Books That Made Me: Part Four – Lord Foul’s Bane – Stephen Donaldson
Unlike all the rest of the reviews in this series, this isn’t exactly a positive review. You’ll see as I explain further. Also there are content warnings for rape, rape culture, and abuses of power/authority.
**
So one of the things about living overseas and being a voracious reader is that books in your native language can either be hard to come by or really prohibitively expensive. Like buying a mass market paperback for something close to 20$ US (or 60 in local currency). So when your retired librarian grandmother sends you a media mail bag of nothing but books she picked up at library sales, you are nothing less than extremely grateful. You’ll read anything at that point, no matter if it’s the fourth book in the series or the ninth. Some of it might not necessarily be things you would have chosen for yourself, but beggars can’t be choosers as the old saying goes. I was so thirsty for new reading material I’d read anything and everything, including some of my father’s seminary textbooks.
Lord Foul’s Bane was one of the books in one of the M-Bags that we received and it took me a while to get around to it, but I eventually did around the same time that we were working with a volunteer team that had come from our former hometown back in the States. That will be important later.
This was the first book in a series and the protagonist, Thomas Covenant isn’t a likable one. You feel sorry for him, of course, because he’s contracted a disease (leprosy) that might as well be extinct in some parts of the world. It’s a very isolating disease and the toll that takes on the body and mind can be severe if steps aren’t taken to remediate some of that. It’s harder to work around the constraints but not actually impossible.
As one does in a certain subset of fantasy novels, Covenant gets transported to this other place after running into someone who mutters strange things that don’t make any sense to him (yet). He is understandably disoriented and in this place, he also has to contend with the fact that the leprosy didn’t follow him here and neither did any of its effects (except for the fingers he’s already lost). He’s also believed to be a reincarnation of one of their greatest heroes by several of the locals.
One of the first things he does in this strange new land is rape someone who was kind to him. He does try to “make up” for it later on in the book as he realizes the scope of his transgression (or possibly that his victim’s mother finally gets through to him because she follows him and continually asks for justice for her daughter against him), but to my recollection he doesn’t actually apologize to the person he hurt. And you know, apart from that, it’s a standard 70’s power fantasy novel written by a white dude.
So here’s where fiction and reality intersect in a not-great way.
So at the time I was reading this, I was working with my father managing one of the volunteer teams that had come to work with us, like I mentioned above. Part of my duties were people herder, translator, and all around tour guide/fount of knowledge. I was 15-16ish and responsible for anywhere between 3 to 13 other people depending on who was in my group and where we were headed. We were on our way across the border when I pulled out the book and at that time, I’d only had the first chapter or so read. The team leader saw the cover and remarked that it had been one of his favorite books and then made the comment that the best books in the genre were always the ones with maps in the front.
He’d been a good guy and pretty chill for someone who volunteered to lead a trip full about 20 teenagers overseas with a solid 19+ hours of transit. He had a wife and kids, the eldest daughter and wife had come with him on the trip. And then I read further in the book and wasn’t sure if I really liked it or not. It was different from other stuff I’d read, but I was on the fence if it was good or not. The worldbuilding was sort of interesting but I hated the main character and he never really seemed to be punished for his initial crime. Unless you count “having leprosy” as a punishment and I didn’t. The leprosy existed prior to him deciding to rape his victim. It was also the kind of book that left me feeling a little like I needed to take a shower and wash whatever the residue of what I’d just read off.
Fast forward a couple months and that same dude turns himself in to the local cops for some statutory rape charges.
Now I want to make it VERY CLEAR, correlation is not causation and he’d never ever touched me in a way that was at all inappropriate and neither did I see him do so to anyone else, including his wife, during the time I saw him in the group stuff we all participated in while they were overseas visiting.
However, I remember the day we learned about it from an email that one of my dad’s old friends still back there sent over. How the email had emphasized that the former team leader was still a friend no matter what and that he’d turned himself in peacefully. How my father insisted up and down and sideways that it had to have been something in a classroom like setting and that it was a moment of weakness and it wasn’t as bad as it initially sounded. It couldn’t be.
I heard that and remembered Thomas Covenant and the council and how he really didn’t seem to pay for his crime at all. How it was treated as regrettable but certainly not something he’d be imprisoned or put on trial for. How Lena’s mother asked for justice but that was set aside in order to “save the Land.”
I loved fantasy, but this was a turning point for me. I’d always been someone who would read anything and everything, but not after this. My fantasy intake was much choosier after this, because I refused to touch things like Covenant. I came to fantasy to escape from everything going on in my real life and things like this weren’t an escape. They were just a reinforcement that not even my literature was “safe” from the dangers that I faced on a semi-regular basis.
So yeah, this book left its mark on me, but not in a good way.