I read
Lord Foul's Bane as a teen sometime at the end of the 70s, shortly (I suppose) after it came out. There wasn't much else back then for those of us whose sensibilities had been lit-up by
Lord of the Rings and
Earthsea: those of us all keen on Tolkien, those of us in Le Guin's le gang. A friend who'd read
The Sword of Shannara (1977) assured me it was bad, so I didn't bother with that one (I've since
made good the omission). Zelazny's
Amber books had not, by the late 70s, penetrated into my suburban-parochial corner of SE England (though I did read Zelazny's
Damnation Alley, for some reason) and I was too hidebound in my reading to explore older, pre-Tolkienian iterations of the Morris, Howard, Mirrlees or Fritz Leiber variety. A cultural wasteland it was, I'm telling you.
At any rate, hobbit-hungry me read the first three C
ovenant of Thomas Chronicle books, and, having done so, decided to give the follow-up trilogy a miss (although when I went to university my first-year flatmate was an enthusiast for all six books, and especially the big metaphysical ending of
White Gold Wielder (1983), so I dipped back into them). Since then, Donaldson has written much and sold many copies, although over this period I found the temptation to follow him through his third Thomas Covenant quadrilogy (2004-13) easy to resist, and
I was unenamoured of his five-volume Gap series (1991-96). Both series sold shedloads though, so evidently lots of people liked what he was doing.
The selling point of
Lord Foul's Bane, back in the day, was the way it elaborated a charming, hippyish Tolkienian fantasy realm (called ‘The Land’) only to flag-up horriblenesses of a kind Tolkien would never countenance—for example, Thomas Covenant, leperous visitor from our world and the series protagonist, starts his sojourn in The Land by raping someone. It was the first intimation of what was to become Grimdark, I suppose, although it would presumably read as thin stuff to today's more committed and Sadean Grimdarkster.
The other notable thing about Donaldson was his prose, what David Langford somewhere calls his ‘knurred and argute vocabulary’, an attempt to elevate the idiom of Fantasy that crashes precipitously into the ceiling of the Ludicrous: ‘they were featureless and telic, like lambent gangrene. They looked horribly like children’ [
White Gold Wielder] and the like. Nick Lowe invented
his game of Clench Racing with Donaldson in mind:
The rules are simple. Each player takes a different volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and at the word ‘go’ all open their books at random and start leafing through, scanning the pages. The winner is the first player to find the word ‘clench’. It's a fast, exciting game—sixty seconds is unusually drawn-out—and can be varied, if players get too good, with other favourite Donaldson words like wince, flinch, gag, rasp, exigency, mendacity, articulate, macerate, mien, limn, vertigo, cynosure.
As
Langford noted at the time, Donaldson was still up to these old tricks in his Thomas Covenant farewell-tour series,
Last Chronicles:
‘Infelice shed distress like damaged jewels’; ‘wreathed around her limbs, her bedizened garment resembled weeping woven of gemstones and recrimination’; ‘... as profound as orogeny’; ‘but it evaded him, illusive as a swarm of gnats’; a character's laughter is ‘like the barking of ghouls’; ‘he was merely a spectator, as oneiric as a figment’; ‘around Linden, the wan glitter of starlight lay like immanence on the friable crust’; ‘in hollows like denuded swales, cold and scalding as congealed fire, the flat wilderland ached towards its illimitable horizons.’ [all Against All Things Ending, 2010]
Now, though, Donaldson has stepped back from such gaudier excesses of style. Both volumes of his new Fantasy series,
The Great God's War [
Seventh Decimate (2017) and
The War Within (2019)] are written in a markedly plainer prose, a gambit in which the advantage of not being actively fucking ridiculous must be balanced against the disadvantage of positive dullness. Swings, we might say, and roundabouts, although in this instance there are rather more roundabouts than swings.
