Lord Foul's Bane: Introduction and Chapter 1: Golden Boy

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| Chapter Two (Part I)

So the choice for the next book after Mister Monday fell on The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen Donaldson, a considerably older series and, I think, reasonably famous in its day. I’ve liked this series since I was a lot younger, and I think taking it on with a more critical view will certainly be interesting.

For reference, this series consists of the books Lord Foul’s Bane, The Illearth War, and The Power That Preserves (the First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), The Wounded Land, The One Tree, and White Gold Wielder (the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant), and The Runes of the Earth, Fatal Revenant, Against All Things Ending, and The Last Dark (the Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant). In other words, this will keep me busy for quite a while!

So, for Lord Foul’s Bane, let me first show some covers, just for fun. This is the Dutch book I first read:

It’s decent enough, though it doesn’t tell us much about what will happen inside. Here’s the cover for the book I’ll be using:

Aside from being incredibly cluttered, I do think this one’s decent, too. It’s certainly interesting, I’d say (what is this hand, after all).

Going into the book, there is a map, which is unfortunately printed much too bold and doesn’t look great, so I’ll have to chase down a better one (probably from the Dutch edition) once necessary.

After that, there is an epigraph: “Something there is in beauty”. I do recall that coming up somewhere in this book.

Then the book actually begins!

Chapter One: Golden Boy

We open in the viewpoint of a woman exiting a store to see her son play on the sidewalk in the path of a “grey, gaunt man” who walks down the middle of the sidewalk “like a mechanical derelict”. For a moment, the woman’s “heart quail[s]”, but then she grabs her son “out of harm’s way”. The man walks by without acknowledging this and as he walks away, the woman tells him to get out of here and that he “ought to be ashamed”.

That’s a decent bit to open with. It does have me somewhat interested, at least. We transfer to the man’s point of view, and he turns out to be “Thomas Covenant”. There’s the protagonist, then! He keeps walking, “as unfaltering as clockwork that had been wound to the hilt just for this purpose”. To himself, he gets upset about “ashamed”, puts on a “wild grimace” and thinks “Beware! Outcast unclean!”. Well, that doesn’t tell us much about what’s going on with him yet.

He then tells us that the people he passes, who he knows by “names and houses and handclasps” give him plenty of room, and some of them seem to be holding their breath. He stops protesting internally and thinks these people don’t need “the ancient ritual of warning”. He concentrates on restraining his grimace and on keeping a steady pace. Well, Donaldson went for in medias res here, and I think it’s successful at that, but combined with Covenant’s attitude so far, it makes it hard to get attached. It’ll also be next chapter before we know what’s exactly going on with him, so that doesn’t help either.

As Covenant walks on, he looks himself over, verifying that he doesn’t have any “unexpected snags or tears in his clothing”, that his hands don’t have scratches and checking the “scar which stretche[s] from the heel of his right palm across where his last two fingers had been” (that’s where the second cover comes from). He then remembers doctors talking about something called “VSE” or “Visual Surveillance of Extremities”. Covenant has “dead nerves”, apparently, and he needs to check whether he’s hurt, or he might not notice. His health depends on it, so he should always do it and think about it; “next time” he might not be as lucky. He then thinks that “VSE” “comprise[s] his entire life”.

He begins to complain about doctors, but admits that without them, he might already be dead. He was very ignorant of his own danger and might have been killed by “[s]elf-neglect”. Then he goes to another topic and watches the “startled, frightened or oblivious faces” around him. He notes that, though it’s a “small town”, many people are oblivious (well, good for him). While he does say, he wishes he can be sure “his face [bears] a proper expression of disdain”. But the nerves in his cheeks don’t seem to work well, though the doctors have said that’s an illusion at present, and he can never be sure how he presents to the world. I mean… you could look in a window?

Now women who earlier discussed his novel in their “literary clubs” avoid him as if he were “some kind of minor horror or ghoul”, and he feels a “sudden treacherous pang of loss”. He immediately strangles it, before it can affect his balance. Well, it certainly sucks that the people he knew now avoid him, and I get why he doesn’t want to deal with that loss… but refusing to feel anything about it and showing only disdain for everyone won’t exactly help, either. (And I frankly want to call him “edgelord” by now.)

