Stephen Donaldson: The Runes Of The Earth

Reviewed by DAVID LARSEN

Gandalf as rapist? Twenty years ago, when Stephen Donaldson's six Thomas Covenant books were outselling The Lord of the Rings, I knew people who wouldn't touch them because the title character started his adventures by raping a girl.

Fantasy consisted in those days of Tolkien, Tolkien, and Tolkien clones. You'd have your dark lord, who was evil incarnate; you'd have noble warriors and wizards, good in every respect and tending to get really bad dialogue as a result; and you'd have hobbit-equivalents to give the reader an emotional foothold in the story. Evil, good, and innocents: that was fantasy.

So along comes Donaldson and creates the Land, whose absolutely good inhabitants are locked in a hopeless struggle against the dark hordes of Lord Foul the Despiser, a glorious creation who enters the story snarling that in the past he's had to be content with murder and destruction, but this time he means business. The good guys are equally vivid on the page — radiant, in love with life, and utterly beguiling.

And in the middle, Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, a glowering middle-aged man from our world who refuses to believe the Land even exists. Convinced he's trapped in a wish-fulfilment fantasy, he lets himself behave despicably, raping the first person he meets, and then despises himself for it.

The consequences of the rape spread out into the Land, warping lives in a dozen ways, including the appalling descent into insanity of Covenant's victim and the birth of a fatally flawed daughter. In the end, Covenant sets out to confront Foul as a means of confronting himself.

If you see the books as Christian allegory — which Covenant's name and the Old Testament/New Testament history of the Land seem to invite — then Covenant is a particularly convincing stand-in for humanity after the Fall, a sinner poised between the absolute good of the Land and the absolute evil of Lord Foul, trying to find redemption. Whether you see him in those terms or not, he's a challenge: a morally complex character in a genre that has a fatal tendency to assume morality can be dealt with by slapping the labels "good" and "evil" on opposite sides of a conflict.

Donaldson extended the series into a weaker second trilogy, introducing the character Linden Avery, who followed Covenant from our world into the Land and helped him save a new generation of its inhabitants from Lord Foul.

And now, 20 years later, the story resumes. Covenant is dead. Linden's adopted son has been kidnapped and taken to the Land. Linden, pursuing, discovers that Lord Foul has set up a situation in which her attempts to rescue her son may trigger an apocalyptic disaster.

It's a fascinating experience following Donaldson back to the Land for a third time. It's still a beautiful place, and Donaldson still has his strikingly idiosyncratic style. When I was a teenager, my father used to go through the original trilogy making lists of unusual words, which he'd then give to me to look up. I made my own list from the new volume: spilth, fulvous, sapid, telic, roborant, jerrid, formication, chrism ...

But Donaldson, having pulled these words out of his hat, has an odd way of over-using them. When your story calls for 15 different descriptions of a magical silvery glow, and you describe it as an "argence" every time, the word becomes both over-familiar and somewhat drained of meaning, much the way bureaucratic language does when the same formulaic response gets trotted out over and over to answer a reporter's question.

Donaldson's writing always had this weakness, but it does give his work a unique flavour. A new and less tolerable problem is the story's reliance on recurring dilemmas that look increasingly like artificial plot devices the more we see of them.

This is a readable enough book, and a huge chunk of my generation would buy it even if it wasn't. But the original Thomas Covenant trilogy was more than readable; it was compelling, with a powerful symbolic and psychological understructure holding it together and ensuring it lingered in your memory.

That sense of tapping into hidden depths is missing here, and what's worrying is that Donaldson hasn't ignored those depths: he's tried to plumb them, and it hasn't come off. Linden spends pages at a time agonising over the morality of chasing after her son when it may bring about the Land's destruction, and puzzling about what white gold is and how its power expresses its user's nature ... and so on and so forth.

These are good questions, but asking them is our job. Donaldson's is to plant them in our minds while telling us a story. In the 20 years since he last walked down this road, he seems to have lost his grasp of the distinction.

* Gollancz, $59.95