Donaldson, Stephen
About the Author:
Stephen Donaldson was born in 1947 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. He lived in India between the ages of 3 and 16, where his father worked with lepers. He now lives in New Mexico.
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
2.7 out of 5
(3 books)
TOP PICK:
The Illearth War
Lord Foul's Bane
The first book of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. The man in question is a leper who finds himself summoned into the fantasty realm of the Land. Here Covenant is heralded as the reincarnation of an ancient hero and is faced with a difficult choice; reject his power and responsibility and hopefully survive to return to the 'real' world or embrace the Land and its people and, in doing so, abandon his sanity.
I wasn't hugely impressed by the whole idea of a man taken from our world into a fantasy one and the suggestion at the end that it could all have been a dream was another nail in the coffin. Also, the plot of the book is basically that Covenant has to walk across the Land, deliver a message and then join an impossible quest. Also not very inspiring. Then there's the dialogue which is largely irrelevant and at times completely impenetrable.
Ultimately, the book's biggest let down is Covenant himself. For a protagonist to really work in a story you have to either like them or empathise with them and it's almost impossible to do either with Covenant. He begins by raping the girl who was his guide and goes on to insult and argue with every other character he meets, regardless of how they treat him. Rather than exploring the psychological and philosophical ramifications of leprosy, Donaldson just has Covenant use it as an excuse to be a horrible person.
What should be noted in the book's defence is that the author does a fantastic job of bringing the Land to life in his writing. Donaldson's wordplay conjured up vivid images in my mind of forbidding mountains, sweeping plains and ancient woodlands. It is the quality of the author's descriptive ability which has led me to give the book three out of five (instead of two).
3 out of 5
The Illearth War
Book two of the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever. Being knocked unconscious in his home, Thomas Covenant awakes to find he has once again been summoned to the Land, where forty years have passed since his last appearance. As the cataclysmic war against Lord Foul begins, Covenant and High Lord Elena set off in search of a long-hidden source of power. Meanwhile a man named Hile Troy, also called to the Land from Covenant's world, leads a desperate military campaign against Foul's innumerable forces.
The biggest failing of the first book of the series, and why it's taken me several years to try reading book two, was that Thomas Covenant is a completely unlikable character. Selfish, irrational and generally mean-spirited, he's entirely impossible to truly empathise with, using his leprosy as a cover-all excuse for being a horrible person. Here Donaldson addresses this problem in two ways, the first of which is to have Covenant actually recognise, admit to and attempt contrition for being a horrible person. The second way is far more successful because the author dedicates the vast majority of the book to Hile Troy's story, with Covenant's merely bookending it. Setting aside the fact that Hile Troy is a weird name for someone supposedly from the 'real' world, he's a much more engaging character and his desperate but dogged attempts to counter the overwhelming armies of Lord Foul make for really compelling reading. Were this the climax of the book, it would've warranted four out of five, but unfortunately Donaldson ends the book by returning us to the activities of Covenant.
As I've said, the author does try to make Covenant a more sympathetic character to begin with, but those efforts are completely derailed in the last hundred pages or so of the book. Weirdly, the fact that Elena is Covenant's daughter isn't addressed through almost the entirety of the book and only comes into play when Covenant finds himself faced with a decision which would finally damn him. As it unfolds, we're supposed to be onboard with the idea that he's changed and become more heroic when he has an epiphany that makes him decide not to have sex with his own daughter, even though she's throwing herself at him. Bravo, Thomas; you're a real hero. And even if this weird 'see he's not all bad because he doesn't shag his daughter' scene had achieved any redemption for the character, it is almost immediately undone when he makes a conscious decision to go back to being a selfish bastard.
Donaldson writes very compellingly and evocatively and the vast majority of this book was really enjoyable. Unfortunately the author begins and ends with a character so awful that it leaves you feeling deeply unsatisfied in a way that does an injustice to just how good the middle section was.
3 out of 5
The Power That Preserves
The conclusion of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Unbeliever trilogy. Starving, feverish and dying in the real world, Covenant expends the last of his energy to save a young girl who has been bitten by a rattlesnake. As he himself succumbs to the snake's venom, he finds himself once more pulled into The Land. Seven years have passed there and Lord Foul's armies have brough High Lord Mhoram and his allies to the verge of defeat as Revelstone itself is besieged. Reunited with old friends, Covenant must master his own self-loathing in order to sneak into Foul's Creche and destroy the evil Lord once and for all.
Thomas Covenant remains a problematic protagonist, mired in self-pity, anger at the world around him and, honestly, simple sulkiness. Donaldson actually puts in some effort here to redeem him as a character, particularly with the aforementioned saving of a small child, but you can never forget that Covenant is just a bad person who justifies every cruelty he commits by the fact he's a leper. The dude's a rapist, don't forget, and despite feeling bad about it sometimes, never actually acts like he should be subject to any punishment or penance for being a rapist.
Like the previous volume the author tries to distract us from Covenant for a bit by focusing on another character, but Lord Mhoram is no Hile Troy. The defence of Revelstone is one of the least inspiring fantasy sieges I've ever read and all too often, with its gravelingases, hearthralls, eowards etcetera, this book disappears up its own lore. If the reader needs to keep referring to the glossary to make sense of who the hell anyone is, the author has become too self-indulgent. That's very much the case here.
However, even with the rapist Covenant and the impenetrable lore, this book has an even bigger flaw; it's so mind-bogglingly tedious. No scene which could be covered in a couple of pages fails to be drawn out for ten times that and no sentence that could be uttered in plain language escapes being over-written to the point that it becomes almost meaningless. If this book was half the length it could possibly be a punchy, well-paced fantasy epic. But it isn't.
2 out of 5
Collaborations & Anthologies:
The Wizards Of Odd (here)
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Fantasy (here)