analysis

Revisiting Stephen R. Donaldson

January 6, 2025

In my wayward youth, I practically lived at the library, picking up stacks of books to take home and devour. By the time I reached my teens, those books got bigger, and in many cases, more mature than what we would normally consider young adult fiction, or whatever. Cue the irony of having parents who strictly forbade Stephen King from my reading list on the basis of a sensationalized understanding of his work, but had no clue about the contents of the comparatively under-publicized works I consumed instead.

In search of fantasy series in my early teens, I stumbled on the works of Stephen R. Donaldson, specifically The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. Like everything else I was reading at the time, I read every book of the series I could get my hands on, as well as other works I could find by the author. In the early 90s, the Thomas Covenant series comprised six books across two trilogies. Donaldson revived the series in 2004 with The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, but by then I had long lost interest in the singularly unlikable protagonist.

Which brings me to the thing I remember most about the series: Thomas Covenant had remained in my mind among the worst protagonists in the history of SF/F. Since this is a bold assertion, I had wondered if Covenant was worth revisiting. So late in 2024, almost on a whim, I checked out an e-book copy of Lord Foul's Bane from the New York Public Library. Frustratingly, I failed to finish it before it was due, and am waiting to check it back out, but while I was reading it, I took public notes on it, which you can see in thread form on my Mastodon site.

What follows is an expanded version of this thread, aiming for an answer to a single question: What effect, if any, does 30 years between readings have on my view of Covenant as a protagonist?

There are spoilers ahead.

Additionally: content warning – sexual assault.

Thomas Covenant is a character whose view of the world has been profoundly shaken by his contraction of leprosy, an ancient disease characterized by its telltale deterioration of the body. As someone who grew up in Bible Belt America, leprosy was a familiar Biblical trope. I was aware via the Bible of how the societies described in the Gospels exiled lepers to colonies on the edge of town, proclaiming them unclean. I also understood at the time that leprosy was incurable, so it wasn't a stretch of my imagination to see a protagonist presented in the Biblical sense of leprosy. My understanding was wrong, however, even if Donaldson's presentation still made at least some narrative sense. So the first thing to do is to quickly review what we know now of leprosy.

Leprosy, aka Hansen's Disease, is caused by Mycobaterium leprae and Mycobaterium lepromatosis. M. leprae was discovered by the Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen in 1873, while M. lepromatosis was discovered in 2008 (attributed to Han, et al.) Its effects include damage to nerves, the respiratory tract, eyes, and skin. The nerve damage can cause pain insensitivity leading to loss of extremities though infection and injury. In short, this is a disease with many visibly pronounced symptoms that are unmistakable, and which cause bodily deterioration. It is transmitted from person to person via extensive (but not incidental) contact, though this distinction hardly matters in a historical view, given the fear with which lepers were regarded.

This is probably a good time to interject with one of the unfortunate aspects of history as conveyed through the literature of the time. As a progressive skin disease, what we call leprosy today is just one of the possible skin diseases described by ancient texts and classified under the same name. So needless to say our modern understanding of leprosy doesn't cleanly map to an ancient understanding. Even so, the idea of a communicable skin disease that forced people into social exile is resonant, whatever it was or should have been called.

I'm not going to go into an extensive history of treatment, but by the 60s and 70s, multi-drug therapies (MDT) had shown high efficacy in treating the disease, settling in 1981 on the current MDT. Writing in the mid-70s, Donaldson may not have had all of this information at his fingertips. Had he started this series even a decade later, the situation would have been markedly different. That leaves us with a Covenant that, at the time of publication, believes himself to be incurable, forced to rearrange his life to accommodate his disease, performing regular visual inspections (VSE), and finds himself abandoned by his wife and ostracized from his small town community.

So this is the context for how we encounter Covenant, attempting to hold on to any last shred of human connection in a world that is systematically shutting him out. He is bitter, and rightly so. Not only has his wife left him and taken their son with her, the people in his small town have taken to having groceries delivered to him and paying his bills in advance specifically so he won't have any reason to come into town. They have weaponized generosity. In other circumstances, this sort of mutual aid would be commendable. After all, unless he can continue writing or find some other remote work occupation (sound familiar?), Covenant is unable to work and would, today, qualify for whatever total disability benefits his state offered. Which themselves aren't much, by design, and include long and arduous application processes, sometimes requiring a lawyer (ask me how I know). But applied this way, they are less “mutual aid” and more “pay to keep the leper in the leper colony”, even though that means enforced solitude. The leprosy itself is a narrative fix, something that only matters to hang the rest of the narrative on and justify the corner into which Donaldson has painted his protagonist.

