Lord Foul's Bane: 1 (The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, #3)

by Stephen R. Donaldson

“Covenant is [Stephen R.] Donaldson's genius!”—The Village Voice

He called himself Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, because he dared not believe in this strange alternate world on which he suddenly found himself.

Yet the Land tempted him. He had been sick; now he seemed better than ever before. Through no fault of his own, he had been outcast, unclean, a pariah. Now he was regarded as a reincarnation of the Land's greatest hero—Berek Halfhand—armed with the mystic power of White Gold. That power alone could protect the Lords of the Land from the ancient evil of the Despiser, Lord Foul. Except that Covenant had no idea how to use that power. . . .

• ISBN10: 0345348656
• ISBN13: 9780345348654
• Publish Date: 12 June 1987 (first published 1 October 1977)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Del Rey Books
• Format: Paperback (US Mass Market)
• Pages: 496
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780345348654

Reviews

[charlton]

This was the first book that introduced me to fantasy writing.
I was a teenager and a whole new world had become open.
Thomas Covenant had to see a doctor on a regular basis,until he accidently found somewhere he could live.

I thought this was an excellent book and would recommend it to everyone.

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

After a long period of waiting for something to happen, I finally find myself liking a book in this trilogy. It took until the middle of the book, granted, but then I flew right through it. The pace picked up, the characters gained interest. It was good, but I'm sad that it was so long coming. However, saying that, I must emphasize again that Donaldson's style is a much vaguer, slower-paced style than I prefer to start with, so those who like that type of writing style will have probably liked this book from the beginning.

Donaldson leaves a lot unexplained, right from the beginning. A great deal of the start of the book leaves the reader following Covenant around in a short of delusional stupor, and later the reader will see glimpses into certain perspectives that are truly irrelevant to the story - or, if they are relevant, Donaldson did not clearly explain how.

I made a note to myself after about the first hundred pages pending an incident: "Given any sort of logic, we'd never see Triock again, but even though many of Donaldson's side-exploits seem to be pointless and end in people dying, people don't seem to die. But they still seem pointless." A little harsh, perhaps, but it remains true. It's said that "if you don't see the corpse, they are not dead," and that prove true of several characters in the trilogy, so many that it was becoming predictable, and a bit disappointing. I think perhaps that the point was that Covenant's ghosts were coming back to haunt him, but I'm not certain.

Ultimately, I didn't love the trilogy, but nor can I say I hated it. Much of my opinion on the book, I am consciously aware, has to do with my preference in books, and not the shortcomings of the writer. He has many fans, and has them for a reason.

((Cross-posted on my blog: The Literary Phoenix.))