Covenant then switches topics again and says he’s nearing his destination, “the goal of the affirmation or proclamation he [has] so grimly undertaken”. Two blocks ahead, he can see the sign “Bell Telephone Company”. He’s walking two miles into town from something called “Haven Farm” to pay his phone bill. He could have mailed the money, of course, but he now see that as a “surrender, an abdication to the mounting bereavement which [is] being practised against him”. So then he goes to explain this “bereavement”. I think having a more coherent direction to his thoughts might help here.

While he was “in treatment” for his unspecified disease, Joan, his wife, divorced him, took their “infant son” and left the state. The only thing he had a stake in and that she dared handle was the car, which she took, too. She left most of her clothing behind. Then his closest neighbours, “half a mile away on either side”, complained about his presence; Covenant refused to budge and one of them left the county. (And good riddance, I’d say.) Then, within three weeks of his return, the grocery store (which he’s walking past now) began delivering his supplies, whether he ordered them or not, and, he suspects, whether he’s willing to pay or not.

I find it quite hard to care about this, because I don’t get the feeling that Covenant really cares and because there’s no context for this. Yeah, bad things happened to him, but that doesn’t make me invested in him in and of itself. And now we get another topic change, which certainly doesn’t help either.

Well, he’s walking past the courthouse now, “its old grey columns looking proud of their burden of justice and law”. That’s the building where, by proxy, he was “reft of his family”, he says. He goes on a bit about how the building is made to reject “the stain of human need” that visits it, and then he says that divorce was granted since “no compassionate law [can] force a woman to raise her child in the company of a man like him”. So this state didn’t have no-fault divorce, then? By later canon, I get the feeling this is on the East Coast of the US, so let me look which states didn’t have it in 1977 (the publication date of this book). So I had a look, and it might be South Carolina, so that’s nice to know.

Covenant asks Joan’s memory if she cried, and if she was brave or relieved. Then he needs to resist “an urge to run out of danger”, and he talks about “giant gaping heads” on the courthouse, which look like they’re “about to vomit on him”. Then he says the town has “no more than five thousand” inhabitants, so the business district is small and now he walks before the department store. This stream-of-consciousness really isn’t doing it for me. So he looks through the windows and sees some “high-school girls” pricing “cheap jewelry”. They lean on the counters in “provocative poses”, and Covenant’s throat tightens. He finds himself resenting their “hips and breasts”, as they’re “curves for other men’s caresses, not his”.

Well, there goes quite a bit of whatever sympathy he may have built up. I’m reasonably sure Covenant’s somewhere around thirty, and here we have him leering at “high-school girls”. And then he resents that he can’t have sex with them? One, Covenant, they’re much too young for you (and he doesn’t even see anything wrong with that!), and two, you’re not entitled to their attentions. If you want to have sex with someone, you can certainly find someone willing, not some random people who are much too young for you.

(I also note that he explicitly mentions “men’s caresses”, because apparently none of these girls could be gay or ace or the like. That doesn’t make me like him any more.)

I’m quite positive that Donaldson wanted Covenant to come across as hateful… but he might just be overdoing it, and that’s not a great thing to have. Covenant explains that, because of his decaying nerves, he’s impotent and “his sexual activity [is] just another amputated member”. Yes, Covenant, clearly you need to get an erection for any kind of sexual activity. (rolls eyes) I get that he might genuinely think that, but if he’s really so desperate for sexual activity, nothing’s stopping him from doing research on it! This just comes across to me like he’d rather gripe about his impotence than do anything about it, and that doesn’t endear me to him, either.

He further complains that “even the release of lust” is not for him; he can conjure up desires “until insanity threaten[s]”, but he can’t do anything about them. Didn’t think so. Then he suddenly gets a memory of Joan in his mind, so intense that it nearly blanks out his vision. It is of her in one of the “opaque nightgowns” he got her, her breasts “tracing circles of invitation beneath the fabric”. He internally cries out for it, asking how she could do it, and if “one sick body” was more important than everything. Well, as the next chapter will establish, she did it in large part for their infant son, so Covenant is just being dishonest now. That aside… it does suck that Joan apparently left him just for being sick, but she was hardly obliged to stay with him no matter what (no matter how hot he found her).

