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The Power That Preserves Stephen R Donaldson 9780345257185 Books

Download As PDF : The Power That Preserves Stephen R Donaldson 9780345257185 Books

The Power That Preserves Stephen R Donaldson 9780345257185 Books

Sometimes a simple, fun, rollicking yarn is what is called for - and sometimes you yearn for something a lot more. The Thomas Covenant series deliver an epic package unlike any other, full of richly entrancing and engrossing world building which is amazingly topped by the character development that delves deeply into the human psyche while presenting and chewing through challenging physical and philosophical dilemmas. The end result always leaves me feeling challenged and rewarded. The first two trilogies are simply fabulous, while the third set of TC books are of definite interest but lack a bit of the cohesion of the rest. As an aside, I have not been able to enjoy or finish Donaldson’s Gap Series at all, but the Thomas Covenant series ranks as possibly my favorite fantasy series ever; completely different experiences between the two.


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The Power That Preserves Stephen R Donaldson 9780345257185 Books Reviews

I've dreamed of this day for nearly 2 whole weeks, the day when I can finally put this book aside. A fantastic day it will be, I dreamed, bereft of vocabularic oddities and tangential, leperous rage. A day when I can look forward to discovering a new text with the potential to carry me away to a new land of fantasy and brilliance. A land uncluttered by near meaningless utterings like "the perception abashed his vehemence" or "he was hauled into the air like a sack of miscellaneous helplessness".

You may wonder, as I have for 10 straight days, why would one continue on a path so strewn with stupid boulders, so wracked with eye-rollingly incredulous exasperation, that most people in similar situations would just abandon that quest. This is something I still ponder. I guess the simplest explanation is, the story itself isn't half bad.

The premise seems a bit, well, misguided, I guess, or possibly ill-conceived. A man learns he is a leper. Really? A leper? OK fine, I'll go along with it. After hearing this terrible news, his wife takes their son and divorces him, leaving him to live alone with what's left of his life and a tidy sum earned by a best selling novel he wrote years before, on a farm in a small town. The news of his disease has also made him an outcast in town. His neighbors have been anonymously pre-paid his bills leaving hoping he would stay put and not infect the town with his leprosy. He's forced to confront the situation, deciding one day to pay his phone bill in person. Yadda, yadda, he encounters a berobed beggar, possibly a destitute ethics professor, he lays upon him a query; "A real man—real in all the ways that we recognize as real—finds himself suddenly abstracted from the world and deposited in a physical situation which could not possibly exist sounds have aroma, smells have color and depth, sights have texture, touches have pitch and timbre. There he is informed by a disembodied voice that he has been brought to that place as a champion for his world. He must fight to the death in single combat against a champion from another world. If he is defeated, he will die, and his world—the real world—will be destroyed because it lacks the inner strength to survive. The man refuses to believe that what he is told is true. He asserts that he is either dreaming or hallucinating and declines to be put in the false position of fighting to the death where no “real” danger exists. He is implacable in his determination to disbelieve his apparent situation and does not defend himself when he is attacked by the champion of the other world. Question is the man’s behavior courageous or cowardly? This is the fundamental question of ethics.

And so begins his fantastical tale, the part of the story that actually engages me. The story from here checks all of the boxes labeled "Tale of Heroic Fantasy". An evildoer to do battle with, strange encounters with the indigenous inhabitants, and even an Epic Quest to save the land. Lots of fun to be had within those parameters. If you can see your way past occasional outbursts of rage and incoherence on the part of the protagonist, then I think you'll find this book pleasing by the time the end comes along.
Yes, it's been over 30 years since I first read this book. It was good then and even better now. I think Stephen knows we're all lepers in one way or another, so we can identify with the hero. Overcoming that thing which seeks to hold us back is a lifelong struggle and only ends at the end.
It wasn't until I was several chapters into The Illearth War that I fully developed my opinion of Stephen Donaldson's first Thomas Covenant book Lord Foul's Bane. When Covenant says, "I'm a leper," which he says far too often, he is really making a statement about the human condition in general and our perception of ourselves in general. It is more of a mantra meant to root himself in his preconceived notion of reality than a statement of fact. The author is reminding us that we really don't have any idea what 'reality' is though we are constantly filtering our perceptions through our prejudices about it. Covenant would rather cling to his notion of reality even with its dire illness and despair than accept another reality in which he is healthy, needed and loved. If he did not carry all the baggage of his opinions and prejudices it might occur to him how unlikely it is that a simple 'dream' would have the massive amount of detail, depth and length of time that his sojourns in The Land entail. He might have given more weight to the unusual and philosophical 'beggar' who he met just before entering The Land for the first time.

The core premise is a good one. What is reality? It's a great question because it's an eternal question and because if you if you really face up to the question it won't go away.

The book has a Tolkien like quality without copying any of Tolkien's stuff which is enjoyable in spite of Thomas Covenant's weird anti-hero persona. The book is very well written although occasionally Donaldson uses unnecessarily obscure words, for example "demesne" instead of domain, where they do not enhance the meaning or flavor of the story.

Despite the fact that Thomas Covenant is by far the most annoying protagonist I've encountered in decades of reading I did enjoy Lord Foul's Bane. I thought Robin Hobb's characters did a lot of whining until I read this book. But Fitz from the Six Duchies books is a rank amateur in the whining department compared to Covenant. Could it be that Hobb was inspired by Stephen Donaldson's character? Nevertheless it's a great read.

Highly recommended.
Sometimes a simple, fun, rollicking yarn is what is called for - and sometimes you yearn for something a lot more. The Thomas Covenant series deliver an epic package unlike any other, full of richly entrancing and engrossing world building which is amazingly topped by the character development that delves deeply into the human psyche while presenting and chewing through challenging physical and philosophical dilemmas. The end result always leaves me feeling challenged and rewarded. The first two trilogies are simply fabulous, while the third set of TC books are of definite interest but lack a bit of the cohesion of the rest. As an aside, I have not been able to enjoy or finish Donaldson’s Gap Series at all, but the Thomas Covenant series ranks as possibly my favorite fantasy series ever; completely different experiences between the two.