Stephen Donaldson had become, after his mind-bogglingly fertile first trilogy--well, ever since the underwhelming The One Tree--a fantasist inspiring my moderate interest. Evaluating high fantasy is a difficult business, because when high fantasy works best it is entirely subjective: a sense of plot inevitability, imaginative fecundity, and wonder, wonder, wonder. Donaldson's imaginative engine was firing on all cylinders all the way up through ROTE, but some of these later volumes just didn't have the same effect. I didn't want to visit the places (even to shudder in horror); I didn't want to spend time with the new characters; I didn't feel the need to follow the plot trajectory. Could be me, could be Donaldson. Whatever.
The Fatal Revenant was not like that. It took me back nearly two decades to when Lord Foul's Bane and The Illearth War first concussed my imagination. It jarred my jaded fantasy palate awake. This is a really good book, and I think it's in part because in FR, Donaldson manages to overpower some of his regular pitfalls.
One is "hyper-emotionalism of the lead character." Perhaps you remember Thomas Covenant, cranky to the gills and acting solely on crankiness. He glowers at everyone. He bites the hand that feeds him, rapes the person who greets him. He would like to overcome his despair and intransigence, but can't, which predicament leads to both the reader and Covenant knowing intellectually that Covenant is going to do the wrong thing before he does it, being powerless to prevent it, and kicking him before, during, and after. He is moody. He acts on his moods, unfortunately. He, at least, has the excuse of being a leper, so his emotions are exotic enough to simulate some kind of wonder, but the advent of Linden as main character removes even that excuse for Donaldson. Linden's emotional range is exaggerated but not unfamiliar: she has a wretched childhood, she feels tremendous guilt for her parents' demise, she tries to atone for her past through her career choice, she loves a man she cannot figure out, and in ROTE she goes after Lord Foul, kidnapper of her son, with a Little-League-parent's fury (you can assign a name of some acquaintance to almost all of those emotional complexes). Donaldson's moneymakers are characters-motivated-by-deep-emotional-torture. That tactic sits uneasily in a fantasy world; you'd better have some kind of fantastic emotional torture, like leprosy, to negotiate the difference between wonder and agony, wonder and psychological depth. In FR, to my great relief, the first half of the book consisted of Linden craving to behave a certain way and--not doing so! Because of logic! She was able to overcome her own inclination! That Donaldson is capable of writing such intellectual heroism for his main character gives me great hope for the future. It also makes Linden jump the tracks to become a genuinely interesting lead in her own right. FR makes clearer than anything else I've read both that Linden has a spot in the Land's pantheon right alongside the sainted TC (courtesy of the Elohim and our newly-discovered race paying her more attention than they do TC), and that she deserves it.
The Fatal Revenant was not like that. It took me back nearly two decades to when Lord Foul's Bane and The Illearth War first concussed my imagination. It jarred my jaded fantasy palate awake. This is a really good book, and I think it's in part because in FR, Donaldson manages to overpower some of his regular pitfalls.
One is "hyper-emotionalism of the lead character." Perhaps you remember Thomas Covenant, cranky to the gills and acting solely on crankiness. He glowers at everyone. He bites the hand that feeds him, rapes the person who greets him. He would like to overcome his despair and intransigence, but can't, which predicament leads to both the reader and Covenant knowing intellectually that Covenant is going to do the wrong thing before he does it, being powerless to prevent it, and kicking him before, during, and after. He is moody. He acts on his moods, unfortunately. He, at least, has the excuse of being a leper, so his emotions are exotic enough to simulate some kind of wonder, but the advent of Linden as main character removes even that excuse for Donaldson. Linden's emotional range is exaggerated but not unfamiliar: she has a wretched childhood, she feels tremendous guilt for her parents' demise, she tries to atone for her past through her career choice, she loves a man she cannot figure out, and in ROTE she goes after Lord Foul, kidnapper of her son, with a Little-League-parent's fury (you can assign a name of some acquaintance to almost all of those emotional complexes). Donaldson's moneymakers are characters-motivated-by-deep-emotional-torture. That tactic sits uneasily in a fantasy world; you'd better have some kind of fantastic emotional torture, like leprosy, to negotiate the difference between wonder and agony, wonder and psychological depth. In FR, to my great relief, the first half of the book consisted of Linden craving to behave a certain way and--not doing so! Because of logic! She was able to overcome her own inclination! That Donaldson is capable of writing such intellectual heroism for his main character gives me great hope for the future. It also makes Linden jump the tracks to become a genuinely interesting lead in her own right. FR makes clearer than anything else I've read both that Linden has a spot in the Land's pantheon right alongside the sainted TC (courtesy of the Elohim and our newly-discovered race paying her more attention than they do TC), and that she deserves it.
Another is that Tolkien knew what Donaldson seems not to know: the Anglo-Saxon monosyllable (e.g., "stone") is a much more agreeable vehicle for wonder than the Latinate polysyllable. Really, which of Donaldson's pet words thrills you more: "Land" (oh, what a land!) or "roborant"? It is possible that Donaldson means to be lexically educational: he frequently repeats the same obscure words in the same contexts so that by crushing repetition perhaps we'll learn them. In FR, we had roborant quite a bit, lacustrine . . . many of the old friends--only fitting in a book called Fatal "Revenant." What's next: a third volume "Roynish Glaive"? I cracked the book open and almost immediately saw that Linden was looking out of Revelstone from a "coign"--exactly the same spot that I learned the word years ago: a previous book, but the same Revelstone--who knows, maybe even the same 'coign.' Oh no, I thought, here we go again. But Donaldson pushed himself this time. Andelain wasn't once viridian. I can't recall exactly where, but at one spot I could tell Donaldson was just itching to use the word "irrefragable"--and didn't. I was proud of him. He reached for the dictionary and found a bunch of new pedantic words to go with his old ones, and that more or less fit the entire strategy of the book: visiting places we'd met before (chiefly in the Illearth War, best of Donaldsonian books) but with added elements, ingredients, twists. Form, meet content.
A third: the first couple hundred pages of this book (I forget if this is an old fault or not) are almost entirely discursive, consisting chiefly of Linden asking enigmatic questions and getting oblique answers. Linden in Revelstone, asking questions. Linden on a journey, asking questions at every stop. Every new character=new lines of questioning. What an abysmal narrative strategy--but astonishingly, it worked. Each line of questioning opened up new vistas of high fantastic history, shedding light on the seven previous volumes, but the kind of light that cast still more information into shadow. You couldn't have been interested in FR without reading those previous books, but if you've read them, you couldn't have helped being mesmerised by Linden's Q&A sessions. It was like talking to the author. It was like the author giving you the most fruitful questions to ask him about his creation.
Fourth, well, this hasn't changed. Donaldson (see: hyper-tortured-emotionalism discussion above) really doesn't demonstrate a sense of humour in these books. I still can't figure out why the Giants are laughing. But the long Q&A sessions do serve one of the purposes of humour: to relieve the emotional tension a little bit, to move the story off the rack into the cell--refresh it with some old bread and water, let its muscles stiffen in time for the next torture session a few chapters later.
Fifth, the addition of the new race ups the stakes of this series in a way that ROTE, with all its kidnapping and caesure-flinging, did not. Something truly new (but truly consonant with the Land and all that has come before) promises to re-invent what we know about the Land without disappointing us or demolishing what we knew about the Land. Courtesy of time-travel, we re-visit old people, old places, and learn more about them, but they do not pall (lose their wonder) in familiarity, nor do they become other than what we thought they were--just deeper. Donaldson didn't lie or mislead us before; he just hadn't told us the whole truth yet.
Pretty exciting stuff. The magic is back.
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