Sorry, no keto bread. Another promise broken. I'm too engrossed in rereading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. I just got through the second novel in the trilogy, The Illearth War. There's something very comforting about revisiting these books right now—more comforting than keto bread, apparently. I should probably write a review of the trilogy when I finish it, then plunge into The Second Chronicles.
Donaldson was my first foray into high-fantasy literature, years before I ever embarked upon JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books get a lot of shit for copying the Tolkien template, but the resemblance is only superficial. Yes, there's a Ringbearer burdened by his ring; yes, the devil-figure (Lord Foul the Despiser instead of Sauron) lives off to the east, and much of the adventure is about trekking across great distances to get to the devil-figure. Yes, Donaldson's Stonedownors and Woodhelvinnin are rough equivalents of dwarves and elves, but their stonelore and woodlore are markedly different, as is the nature of the central hero: in Donaldson's universe, Thomas Covenant is an antihero who is hard to like until the very end when he finally finds himself.
Donaldson's books are also much more about interior struggle although they do also feature Tolkien-style land wars (which Donaldson actually depicts rather bloodily instead of just skipping to the aftermath). One of the central issues in the first two trilogies is that of fate versus freedom, one of my favorite philosophical issues. Donaldson's stories don't offer simple answers to these questions, and that's another difference between him and Tolkien: whereas Tolkien is a bit more classically good-versus-evil in his stories,* Donaldson's stories have murkier moralities and a lot more paradoxes.
I suddenly got curious to see whether GRR Martin (of A Song of Ice and Fire fame) was at all influenced by Donaldson since Martin also hates black-and-white morality tales, and while the evidence of influence is unclear, the two writers, both of whom live in New Mexico, are apparently friends, with Martin even suggesting that anyone who's never heard of Stephen R. Donaldson "has been living on Neptune since 1978." I'd say that's about right. Donaldson, part of a wave of post-Tolkien fantasy writers, was huge back in the day. His fairly recent Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant tetralogy was a huge disappointment to me, but the third book in that tetralogy does begin with a magnificent passage about what it means to go from deific status back to being a mere, enfleshed human being (Linden Avery, out of a combination of love and desperate need, calls Covenant back from his role as Timewarden into his mortal form). That passage may be my favorite in the whole Final Chronicles.
Rereading the first trilogy has been refreshing, almost giving me a "life has come full circle" kind of feeling. I went fairly quickly through Lord Foul's Bane, the very first book, then just finished The Illearth War, and I'm now starting The Power That Preserves, which finishes out the first trilogy. Donaldson has talked about how he has no hope his trilogies will ever be put to film; Thomas Covenant is a leper from a time when leprosy had no cure (it's curable these days); Covenant also enters an alternate universe, the universe of the Land, where he is healed by a magic mud called hurtloam. With the return/regeneration of his nerves, he loses control and rapes a teenaged girl who had tried to befriend him, thus starting a chain reaction that echoes throughout the rest of the trilogy. (Reading about rape as a junior-high student wasn't something I was prepared for, I admit. Coming back to that aspect of the story now makes for very different reading.) The rape alone, along with how the people of the Land generally tend to forgive Covenant or look past his sins because they hope he'll save their world, would be severely un-PC these days; I can't imagine gun-shy Hollywood greenlighting the Thomas Covenant series without performing Netflix-scale surgery on it, swapping sexes and races, and making it clear that Rape is Always and Forever a Bad and Unforgivable Thing. I also think that most of the non-fantasy-reading public would misunderstand Donaldson's repurposing and subversion of Tolkien's major tropes; more likely, the public would see Donaldson as an unoriginal copycat, as many (especially Tolkien lovers) did back in the day.
