…Or, The First Chronicle of How Not To Write Fantasy, by Gargleblast the Despoiler
While clearing out some decayed books from a second-hand bookshop, I came across an old fantasy brick from the 1970’s. An enthusiastic publisher had printed ‘COMPARABLE TO TOLKIEN AT HIS BEST’ below the title. I could tell this was going to be a treat.
Its yellowish-brown pages gave off the unmistakeable smell of damp cardboard, which turned out to be a far better summary of the reading experience than the publisher’s tagline. If you ever find yourself confronted with such a tome, my advice is that chewing the pages will deliver the full epic fantasy experience in considerably less time.
Lord Foul’s Bane (or “The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever”) is a bad book. It’s bad in so many ways that a tour of its incompetence promises to be rather educational. This is a very different kind of bad than what we’re used to from modern books and films: it isn’t lazy, or preachy, or playing-it-safe. An earnest attempt has been made to create something original and compelling, by a writer with some ability (Stephen Donaldson). And he has failed.
The World’s Least Sympathetic Protagonist
Lord Foul’s Banality is a fish-out-of-water story, or ‘isekai’ to anime and manga aficionados. The protagonist, Thomas Covenant, is transported from his miserable life in modern America to a mythical fantasy realm, where he is a person of power and importance. So far, so banal.
The key to Covenant’s character is that he’s a leper. The author’s father worked as a doctor among lepers in India, so this part of the story is clearly well-researched. We’re treated to several pages of medical information about leprosy, interspersed with Covenant’s misanthropic comments. Because the only other thing you need to know about Covenant is that he’s bitter. Throughout the entire book he doesn’t treat himself to a single cheerful thought. His interactions with other characters consist of three button-press options: sarcastic, angry, or complaining. At times he manages all three at once.
Patient readers might withhold judgement to begin with. Leprosy is, after all, a horrible condition – and the combination of a nasty disease and social ostracism would be enough to embitter anyone. Perhaps Covenant’s a decent person beneath this layer of leprotic bitterness, you might wonder; perhaps his attitude will improve as the story goes on. Any such illusions are quickly shattered when he arrives in fantasyland and rapes a child.
There is an idea called the ‘moral event horizon’, a metaphysical boundary beyond which nothing can redeem a character in the reader’s eyes. This is especially important when it comes to point-of-view characters. Once you’ve lost the reader’s sympathy for that character, you’ve compromised the appeal of everything that might be viewed through their eyes. In the case of Large Fowl’s Brain, that’s the entire novel written off!
To make matters worse, Covenant is shielded from any consequences by his identity as the Chosen One. The book proceeds on the assumption that we still sympathise with this immoral bastard, presumably on account of his victim status as a leper. Which has already been cured.
Anti-Hero?
Some would claim that Covenant is an anti-hero. An anti-hero is a protagonist who challenges our idea of what constitutes heroism, often by doing morally-questionable things in pursuit of a noble goal, or rejecting conventional morality in favour of his own dubious worldview. It’s a subversion of the hero archetype, and could be considered a form of demoralisation, since it aims to confuse readers about what’s good and what’s evil. By this logic, Donaldson’s leprotic rapist is a clever challenge to the simplistic morality of the 1970s.
You can buy that argument if you wish, but Covenant is simply a jerk. He brings no motivations to bear on the story, heroic or anti-heroic. He's simply determined to be as passive and ineffective as possible, while the world drags him sneering and complaining towards a prophetic destiny.
Fixing Thomas Covenant
Fans of the series will argue that Covenant gets better. He does have a character arc, and some of the events of the first book are followed up with consequences. But if it takes 36 years and nine chunky sequels to fix your character, you’re doing it wrong.
How might this character be improved from the start? The easy answer would be to remove the offending act of sexual assault, but this doesn’t address the core of Covenant’s problem. I think this can be summed up in three points:
His sarcasm and negativity make him a poor guide to the fantasy realm.
He begins with no redeeming moral qualities, hidden or otherwise.
His refusal to engage with the world around him forestalls any meaningful development of the setting or other characters.
In short, Covenant behaves like a whining kid dragged on a school trip he doesn’t want. He expresses no gratitude or joy at the lifting of a chronic wasting disease, and instead treats the blessings of the fantasy world as a threat to his anti-leprosy routine. A little curiosity, hope, or optimism would go a long way towards making him sympathetic.
