The Mirror of her Dreams
A Man Rides Through It

Literary Quality:
Christian Morality: Harmless
Age Appropriateness: Adult

"Although there's quite a bit of violence; and some ends justifying the means type stuff, and some semi-explicit sex, it's actually not that bad. A much richer, less arid-feeling world than his "Thomas the Unbeliever" (see below) double trilogy. the heroine's a bit of a doormat, and the hero a bit of a dolt, but they're both good folks, there's lots of intriguing characters and the semi-clerical magic-working college is portrayed as stuffy and stubborn but not primarily evil. And the plot actually sort of works. The mostly harmless designation comes from the mirror-based magic they use and some associated questions about questions about what is real and what is illusion."

Thomas the Unbeliever

Literary Quality:
Christian Morality: Good/Dangerous
Age Appropriateness: Adult

This is the author's most famous work: pitting the embittered leper-author Thomas Covenant and several generations of allies against Lord Foul the Despiser, in The Land, a vaguely drawn, sappy-happy place of tree-hugging, vaguely New-Agey types at roughly a high-medieval technology level. Most notorious for a plot point early on, in which Thomas the Unbeliever rapes literally the first woman he meets in the Land. The sequence is not terribly graphic, and definitely not prurient, and this deed of his leads to much grief and trouble (although the storyline's treatment of his victim in the later books, where she's a crazy woman who regards him as a sort of Prince on a white horse, comes off as offensive and somehow implausible.)

The writing is crude and bombastic, the plot's zippy pace almost matched at times by its sheer illogic and/or meanspiritedness, the worldbuilding lazy (the equally "medieval" Mordaunt's Need and the one or two scifi novels by the guy that I've read are so far superior in detail of worldbuilding, and so similiar in tone that I can only conclude Donaldson bought himself a really good ghost-worldbuilder with the proceeds of his first trilogy), the characterization full of paradoxes the author cannot adequately expound, the use of magic downright dishonest at times, and the tone is extremely dour.

Yet it's a compelling read, largely and unfortunately thanks to its vision of evil. Foul, with his contempt for the organic world (hence "the Despiser") and his visions of crystalline purity, is a far more convincing take on what Lucifer is (or what Lucifer was when he fell) than many Sauron wannabes. He can turn the best intentions and the slightest failings of his enemies against them, and almost everything the good guys attempt goes awry. His fate is a clever application of the old thesis that the devil cannot stand to be mocked.

With this fairly valid set of observations about the nature and M.O. of evil, however, goes a fairly asinine theology. Foul is a coeternal equal of the Creator (aka the Power that Preserves) who made this particular fantasy universe, and the Creator is occasionally described as misguided, wrong-headed, or otherwise somewhat less than all powerful. Donaldson occasionally denigrates the effectiveness of virtue, by the very simple and modern expedient of assuming only "nice" traits are truly virtuous (INNOCUOUSNESS IS NOT A VIRTUE, D***IT!!!!!!!!!!), although he retains more respect for chivalry and martial courage than many such moderns do.

Thomas's chief virtue and achievement as a hero is his strange attitude of suspended disbelief towards the Land, a sort of stasis between believing and disbelieving supposedly patterned on Eastern philosophy of the Brahminist and Buddhist schools. At that level, it's annoying, but at another level it's an interesting allegory for something else altogether: Creator as original author, Thomas as chosen collaborator, Foul a sort of composite of all the really mean English professors and critics who (I assume) told Donaldson he wasn't any good and tried to get him to revise in directions he didn't approve of. The books are thought-provoking and occasionally heart-breaking (I cried really hard when introduced to the kindly, primitive mud-creatures who live in the heart of Foul's domain in "Power that Preserves"), but they are by no means easy reads, and the borderline nihilism is ultimately much more dangerous to the easily scandalized than the Manchaeism or the rape would be.

(c) 2000 - 2007
Updated 22 July, 2007
All Rights Held by the Author.
No part of these pages may be used or copied without express permission of the author.