Bob Aarhus's Reviews > Lord Foul's Bane

** spoiler alert ** When you dream, are you responsible for your actions?

You might as well admit it: you'd probably do it, too. When Thomas Covenant -- a writer who contracts leprosy and is abandoned by his wife, his friends, and society -- falls into a comatose state, he arrives at a land where his nerves are regenerated, his impotency reversed, his status legendary as White Gold Wielder. He's the Unbeliever for a simple reason: he thinks this is all delusion, all a dream. So, yes, he rapes the young woman -- it's all a dream, he'll wake up soon -- then is carried along with the consequences of this and a dozen other choices, just like one is carried along the current of a dream, from one vignette to the next. Covenant is an anti-hero because he is embittered by the only reality he knows, and the new reality before him is almost as comical as the one, as a writer, he had pushed on other readers.

The problem is, of course, that the other characters don't share in Covenant's solipsistic views. They will suffer and die because Covenant refuses to deal with this new reality. It's a dream, right? Donaldson doesn't pull any punches with Covenant -- and I suspect a lot of the bitterness is a reflection of Donaldson's own experience with patients of Hansen's disease. "Lord Foul's Bane" is Donaldson's VSE of the human soul faced with a new reality of a life of degeneration.

Which is why I think reviewers who don't finish the book and try to look beyond the surface are giving this series the short shrift. I do agree that the second trilogy left me less intrigued and interested than the first. And I don't agree that this story is a rival for Tolkien -- but again, I didn't find nearly as satisfactory character exploration in LoTR as I did here. They are two different tales.

Read this book at your peril, but agree to undertake the journey to the bitter end with an open mind that not all heroes wear shining armor and are ascetics on horseback.