The idea of an unbelieving, cynical protagonist as a foil to the settled civilisations of a fantasy world isn’t necessarily a bad one – but just as he challenges the beliefs of that world, his unbelief must itself be challenged by an intelligent adversary with compelling arguments. His unbelief should adapt and evolve, engage with the world in a meaningful way, and develop a clear and relatable motivation. There’s no stakes in a story where the protagonist believes everything to be an inconsequential dream.
Welcome To NPC-Land
If a fish-out-of-water story features a bad fish, then the water has to be really good to rescue the novel. Enter ‘the Land’. I venture that choosing this name did not stretch Donaldson’s powers of imagination. The Land is a fantasy realm populated by villages and castles, where men and women share the space with other generic nonhuman creatures like giants and cavewights. There was an apocalypse 1,000 years ago, and the main antagonist is hellbent on creating another one: overrunning the land with darkness, making everyone miserable, and generally being evil. Not exactly groundbreaking, but you can make a good story out of it.
Different cultures are defined by the stuff they like – the wood people like wood, the stone people like stone, and the horse people like horses. Each tribe has its own magical lore that relates to their substance of choice.
Compelling fantasy worlds require distinct and interesting cultures; having settled tribes based on different types of magic is a valid way of achieving this. But a culture based on materials alone does not seem resilient. All you have to do is trade wood for stone, and suddenly your two cultures lose all their distinctiveness. Donaldson’s solution to this is that ‘wood and stone are not traded’. But why not? What causes such an economically harmful taboo to be practised across the entire world, in the face of numerous existential threats? The answer to many such details of the setting is simply author’s fiat.
Perhaps this is what makes the Land feel more like toy-land than fantasyland. Nevertheless, it is a complete setting, populated by different places with mutually-consistent histories and characters. Donaldson’s version of the old fantasy cliches is more palatable than his anti-hero. From reading online reviews, fans of the series tend to like the Land despite Thomas Covenant, though there are admittedly some who invest the protagonist with a complexity he hardly deserves.
Excessive Exposition
It's a shame, then, that our introduction to the Land is achieved through enormous and somewhat unprovoked lore dumps. Characters tell you about their civilisations at length. The exposition budget is unlimited. From aliantha to clingor to lillianrill, the Land is filled with italicised nouns that demand thick paragraphs of explanation. These often turn out to be dull utility items: aliantha is a nourishing berry that grows everywhere, saving the author from logistics; clingor is leather that sticks like glue; and lillianrill is a type of holy wood. Characters who explain things to Covenant do so ‘as if reciting something learned’ rather than expressing things in their own words – reminiscent of non-player characters (NPCs) in videogames.
To dwell on just one tiresome trope of old-school fantasy that drags down Lewd Feels Bean, there is a ridiculous pattern to character introductions. The majority of characters introduce themselves like so: “I am Alice, daughter of Bob, a carglegablebarb of the dewehenninlim, also known as Eric, by the flibbleflabble Gerald of Normaltown… You are Zork of Yibble, known to Elder Xaxax by the wibblewomp who defeated High Lord Steve…”
There are dozens of these introductions. Sometimes a character will introduce themselves multiple times to different people throughout the book, using this format. It’s clearly done to convey a sense of connectedness, showing that each character is linked to the world by multiple bonds of family and identity.
But aside from the burden of dragging readers through a phonebook of lore-names every time someone says ‘hello’, it sounds incredibly pretentious to introduce yourself in this way. Medieval societies employed heralds to announce detailed information about their social status to courtly gatherings. Listing your own lineage at each greeting would be ‘blowing your own trumpet’ – literally.
If Limp Flail’s Bloon had been published 20 years later, the Land would be called NPC-Land. Like a badly-written videogame, the protagonist’s actions never affect the direction of the plot. Character actions change your dialogue interactions with NPCs, but the plot’s railroad tracks don’t budge. The lorekeeper of the village still takes him to the next checkpoint, despite the rape of her daughter! – the only difference is that she’s not happy about it.
Dear God, The Writing
Some authors are gifted enough that their prose can make a bad story compelling. It’s a bit like eating cake: there’s little nutritional value, but it tastes great while you’re chewing.
