caamora wrote:
I also love the interactions between Covenant and Linden. They are two peas in a pod.
Agreed. They are so much the same and both of them have had something that drives them to be almost compulsive obsessive. Covenant with denying anything that would make him lose his mind or worse become like the old hermit he saw in the Leprosarium. The sight of the old hermit with Leprosy must have seared itself in his brain along with the statement:
"Kill yourself" he rasped terribly "Better than this!"
That along with having someone you love just leave you..totally the way Joan did to him. That must have been terrible for covenant as well. Bad enough to have a disease but to have your family abandon you.
And then in this chapter Linden shows why she is much the same by describing what happened with her father. Instead of being compulsive about dying through Leprocy she is obsessed with not becoming like her father and mother and being suicidal.
The scene was as vivid to her as if it had been etched in acid.
What an awful thing to do to your child. Its a wonder that she came out as well as she did.. but again she did so I think by becoming compulsive in trying to stamp out death. And her father did abandon her although in a much more permanent way than Covenants wife did.
"you never loved me anyway."
That such a strong love can come from tragedy speaks a great deal for both of those characters. 