The set-up here is a Generic Fantasyland where the kingdoms of Amika and Belleger have been at war for generations using sorcery—there are six ‘decimates’, or magical powers (shooting lightning, foment earthquakes etc) although in Vol 1 the Amikans discover a seventh, the power to render their enemy's sorcerers completely inert. This leaves Belleger on the brink of defeat, despite their newly-discovered technology of ‘gunpowder’, so a Bellegerian prince called Bifalt (‘Biff-olt’? ‘Bye-fall’? don't know) must undertake a perilous quest to find a magical library and so restore the balance of yaddayadda. The novel goes on too long, but it doesn't go on too long in the way
The War Within too-longs its going-on-too-long. This second installment is set twenty years after the first, with Bifalt now king, married to a Queen from Amikan so as to unite the two realms and end the war, which alliance is essential since a New and Terrible Evil, more powerful than any yaddayadda, is prophesed to arrive from over the western sea. The anticipation of this direful eventuality is the book's main narrative hook and most tediously is its anticipation drawn-out. The novel is all anticipation, with one huge diversion into backstory, followed by more slabs of anticipation: a Cook's Tour of Bifalt's two-kingdom realm, many cardboard details of the preparation for the coming invasion, various crank-the-handle machinations at court and a healthy supply of yaddayadda.
The one interesting thing here, I thought, is the treatment of religion. Donaldson's conceit is that in the old days, when there was plenty of magic sloshing about, religion was a null category, not needed by the populace. Now that magic has been stifled for the larger good, and as the kingdom stockpiles guns and cannons against the coming assault from the West, religion has been, as it were, invented out of whole cloth to fill the void left by magic. It's a nice idea, although a novella-length one, and
The War Within is 564 pages.
Otherwise what most struck me, reading this, was that SD has elected to replace his knurred and argute vocabulary not with
good writing, but with a twofer that alternates the tiresomely repetitive and the plain bonkers. So far as the former is concerned, Donaldson seems to lack faith in his readers ability to take his point. Here, at the book's beginning, and over multiple pages, is how he informs us that Magister Sirjane Marrow in the beseiged Magic Library is anxious his defensive strategy will fail unless the caravan of Set Ungabwey arrives in the nick of time: ‘the wagons, that had left the Repository almost three weeks ago, were not in range of the Magister's senses’; ‘those wagons were the most essential conveyances in the caravan. If they did not come in time—’; ‘the caravan was Sirjane Marrow's latest gambit; only the most recent of his moves in the game he had played against ruin, but by no means the least crucial’; ‘the enemy was close. If Master Ungabwey had failed, the librarian's entire defensive strategy would fall apart’; ‘he had no idea what he would do if the caravan did not accomplish its purpose’; ‘the library's survival was his driving obsession’; ‘he already had too many piercing anxieties, and each of them felt like a fresh sting’. Got that?
The caravan arrives, of course. Tension-baiting this clumsy can only ever lead to anticlimax. This rat-tat repetition of key points over and over sounds throughout the whole lengthy narrative, like a prose-style deathwatch beetle. It's irritating, but at least its not mad:
Her face resembled poorly-kneaded pastry, with currants for eyes, a baked fig for a nose, and a mouth like a line of silvered almonds. [107]
Meswipeth left, sirrah. When Donaldson's prose-style pendulum swings to the opposite amplitude, it really swings.
Her mental jaw dropped at prince Bifalt's willingness to concede. [151]
Her
mental jaw. Next to that, this passage of undiluted Spinal Tappage seems positively homely:
He was all in black. He wore a black cassock cinched with black rope, black sandals on his feet. His hair and his full beard were ebony. His eyebrows formed thick streaks of obsidian of his forehead. His eyes were so dark that they resembled pits leading into the heart of midnight. [112]
Black, black like the heart of a crow etc.
If lines marked his face, they were obscured by his short, blond beard. [264]
We may never know!
He tugged on his beard, trying to pull his expression into a more respectful shape.[322]
I have a beard myself and can vouch for the effectiveness of this yanking strategy upon the playdoh expressivity of my face.
He stared at Estie's mouth as if it horrified him. [95].
Not
because it horrified him;
as if it did.
The King seated himself and poured a small amount of grot into his mug before he gazed at his brother again. [419]
Surprising to see obscure brands of Czech beer being served in such a place, I'd say. Mostly, though,
The War Within is a novel that treads water. The threat of the invasion is trailed right at the beginning, and by p.442 we're still at ‘the enemy was coming. That was certain now.’ Presumably the invaders will actually arrive in Book 3. To quote the man himself, ‘an interminable amount of time passed’ [183]. Indeed.