Stephen Donaldson is not one of those authors. He’s fond of showing off a broad vocabulary, but doesn’t always convince you that he knows what the words mean. ‘Lambent’ describes a flickering, flamelike glow, or a soft radiance, yet in Loud Fail’s Pain it shows up repeatedly in the place of ‘shining’. Perhaps this author is more familiar with the thesaurus than the dictionary.
Purple Prose
The Unbeliever series has often been accused of purple prose, i.e. a saturation of verbiage that achieves a relatively weak descriptive effect. While this has some truth, there’s a lot worse out there, especially in 1970s pulp fantasy. I would say instead that Lard Foil’s Bone suffers from first draft writing.
As someone with experience of writing, I can easily imagine the author sitting at his typewriter each morning and churning out page after page with minimal review of style. It’s hard to put my finger on what feature of the prose gives me this impression – is it the long paragraphs of expository description, interchangeable in tone and diction? Perhaps it’s the total lack of nuance or layered intelligence in the dialogue? Or maybe it’s Covenant’s reactions – sarcastic, complaining, bitter – that could seemingly be cut and pasted between different sections of the novel without anyone noticing?
Either way, this is not the sort of prose to study if you’re looking to elevate your style. The author has no economy of words, using as many adjectives and adverbs as he likes to complete each description. These are often the same words, lending a monotony to the effluent prose that leaves you with that impression of eating cardboard.
Noting the lack of variation in word choice, one contemporary critic suggested a game called ‘clench-racing’ as a better way of enjoying Donaldson’s novels than reading them. In this game, you and a friend open the book to a random page and the first person to find the word ‘clench’ wins. Needless to say, the game is usually completed within a matter of seconds.
(Note for audio listeners: At this point an error in editing permanently degraded the rest of the voice audio, which I’ve partially corrected by speeding up the track. Apologies!)
Dreadful Poetry
What could be worse than a bad story with an unsympathetic character that’s written in bad prose? Why, poetry of course. Writing original poetry for a novel is hard to do well, even for the best authors. The poetry in this book would make a Vogon tremble.
Tolkien got away with poetry because he was an excellent poet, as well as a professor of Anglo-Saxon who translated poetic epics for fun. He was intimately familiar with meter and verse. Many of his poems in The Lord of the Rings can be read separately as poems, and still retain their quality. The same cannot be said of this:
In war men pass like shadows that stain the grass,
Leaving their lives upon the green:
While Earth bewails the crimson sheen,
Men’s dreams and stars and whispers all helpless pass.
This is by no means the worst verse in the book – to give the author a fair chance, I picked one of the least objectionable. At first glance, the rhyme scheme is intact. The syllable count is also even: 11, 8, 8, 11. But the meter is all over the place. Look at where the stresses fall on each line:
In war men pass like shadows that stain the grass,
Leaving their lives upon the green:
While Earth bewails the crimson sheen,
Men’s dreams and stars and whispers all helpless pass.
The result is an arrhythmical mess. You might also note that a lot of the syllables are used redundantly, repeating the same point (men die) without contributing meaning or imagery. The use of an internal rhyme in the first and last line further disrupts the rhythm, turning an ABBA quatrain into a six-line stanza with an AABBAA scheme.
When writing poetry, you often get three lines of a four line stanza without really trying, but have a hard time finding the last line that fits it all together. It’s a bit like drawing faces: the last feature you draw always seems to ruin the likeness. Donaldson has clearly had the same trouble with this verse, because the third line looks like the victim of cruel and unusual torture.
Poetry is of course subjective, but to me this line comes across as declamatory, bombastic, and pretentious – like much of the writing in Laid Fool’s Brine.
Cartoonishly Evil Villain
Perhaps the benefit of 46 years of hindsight shows these old books in an unfavourable light. We’ve been treated to some great fantasy in the last few decades, a lot of which conforms to more modern, minimalist sensibilities of style and pacing. Nevertheless, some of the contents of this novel are so on-the-nose that my first thought on reading was: “Is this an intentional parody?”
This certainly applies to our eponymous villain: Lord Foul the Despiser. A good name for a two-bit literary critic, but surely not a serious villain? Alas, Lord Foul is deadly serious. And so is his four page villain monologue, a contender for the most over-the-top evil character introduction in second-rate fiction. Listen to this:
“You do well to pray to me,” the voice intoned. Its deadliness shocked Covenant like a confrontation with grisly murder. “There are no other hopes or helps for a man amid the wrack of your fate. My Enemy will not aid you. It was he who chose you for this doom. And when he has chosen, he does not give; he takes.” A raw timbre of contempt ran through the voice, scraping Covenant’s nerves as it passed. “Yes, you would do well to pray to me. I might ease your burden. Whatever health or strength you ask is mine to give. For I have begun my attack upon this age, and the future is mine. I will not fail again.”