Then he suppresses the memory, thinking that such thoughts are “a weakness he [cannot] afford” and he needs to “stamp them out”. He thinks it’s better to be bitter, since “[b]itterness survives”; it seems the be the only taste he can taste any more. And sure, “bitterness survives”, but if that survival necessitates suppressing all traces of happiness and “weakness”, what are you even surviving for? Just for the hell of it? I guess that Covenant thinks this is deep, but it really isn’t. He discovers, to his dismay, that he’s stopped moving, and he just stands on the sidewalk with “his fists clenched and his shoulders trembling”. He forces himself to move again and then bumps into someone.

He notes that this person seems to be wearing “a dirty, reddish-brown robe” (an odd choice for this town), but doesn’t stop to apologise. He just walks on so that he doesn’t have to face that person’s “fear and loathing”, and after a moment, he is walking as before again. Now he passes “the offices of the Electric Company”, which is his last reason to come pay his bill in person. Two months ago, he sent a cheque to the Electric Company (which is noted to be small, since he doesn’t use much power) and it was returned unopened. It had a note attached that his bills has been anonymously paid for him for “at least a year”.

He had a “private struggle” over this, and realised that, if he doesn’t do anything about this trend, there soon won’t be any reason for him to go among people at all. So that is why he has come into town now, “to show his peers that he [does] not intend to be shriven of his humanity”. In rage at being outcast, he says, he wants to defy it. Well, I can certainly get that, and it’s the best way to do something about it, so points to him for being proactive. He thinks about him paying his bill “in person”, and he wonders if the bill has already been paid for him. What is he coming “in person” for, then? He immediately gets afraid because of this. I mean, if they have already paid your bill, they should have notified you if they want you not to come. And coming into town just because would be a stronger statement than coming because of your phone bill.

Well, Covenant quickly does a VSE and then looks at the sign of the phone company, now only half a block away. He goes on, conscious of a desire to run ahead, and then notices “a tune running in his mind along the beat of his stride”. Then he remembers the words and we get to see it:

Golden boy with feet of clay,

Let me help you on your way.

A proper push will take you far—

But what a clumsy lad you are!

Hm, not bad, and there’s the chapter title. Covenant goes on a tangent on the rhythm, comparing it to “stripper’s music” and imaging an “overweight goddess” “grinding out his burlesque fate” (sigh). Then he finally says that he’s been “a kind of golden boy” at one time. That means we’re about to get some of Covenant’s backstory!

Well, he had been “happily married”, of course, had a son, and he had written a novel in “ecstasy and ignorance”, which he’d seen spend a year on the best-seller lists. Because of that, he now has all the money he needs. He thinks to himself that he’d be better off if he’d known what kind of book it was. But he didn’t know, and he didn’t even think he’d find a publisher back when he was writing it. That was right after he married Joan, and they did not think about “money or success”. “[T]he pure act of creation” fired his imagination, and due to Joan’s support, he kept “burning like a bolt of lightning” for five months while he wrote his novel, which he describes with lots of flowery language.

When he was done, he felt “as drained and satisfied as all of life’s love uttered in one act”. He says that wasn’t an easy time, since “unconstricted emotion did not come easily to him”, and he was anguished by the “heights and abysses” he saw in his writing. It was still glorious, though, and he found focussing on “that pitch of intensity” “the cleanest thing that had ever happened to him”. When he sent his manuscript away, he did so “with calm confidence”.

This is all quite nice, but I find it hard to care. It has no direct bearing on Covenant’s present situation, nor on the story as a whole, and the lack of details keeps it from coming alive. He keeps going, saying that during the months of writing and waiting, they lived on Joan’s income. Then he goes to talk about her. Her name is really “Joan Macht Covenant” (the only time we’ll see this middle name). She was quiet and expressed more of herself “with her eyes and the tone of her skin” than with words. Um, could she change her skin tone easily, then? Her skin has a “hue of gold” that makes her looks as “warm and precious as a sylph or succuba of joy”. A “succuba of joy”? That… really doesn’t make much sense, Donaldson. I get the feeling he got entangled in his similes here.