I've also heard college-professor criticisms of the songs and poems that appear throughout all three of these Chronicles. Many professors of literature think Donaldson has no ear whatsoever for poetry; in my most recent rereading, I actually wonder whether they have a point: Donaldson's verse is often clunky and unwieldy, and when it's metered, it tends to follow the most basic of schemes, like iambic tetrameter or pentameter. That said, even the poetry retains its charm, probably because I started reading Donaldson in junior high and have built up a sentimental connection. One poem that I quote often is a lament by Lord Mhoram, first recited or sung when his parents die:
Death reaps the beauty of the world—
bundles old crops to hasten new.
Be still, heart:
hold peace.
Growing is better than decay:
I hear the blade which severs life from life.
Be still, peace:
hold heart.
Death is passing on—
the making way of life and time for life.
Hate dying and killing, not death.
Be still, heart:
make no expostulation.
Hold peace and grief
and be still.
I think this is one of Donaldson's better poems, and I've sometimes quoted it on the occasion of the deaths of loved ones among my friends and acquaintances. And tough, old Lord Mhoram is one of my favorite characters from the first Chronicles.
Another reason the first Chronicles might be unfilmable comes from The Illearth War. Covenant comes from "our" world, the "real" world, and time movies differently between our world and the world of the Land. A day in our world is a year in the Land, so when Covenant goes back to the Land after forty days in our world, forty years have passed in the Land—enough time for Covenant's daughter-by-rape, Elena, to be born, to mature, and to become the new High Lord of Revelstone. The Illearth War toys with the idea of incest: Elena has been raised by her increasingly insane yet forgiving mother Lena, the girl who was raped in the first novel, and by Triock, the man who in his youth had wanted to marry Lena and to kill Thomas Covenant (he refrained because of the Oath of Peace that every dweller in the Land swears). So as Elena tells Covenant, she sees Triock as her "true" father, making her, in her own mind, free to fall in love with Covenant, much to the horror and disgust of those who know the story of her brutalized family. How would a movie or TV series portray this aspect of the story? While Elena and Covenant never have sex, they come dangerously close to it a few times, with Covenant finally settling into a father-daughter relationship by making a duplicitous "bargain" in his own mind, one he doesn't tell Elena about: he decides he'll help her on her quest to gain the Seventh Ward of ancient High Lord Kevin Landwaster's lore because that will leave him off the hook, i.e., no longer responsible for saving the world. There's something thematically similar to The Last Temptation of Christ (Nikos Kazantzakis) in this idea of shirking cosmic responsibility for the sake of a pedestrian existence, but I'd hesitate to label Thomas Covenant a Christ-figure. For most of the first trilogy, he's a despicably selfish coward, partially turned that way by the fact that he contracted leprosy, resulting in a divorce and his being shunned by his fellow townies, who hope he never has any reason to come into town.
Anyway, it's especially the first Chronicles that are queasy in this way. The Second Chronicles and the Final Chronicles both move past the rape since the heroic Thomas Covenant who has come to love the Land and not dismiss it as a delusion is now front and center. The latter two Chronicles arguably focus more on another protagonist named Linden Avery, a doctor in the "real" word who gets pulled into adventures in the Land. She has an adopted son in the Final Chronicles, and rather tragically, Linden and her son are both killed in the real world (Covenant had been killed in the real world at the beginning of the Second Chronicles, stranding him forever in this alternate universe), and this is where you can see the influence of CS Lewis on Donaldson's writing. In the Narnia series by Lewis, the Pevensie kids have adventures in an alternate universe, and by the final book, all the kids are killed in a freak train crash, which flings them into heaven, where Lewis gives what I found to be one of the most touching modern descriptions of the afterlife ever put to paper. Time in the world of Narnia also moves more quickly than it does in the real world, and the mass tragedy of the Pevensie kids shares deep DNA with the tragedy of Linden Avery and her adopted son Jeremiah. So as much as Donaldson was influenced by JRR Tolkien, he was also heavily influenced by CS Lewis, among others.
And that's my lengthy explanation for not baking any keto bread this weekend.
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*Not to imply that Tolkien's morality-scheme is somehow simplistic: we've talked about the role of Gollum a few times on this blog, most recently here.