On and on it goes. It’s a script that would make Brian Blessed blush. In the next paragraph, we learn that Lord Foul’s enemy is called… Kevin. Kevin. This world is populated by names like Atiaran, Melenkurion, Saltheart Foamfollower, Mhoram son of Valior, Loric Vilesilencer, and… Kevin.
No disrespect to all the fine Kevins out there, but this name simply doesn’t work. Imagine if the Council in the Lord of the Rings were led not by Elrond, but ‘Steve’. Even Sean Bean couldn’t have kept a straight face through the Council of Steve.
Consistency in naming is one of the most valuable tools that a fantasy writer has at their disposal when it comes to creating an authentic, richly-textured world. By using such a common English name, the obvious inference is that Kevin is an outsider from Earth, like Thomas Covenant – but according to the lore he’s just a normal person from the Land. A truly baffling decision by the author.
Lessons Learned
I suffered through 450 pages of dreadful writing so that you don’t have to. Here are the lessons, handed down with great majesty and ceremony like the Great Lore of High Lord Kevin:
If you have an ‘alternative’ or ‘anti-heroic’ character, they need to have clear motivations and engage with the world around them. Passive protagonists drain the life out of a story, unless handled carefully.
If your protagonist does something utterly despicable of their own volition, the story cannot just brush it under the rug and move on. The best present an author can give their characters is consequences.
Make your protagonist an active player in their own story – not a passenger on a railroad track. Why is their point-of-view worth listening to? What do they want? When will they take charge of a situation, and why? Think carefully about their behaviour towards others, and how others respond to them.
Fantasy lore is not as simple as throwing a load of names and ideas on the wall and picking the ones which stick. Compelling fantasy worlds must be self-consistent across multiple dimensions of analysis: time and space, language and culture, character and story all have to work together. No Kevins.
If you absolutely must add poetry to your work, spend a disproportionate amount of time ensuring that the verse is good. It only takes one forced line to destroy a poem.
Be economical with words. Save your descriptive powers for the moments and things in the story that matter most, rather than blasting the whole book with adjectives and adverbs. Limit the amount of space used for pure exposition; where exposition is necessary, present it in a manner that expresses character and moves the story, instead of bogging the reader down with lore-dumps.
It is perhaps depressing to note that despite violating so many basic principles of writing, Light Foal’s Boon sold well enough for the publisher to commission a sequel trilogy, which sold over 10 million copies. So the final lesson is that perfectionism is overrated, and a bad book sells better than no book!
Thank you for reading.
The intro/outro music is an excerpt from ‘Skyships,’ an original composition by John Wheatley.
Hey John, this is the first thing I stumbled upon after seeing you away from Lotus Eaters for so long. I should've seen it coming considering your excellent dissections of ghibli films and V for Vendetta on there among other things. Although I haven't completely gone through all articles, I must say pretty great job. I will be looking forward to other things you might be doing in the future. Cheers Mate!
This is a first! I've never mentioned this in public before but after reading John's assessment of Stephen Donaldson's first novel I thought it might be appropriate to describe (briefly) the time I spent with Stephen way back in 1988 at the World Fantasy Convention in London. The theme of the convention was Jack the Ripper as it was the centenary of the infamous murders in the East End. But that's another story..
I had only two published novels to my name at the time but I was paired with Stephen as we shared the same publisher. On one occasion he and I went to a restaurant where Stephen's eyes widened at the sight of Burt Kwouk (the pugnacious Cato from the Pink Panther film series) sitting nearby. Stephen, who was customarily a sober, serious guy, was clearly entranced to a child-at-Christmas depth by the sight of a celebrity. His response was "I *love* England! That was a side of him that never appeared in Lord Foul's Bane!
But to the point. Later that evening, Stephen talked at length about his love of opera, particularly Wagner and Mahler, and I got the strong impression that it was opera, rather than Tolkien and Peake, that was the engine behind Stephen's early writing. This, I feel, explains a lot!
P.S. I wish you every success in publishing your own work, John. You certainly have all the makings of a fine author.
Excelsior