It is during one of Covenant's trips into town, where he is attempting to pay his bills for himself, that he becomes the protagonist of a portal fantasy (or the similar concept, isekai). In a portal fantasy, the protagonist is someone from “our” world, transported to some other world, usually to accomplish some kind of Hero's Journey. It's important that the protagonist be someone the reader can relate to in some way, because their “everyman” character is in some ways a reader stand-in. In 70s fantasy fiction, this character usually was a man or, if the target age was younger, a boy or young man. That's a subject of litigation elsewhere, so I won't dwell on it here, but suffice it to say that we as readers are supposed to identify with the protagonist of a portal fantasy.

(Aside: While reading the Wikipedia entry for isekai, trying to find any notable differences between isekai and portal fantasy, I was amused to find that one common isekai trope is for the protagonist to die being hit by a car or truck, then reincarnate in the new world.)

Covenant traverses his portal by being hit by a police car. He suggests the policeman was targeting him, because by this point in the novel he suspects everyone of wishing him ill. This mentality colors every interaction he has with other people, because he's always expecting the shoe to drop. In any case, he “travels” after a cryptic conversation with a street beggar, waking in some kind of liminal space where Lord Foul confronts him to lay out the stakes: deliver a message to the Lords' Council spelling the end of the world in a matter of years. He shows that a creature named Drool possesses an item called The Staff of Law, and indicates that Covenant possesses power via his white gold wedding ring, but that he will not be able to master it in time. And then Foul casts Covenant out to land upon a high rock called Kevin's Watch. From this point, Covenant is fully in the new world.

There, atop the 500 foot spire, on a flat stone above a plain, a disoriented Covenant tries to make sense of his new surroundings, and there he meets his first inhabitant of this world, Lena, who hails from nearby Mithil Stonedown. It is at this point that Covenant begins his negotiation with this new reality. Is it a dream? Something else? He convinces himself it's a dream, because what else could it be? And this is something my teenage self maybe didn't appreciate as much. What would I really do if I awoke in a strange world? Would I believe it? Or would I deny it as Covenant does?

Everything that follows is cast in doubt as a potential product of Covenant's comatose mind. Because he can't conceive of this world as being real, neither can he conceive of any consequences for actions he takes within the world. He acts miserably, execrably, lashing out at the people of the Land, justifying his actions as necessary for him to retain control of his mind, which he fears will be lost if he succumbs to the place and accepts it as something other than a dreaming figment. It is in this state that he rapes Lena prior to setting off in the company of her unsuspecting mother.

When an author has presumably limited space and scope to tell a story, those limits impose a sort of narrative efficiency. The most charitable way to interpret this vis-à-vis the rape of a teenager at the hands of the (early middle-age?) protagonist is that Donaldson thought it added something necessary to the story. So far, I can't see what that is. Does Covenant come to regret it? Yes, eventually. But where I can be sympathetic to a man bereft of society and cursed to die slowly, this act greatly diminishes my sympathy. It doesn't even really matter if Covenant believed it was real or a dream.

At every turn, Covenant is resistant not only to the reality of the world presented to him, but also to the role that this world is thrusting upon him. In some ways, this is typical of portal fantasy, where the Chosen One must overcome initial doubt. I don't think we ever in the series get a clearly confident Covenant, one who has overcome that doubt. He grates against the role continually, and for what to my adult mind seem like rational reasons: this kind of heroism is best watched on screen, as something one reads about in books, or as something one plays out with dice and character sheets. Covenant is no easy hero, and since we know he's a wretch on top of being bitter and cynical, we don't get our heroic stand-in to allow us to feel similarly heroic.

I'll part with a brief meditation on what Donaldson might be doing here. Bearing in mind for a moment that an entire Fandom site dedicated to this 48 year old work, I haven't read any of it and am approaching this armed only with what I had previously read and the supplemental material about leprosy. Assuming the Land is all a figment of Covenant's sleeping mind, this reluctant Hero's Journey seems calculated to provide Covenant with additional resolve. He is, after all, confronted with an impossibility, much the same in his view of the leprosy diagnosis. It's an impossibility suddenly manifest, and he must negotiate with it or let it destroy him. In this light, Covenant is not our hero of the Land, Berek Half-Hand reincarnated. He is just a broken man grappling with the impossibility of his life.

Does that rehabilitate him in my mind? Well, in the waffling parlance of our time: it's complicated.

Revisiting Stephen R. Donaldson

Further Reading