be a total shock. He really makes Joan Covenant suffer, before his leading man, all full of compassion and a magic sword, sticks her one right through the chest, and grabs back his wedding ring. I guess Mrs Donaldson took the best china in the split.
Yes I know. Totally unfair and below the belt, but there's no getting away from the thought that this book is all about women in pain. Covenant’s second ‘ex-wife’ Linden Avery's mental collapse is chronicled in excruciating detail.
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Then Covenant ends up accidentally feeding his dead daughter to a giant monster, potterishly called 'She Who Must Not Be Named', where she faces eternal torture. The monster herself is the embodied sum total of all the anger and bitterness of all the women of the Land, plus Lord Foul's ex-wife besides. This monster is responsible for the latest blighting of the Land.
The men, by comparison, seem curiously numb and ineffective. Jeremiah drools. Covenant observes. The Humbled agonise. Liand, Anele, Esmer, the Harrow and Galt
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all get themselves killed in curiously unimportant ways as though the author wanted to make an unexpected point, and then clear the decks for the finale.
But it's Joan Covenant whom this book gravitates towards.
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The torments of Elena and Infelice presage her suffering and that of the whole Earth (as the author might put it if he talks like he writes.) The most haunting moment of the book is where Covenant finds Joan on a beach below Foul's Creche, a beach created by some unnamed cataclysm far out at sea sucking out the tide and foreboding a Tsunami, as the Earth begins to tear itself apart. She put herself there because she yearns for death as an alternative to her worse torments. For all the women of this book, there are worse things than death that befall them. Even little Pahni is left desolate and suffering while her boyfriend gets killed. Somehow he seems to get the best of that deal.
To the end of avoiding that, Donaldson keeps you perpetually off balance. He's always used obscure vocabulary, but at the age of 44 I now know, as I did not aged 14, that not many know what “gemmed in gall” or “more than an eidolon” means without access to a dictionary. Donaldson must have spent many hours with Chambers and a highlighter pen to find so many hundreds of obscure words as “refulgence”, “bedizened” or “objurgation”, and that’s just one chapter.
What purpose does this curious vocabulary serve? I think at least in part it's to distract from the genre's roots in children's fairy tales, and give it a more sophisticated feel. I well remember how in the very first book, the literary effect of turning Covenant into a rapist was for me to put maximum distance between him and Bilbo Baggins. The language, and the constant use of the unexpected plot twists, achieve the same effect here, keeping the reader slightly off balance and not knowing what to expect. That drew me in so that I stopped asking questions about what was actually supposed to be going on and if it made much sense.
Donaldson further aids himself here by an adept use of a rampaging imagination. So when Covenant says "Do the unexpected"
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Linden trades her staff and ring away to an Insequent. The Lost Deep, beautifully realised by the author, is spectacular and, although signposted properly, comes delightfully from nowhere. The mass graves of the Elohim's ancient enemies and what becomes of them are haunting.
Nevertheless if you insist on judging the book at its ‘swords and sorcery’ face value, the plotting may annoy you.
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Esmer, Anele, Liand? Is that it for them? Pretty underwhelming character arcs if so. Jeremiah and the Ranyhym are used to take the story forward without any kind of convincing narrative motive or logic or relevance to what else has passed, with Deus ex Machina efficiency.
The reason is a good one though. This book has strong psychological undercurrents that are much more important than the plot. If the theme of the first chronicles was that guilt is power, the theme here is that you have to accept the pain of the guilt or face impotence. It’s no co-incidence that most of the male characters are rendered ineffective by their introspective psychological conditions, while the women and the horses make the tough choices.
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Anele is a lunatic for his own protection. Jeremiah, we learn, is vacant for the same reason. Covenant demands to keep his leprosy so that he cannot feel pain, whereas Linden ends up cutting herself in the manner of a self-abuser to ensure that she can.
Only the young buck Liand is free from doubt, willing to take action, willing to risk it all.
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And he gets his head caved in. If I were a grumpy old sod I’d say serves him right for flirting with Linden (the second wife) and making out with the cords.
I hope I don’t make it sound like a bad book. It isn't. I was in no mood to read a 700 page doorstep (is it really that big or does the ARC just have big type?) but once I started this one I could not stop. On the train, when I should be asleep, when I was supposed to be working – there I was flipping the pages as fast as I could. The writing was so very good that my excitement swept me along. The feeling of impending death precludes long journeys and dawdling reveries exploring the landscape. These people are on a deadline. And yet one hardly minds whether they save the Earth or not in a sense, because it’s all going to end anyway within the next 700 pages. My feeling is that saving the planet would just be too predictable at this point, and simply wouldn’t accommodate the climax of themes that have been set in motion. Donaldson is preaching resolution, acceptance and the perspective of age, not rebirth or redemption. These are after all the last chronicles.