Well, Joan wasn’t “large or strong”, and Covenant was constantly amazed that she has “breaking horses” as her job. He immediately says that’s not the right term (then why use it?), because there are no “tests of strength” or “bucking stallions with mad eyes and foaming nostrils” in her work. She rather seemed to “seduce” them, by calming them. And when she loses control of a horse while riding, she simply dismounts and lets it calm down before beginning again. In the end, she takes the horse on a “furious gallop” around Haven Farm, “to show the horse that it could exert itself to the limit without surpassing her mastery”. All this sounds quite nice!

Covenant felt “daunted by her ability”, and even after she’d taught him how to ride, he was still afraid of horses. Well, her work wasn’t lucrative, but it kept them from going hungry until the day the acceptance letter arrived. On that day, Joan decided it was time to have a child. That worked, apparently, but, due to editing and such, they needed to live on Covenant’s royalties “for nearly a year”. Joan kept her job as long as she could without bringing the fetus in danger, and when “her body told her the time had come”, she stopped. After that, her life “turned inward”, and she focussed on growing the baby “with a single-mindedness that often left her outward eyes blank and tinged with expectation”.

Once again, it just doesn’t really do it for me. I barely know Joan, so how can I find much about this one way or another?

Well, the boy was born, and Joan announced he was to be called “Roger, after her father and her father’s father”. Covenant is now apparently near the phone company, but he keeps on talking, thinking that he “never even liked that name”. Then you could have told Joan that, couldn’t you? But his son’s Very Beautiful face made his heart ache “with love and pride” (and he says pride is “a father’s participation in mystery”). And now his son is gone with Joan to “he [does] not know where”. Well, that sucks. He then wonders why he’s “so unable to weep”. …Because you think that that’s weakness and you don’t want that?

The next moment, a hand touches his sleeve, and someone asks for his attention. Covenant turns around, ready to shout “Don’t touch me! Outcast unclean!” at them, but the face of the boy who’s holding his arm stops him. He’s young, “not more than eight or nine years old”, which Covenant thinks is too young to be so afraid. Didn’t think so. He is “mottled pale-and-livid with dread and coercion”, as if he’s being forced into something that he’s afraid of. Well, maybe he’s afraid of going to Covenant? Isn’t a large part of the town supposed to shun him?

The boy asks him to take an “old sheet of paper”, which he pushes in Covenant’s “numb fingers”. A “he” told him to give it to Covenant and he’s supposed to read it. Covenant takes the sheet and wonders who this “he” is. The boy points and Covenant sees the man he bumped into earlier, standing “half a block away”. We get a block of description of the man:

He was mumbling, almost singing a dim nonsense tune; and his mouth hung open, though his lips and jaw did not move to shape his mutterings. His long, tattered hair and beard fluttered around his head in the light breeze. His face was lifted to the sky; he seemed to be staring directly at the sun. In his left hand he held a wooden beggar-bowl. His right hand clutched a long wooden staff, to the top of which was affixed a sign bearing one word: ‘Beware.’

That’s an interesting apparition and obviously someone who’ll be important soon. Covenant gets fascinated by this sign and he imagines “dangers” coming out of it and flying at him, “screaming like vultures” (that indicates that he knows quite a bit about animals, since New World vultures don’t scream). Among the dangers, he can see eyes “like fangs, carious and deadly”. They look at him with a “fixed, cold and hungry malice” and malevolence drips off them. At that moment, Covenant “quaver[s] in the grasp of an inexplicable fear”. Well, that’s weird (though I’m quite certain what this is).

Covenant then realises that it’s just a sign. He shudders, and everything disappears. The boy tells him again that he should read the paper. Covenant tells the boy not to teach him, because he’s “a leper”, but when he looks around, the boy is gone. There the chapter ends.

Well, now we know what Covenant’s mystery disease is, and we’ll spend the next chapter exploring what that means for him. For this boy… since he never appears again, I guess that he was an illusion, probably sent by the old man? We don’t get any answers on this, so I’m just guessing.

Overall, this chapter was… not a very engaging introduction, given that the bulk of it is Covenant rambling on about whatever crosses his mind. Yes, we get a bit of backstory, sure, but it’s told as a story, and that makes it hard for me to engage, too. Aside from that, Covenant doesn’t come across as pleasant, which is Donaldson’s intent, but it just doesn’t help.

Next time, we’ll be getting more of Covenant’s backstory, this time as a story. Until then!