RISING FROM THE DEAD

THE RUNES OF THE EARTH
By Stephen R. Donaldson
532 pp.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $26.95.

THE RUNES OF THE EARTH
By Stephen R. Donaldson
22 sound discs (28 1/2 hr.)
Penguin Audio. $49.95.

Reviewed by John Clark

Between 1977 and 1983, Stephen Donaldson wrote six books chronicling the experiences of Thomas Covenant, a writer who had contracted leprosy. The story began with his wife leaving and taking their child, and with his being shunned by nearly everyone in the small town where Covenant lived. After being struck by a car, he awoke on Kevin’s Watch, a stone outlook several thousand feet above the Southron Plains in a world simply known as The Land. There, Covenant meets Lord Foul, his nemesis for the remainder of his three visitations to this rare place.

The books sold six million copies and created a loyal fan base that included me. It took me fifteen years to read them, not because they were badly written, but because Donaldson’s treatment of Covenant was so unsparingly severe. The first time, I read books one and two before quitting partway through number three. Ten years later, I made it through the first five but couldn’t finish the sixth. Five years later, I reread the first five, and on a damp November day I found myself sitting in the woods with tears rolling down my cheeks as I closed the final book. They were tears of extreme sadness, mixed with gratitude that I had persevered and now understood the whole story.

The series affected me so profoundly that I doubt I would be a writer if I hadn’t been exposed to Donaldson’s style and rich, starkly beautiful prose. They were certainly the impetus to write my own fantasy novels.

What stood out more than anything else was the clarity of vision and purpose that Stephen Donaldson sustained through more than 2,875 pages. Time and again, my thoughts returned to a sense of awe at a writer, barely thirty years old, creating and peopling such a rich fantasy world. Even more unsettling was the question I asked myself over and over again. That is, what does a writer do when such a marvelous monster has been completed, and what sort of emotional letdown must he feel?

Even though Covenant died at the end of the series, I was left with a nagging sense, as were a lot of other fans, that there was more to the story of Thomas Covenant and his epic struggle to defeat Lord Foul. When I reread the books last year, my curiosity prompted an Internet search. I discovered that W. A. Senior had written an analysis of the series called Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Variations on the Fantasy Tradition. I borrowed it through interlibrary loan and found it helpful in answering some of my questions. In the process, I contacted the author to thank him for writing the book. Mr. Senior mentioned that Stephen was working on a new Thomas Covenant trilogy. I filed that away and went on to other literary pursuits.

In November of 2004, I discovered with great shock and extreme joy that The Runes of the Earth was about to be published. Even better was the discovery that instead of a trilogy to complete the story, the new series was to be a quartet. The new book is 513 pages of familiar territory for those who read the original books. However, new readers will not suffer for having missed reading the earlier books. The author does a stellar job of summarizing the original double trilogy in the twenty-page preface.

This is great fantasy. Stephen Donaldson has stated in an interview on his website (www.stephenrdonaldson.com/) that “… perhaps the deepest, most personal reason is that I was afraid. At my first glimpse of The Last Chronicles, I knew that it would be astonishingly difficult to write; that as a narrative exercise it would make the previous Covenant stories look like a stroll in the park. If this last story is done right, if it fulfills my intentions, it will complete and unify the entire saga. But in order to accomplish that goal I'll have to go far beyond my known abilities, both as a story-teller and as a writer. The prospect terrified me. It still does.” That explained very succinctly why it took twenty years to creep up on the sleeping monster. But did he get it right?

Well, from my perspective, he certainly did. I slipped into the book and felt like I had come home to a world I’d missed terribly. Linden Avery, Lord Foul, the Waynhim, the Ur-viles, the Haruchai, the Ramen, and the Ranhyn are all back. Even though several thousand years have passed in The Land, the book takes you to familiar places, among them Kevin’s Watch, Mithil Stonedown, and Revelstone.

The book opens with Covenant’s son Roger, now legally of age, attempting to coerce Linden Avery into releasing his incurably insane mother Joan into his care. Linden, known in The Land as “The Chosen,” refuses. Roger seems to acquiesce, but returns shortly and, in a spate of violence, takes his mother by force. Linden follows him to Thomas Covenant’s decrepit farmhouse, where she is shot.

When Linden regains consciousness, she has returned to Kevin’s Watch, the place where Thomas Covenant first perceived this new land. In short order, she meets Anele, a blind man who flits in and out of insanity, but also is not what he at first seems. A bizarre phenomenon called a caesure destroys Kevin’s Watch while Linden and Anele are making their frenetic descent down the incredibly long stone stairway.

Both survive, thanks to Linden’s frantic use of wild magic, but are captured by members of the Haruchai, remnants of the Bloodguard that Covenant relied upon in the first series, who take them to Mithil Stonedown, the village where Thomas Covenant first interacted with those of The Land some seven thousand years before.

The Haruchai have come to believe their mission is to prevent any knowledge of what went before, believing that this will protect The Land. Therefore, since Anele possesses magic and remembers much of what happened after the Sunbane, they plan to keep him locked up in the village. Linden, meanwhile, has realized that Joan and Roger have also been transported to The Land, as has her autistic son, Jeremiah. However, Linden has every reason to believe that Jeremiah is in the clutches of Lord Foul.

Her key to action is when Covenant speaks to her from the dead, saying “When in doubt, do the unexpected.” That is exactly what Linden does. Nearly at the breaking point over Jeremiah’s fate, enraged by the impassive and intransigent attitude of the Haruchai, and confused and worried by Anele’s lapses in and out of madness, Linden escapes with Anele when a caesure, tornadolike storms that rend the fabric of time, approaches.

In the process, she discovers that Anele lost the Staff of Law, an object of great power that Linden created from two creatures 3,500 years before on her previous visit to The Land. But how can this be? Anele is no older than Linden. In the course of moving south (because she believes everyone will assume she went north), she is first befriended by a young stonedowner who has his own reservations about the way the Haruchai are suppressing history. He helps Linden head into the mountains where she believes Anele last had the Staff of Law.

They are attacked by Kresh, huge wolflike creatures that Linden believes were sent after her by Lord Foul. Both the Ramen, caretakers of the mythical Ranhyn, and Ur-Viles, black creatures spawned in the bowels of Mount Thunder, come to her aid and defeat the Kresh.

From there, Linden rediscovers some of her healing power as well as relearning how to use at least part of the wild magic that is channeled by the white gold wedding ring that Thomas Covenant gave her before he died. She realizes that Anele really did lose the staff 3,500 years before and was sent forward by one of the caesuras. In order to retrieve it, she and her companions must endure another caesure and get lucky enough to not only land in the right time but also in the right location.

The last third of the book addresses their efforts and attempt to return. I will refrain from description so readers will have plenty of surprises. Suffice it to say that real fans of the original series will yell with joy as they read the last few pages and will squirm as they await the next book.

After I read the book, I bought the unabridged version on CD, as I wanted to get a feel for how well it translated to audio. It stands up well, and one gets an added bonus by listening—you find out how all the names are properly pronounced. You also get a much better sense of Stephen Donaldson’s use of very elegant and somewhat archaic language.

If you appreciate well-written fantasy, I believe you will enjoy this book. Many reviewers have even gone so far as to compare the series to Tolkien’s work. I won’t, but you might. Read and then decide for yourself. 

 

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