You know, I really wanted to like this book, the first in Stephen Donaldson’s popular Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever series. Donaldson, to his credit, has a main character with a lot of potential. Thomas Covenant is a bitter, cynical, mean-spirited man from our own world who lost his entire life to leprocy. He’s then transported into a magical realm and pitched into a struggle between good and evil. Only it may actually all be in his head and the result of his dwindling sanity and massive head trauma. Covenant has to decide what he’s going to do about this and just how much about the magical world and its trials he is going to go along with.
I like Covenant as an antihero. I mean I don’t like him –this is, after all, a man who attacks and violates a young girl in the opening chapters of the book and has the worst temperment you’ll find this side of Oscar’s trash can on Sesame Street. But he and his situation are inherantly interesting. It’s just a pity that Donaldson squanders all that creative capital on a setting that’s bland, banal, and cliche before its time. It’s hard to take things seriously with a place named “The Land” and characters who have names like “Saltheart Foamfollower” or “Drool Rockworm.” And then there’s the dialog, which is written in clumsy attempts at artificially grandeur, medieval dialects. It’s all just a little …trite. And don’t even get me started on how a small band of adventurers embark on an epic quest to destroy a magical doo-dad that threatens the world when wielded in the wrong hands. Tolkein much? The world that donaldson created didn’t strike me as any more special than the stuff I came up with when daydreaming during 8th grade Science class or putting together campaigns for all-night D&D sessions. Covenant is literally the only interesting thing in it, and he certainly can’t rescue it.
Now I know, Donaldson wrote this during the seventies, when Tolkein himself was fresh and nobody had even seen a 20-sided die. I assume that this stuff wasn’t cliche at the time. His first readers were seeing stuff that was relatively new. But unless you got a time machine that will allow me to go back there and join them, I’m not interested. I’m reading for pleasure, not historical literary context. There are many other Thomas Covenant books, but I sincerely doubt I’ll pick them up.
Terrific series! I loved these books.