A great fantasy series. Great characters, excellent writing. See the full review in the paperback edition. ( )

This series was my introduction into the world of fantasy, so I will always have a soft spot for it. My friends who read the series became impatient with Thomas Covenant's constant whining of "Leper! Outcast! Unclean!," but I enjoyed the story of his adventures in The Land, and it led me to other (perhaps better?) books and series in the genre. ( )

Thomas Covenant is such a dark, conflicted character that I found him intensely repellent. The story however feeds my need for a rich fantasy world in need of a hero. ( )

Imagine, if you will, the blandest post-Tolkien, high-fantasy novel you can (like something put out by Wizards of the Coasts perhaps, but stripped of most of the interesting, gratuitous violence). Now imagine the protagonist to be perpetually more angst-ridden than Harry Potter in Order of the Phoenix. You have now successfully imagined Lord Foul’s Bane.

Needless to say, this book disappointed me immensely. I picked it up knowing full well that the protagonist suffered from leprosy. I was under the impression Stephen Donaldson would use this to his advantage, would offer the reader the psychological impressions of a leper, perhaps. Maybe, I thought, Donaldson would even use his novel’s adventure plot as an elaborate metaphor for the protagonist’s psychological recovery from leprosy. Instead, the leprosy serves as a simple stage prop to explain away Covenant’s immature and irrational behavior.

I do not plan to read anything else by Stephen Donaldson. ( )

How does one start a review on a book one despised for the first 376 pages, and wavered between love and hate for the last 98? Because that’s my general feeling about Lord Foul’s Bane. It’s a nice long book with a fantasy story, a made up land, a strange language, people with pointy ears, people who live in trees, horses that seem smarter than your average horse, giants, mountains, a ring that glows, old men with long beards and special staffs (staves?), and a creepy underground dwelling “cavewight” who yearns for power. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s a lot like The Lord of the Rings. But it’s a little different: it’s slightly easier to read. But that doesn’t make it great. The writing was slow and sluggish at times, far too much expository description for locations which could have been understood better with less detail, “less is more” sometimes rings so, so true.

Thomas Covenant is a leper living in a small town where he’s generally shunned and avoided. His wife has left him and taken their son. His utility bills are paid by unknown parties so that he doesn’t have to walk to town and expose everyone to his disease. People fear him, and he’s become bitter and resentful because of it. He’s an extremely unlikeable character; I wanted to like him, I wanted to feel his pain and loneliness, but he pushed me away, made it completely impossible to feel sorry for him. When he walks into town one day to pay his phone bill he meets a strange beggar who gives him a note with a short story about a man who finds himself in an other-world which he believes is a dream and so he refuses to defend himself, and a follow up question on courage and ethics. It appears very random, until we look back (hindsight is twenty-twenty afterall) to figure out that the story in the note is really what happens to Covenant. Covenant speaks with the old beggar (who is blind and walks with a staff – methinks this beggar will turn up again in later books) and gives him his wedding ring. The beggar returns the ring, Covenant walks away, is hit by a police car, and wakes up in The Land. He’s greeted by the creepy cavewight, a lot of clouds and smoke, and a disembodied voice known as Lord Foul (the evil guy). Lord Foul gives him a message he must take to the Council of Lords and then the voice and the cavewight disappear, and a girl comes to Covenant’s rescue, and the journey begins and doesn’t end for a long, long time.

(Sometimes I wonder how people come up with these intensely overflowing ideas. Whole other-worlds, characters, languages, scenery… it’s incredible.)

Covenant’s journey is both physical, and mental, as well as emotional for him. The entire span of the book he’s convinced he’s dreaming. You would think he’d catch on that The Land had helped heal his leprosy, but he’s in serious denial. It’s one long mental crisis that peaks three-quarters of the way through when Covenant realizes he needs to pick a side, make a decision, but he doesn’t do it right away. He has kept moving only because moving forward through the “dream” is the only way he can survive… but when he’s met over and over again with those defining moments where an action from him will make him a hero, he cowers and shakes, and runs away. Perhaps that makes him the most realistic fantasy character I’ve ever read. He doesn’t become the hero overnight, in fact, he may not be the hero at all. He doesn’t make his own choices because he wants to, he’s pushed into a corner where the only thing left is to appear as though he’s made a decision. I am not sure if he ever really did decide to be the good or bad guy, or if he did the only thing he could do because that’s all there was. He’s flawed, and that’s real.

I found the similarites to The Lord of the Rings to be slightly distracting at times. I am sure Stephen Donaldson knew what he was doing when he wrote Lord Foul’s Bane (first published in 1977, 23 years after The Fellowship of the Ring). Perhaps LOTR wasn’t as mainstream then as it is now. I am no expert.

I do want to (eventually) read the next two books in the first trilogy of the Chronicles (The Illeath War, The Power That Preserves), and perhaps the many, many books that come after (one more trilogy, followed by a tetrology). If for nothing else than to find out what happens to the characters in the beginning that affect Covenant but never return. And to find out if he ever becomes likeable. And to see if the old beggar is who I think it is.

Overall, I’m going with a neutral 2 1/2 stars out of 5 on this one. I really did not like most of the book, but the end (slightly) redeemed itself. ( )