Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs's Reviews > Lord Foul's Bane

Lord Foul lives. He's Going for Control. And the woke world THRIVES beneath his Shadow. Houston, we have a problem.

THIS is a book for folks who often find life Tough. Maybe you’re one of em? That has been My life for sure! And now, there's no goof like an Old Goof.

When I was 20, I started swimming against the Tide. I had discovered Value in my life!

I was gonna hang on to it for dear life...

The only other available option was sheer outrage.

So, naturally I made new friends - the pleasers. They sought to lull me with their nice, pleasant lullabies, and dropped pleasant leading gambits...

Whenever in a weak moment in this woke Canadian world I consented to listen, the soporific would be gently administered and I’d drift off to Lala Land for what seemed ages.

But then I’d remember to Remember myself and throw off my shackles.

Time then for my opposition to use the heavy artillery?

You got it!

So back and forth went my life, just so, for interminable aeons of slumber - interspersed with jarringly wide-awake cauchemars with all their Soul-splitting bright noonday torment.

Awakening from history’s nightmare is no picnic.

Pride was always my stumbling block - EXACTLY as it is for Thomas Covenant in the Strange and Savage Real-Life Dreamworld he’s been catapulted into. Much like ours now.

We’re all proud naturally, because of our inborn need for transcendence. A real ‘radix malorum,’ as it turns out, cause humans are dangerous goofs.

So then the woke world turns to us and says: “You’re no one special. So why not just jump on the eternal bandwagon of endless 24/7 Desire?”

Because it’s precisely the road of fools, is why - “the way to dusty death.”

Death isn’t real to a little kid. And it’s only real to us because of our illimitable desires. We have to make perfect our will, no easy task.

But Thomas knows nothing of this. So in his vividly Real parallel universe to his daily disbarred-from-humanity drudgery of incurable leprosy he is fighting perceived evil.

Don’t all we outsiders do that?

Just like me, so Thomas - a leper, one set apart and enchained in a Magic Circle of Exclusion from “polite” society!

A figurative leper, like the rest of us plodders who strive with every fibre of our sinews to be reconnected and justified to our erstwhile peers.

As Kafka says, “give it up!”

Kafka and Thomas win out. Inclusion is not the point. Our, and their, splintered life is. Brokenness wins! That’s where we start. We are fallen.

As the Nobel laureate Lagerkvist states, Endurance is everything, for only in that can there be Glory.

We are ALL clinging to that accursed rock upon which, we, like Prometheus - who saw THROUGH Lord Foul’s mind games - are impaled, sentenced to submit to the gnawing of the gods upon our liver.

So resistance, as the film cliché says, is futile!

And submission is key. Calling it a Cross is OK, folks.

The books in the immortal Thomas Covenant sword-n-sorcery series seem endless, and a too-daunting task for a feeble septuagenarian like me to attempt.

But I HIGHLY recommend them to folks who - like I do - find the struggle for Goodness Herculean.

And this First one of the saga is Great.

For Thomas’ Struggle is Really Endless. No getting around it.

It gets better, you know, if we make ourselves really LITTLE. Then we’re only chaff spinning on the Hurricane of Life.

And chaff is just peanuts at the Destroyer’s orgiastic feast.

Some day we will all be able to do just that... ALL of us Victims.

Once the strength of the battle subsides, we will find we have been MOLDED into a vital tiny truculence that can endure ALL the outrageous Forces of Circumstance.

On that blessed day we’ll drop our guard...

And take up the eternal cloak of Humility -

Which will lead us to a Far Better Land than the one so ruinously despoiled by Lord Foul!

For chaff always finds a quiet, Happy Landing.