The Last Dark: The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book Four, by Stephen R. Donaldson, reviewed by Michael Levy

New York: Putnam Books, 2013; $35.00 hc; 557 pages

I was the perfect age when The Lord of the Rings came out, a junior or senior in high school, and I fell head over heels in love with it as have so many teens. Before Tolkien, I was basically a science fiction guy, but LOTR changed that. I remember that the Conan books also started coming out a few years later in new paperback editions, and I consumed those, too, and Lovecraft and all of the dozens of other older books that soon were being reprinted as “in the tradition of” one of the big three. The exact publication dates, I must admit, kind of swirl around in my head in a sweet, nostalgic fog, but the specific chronology doesn’t really matter. During the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s I discovered A. Merritt, Clark Ashton Smith, L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, Gardner Fox, and many other fantasy writers. My inclusion of Fox in this otherwise illustrious roll call, of course, may say something about my critical standards at the time, even though by 1969 I was an English major at the University of Illinois and a member of the campus Tolkien Society. When the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series began, I bought and read every single volume, for all that some of them were kind of squirrelly (what was E. R. Eddison going on about?) or slow (did anything actually ever happen at Gormenghast?). Then the del Reys came along and more or less created the idea of modern generic high fantasy, what some have come to call, not always justly, extruded fantasy product. The Sword of Shannara and its many sequels were definitely extruded product—in memory at least they made Gardner Fox look good—but then there was this Stephen R. Donaldson fellow and his Lord Foul’s Bane. I wasn’t quite sure what to make of him.

Donaldson felt kind of Tolkienic at his best, but he also felt kind of Terry Brooksian at times as well, and he was darn difficult, to boot. I was in graduate school by this time, working on a PhD dissertation in seventeenth century poetry. I could read entire Shakespearean sonnets and pretty much know what every word meant, but this Donaldson, he continued to stump me; there were words I didn’t know on almost every page, and more often than not he wasn’t even making them up as Tolkien did. That didn’t seem fair. And his hero was a grade-A jerk, not a bit warm and humble like Frodo or awesome and romantic like Aragorn or even hyper-alpha like Conan. He was a self-pitying, somewhat sadomasochistic nonhero, broken, sometimes monstrous. What was that about? Still, I kind of enjoyed Lord Foul’s Bane and read the other books in the initial trilogy with increasing pleasure as Donaldson gradually mastered his craft. I continued into the second trilogy but stopped about halfway through The One Tree for reasons of which I’m not entirely sure—I just got tired of the series, I suppose. To be honest, I never even thought about giving The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant a try when they started coming out a few years ago, but then this fat final volume of the tetralogy, The Last Dark, appeared on my doorstep quite unexpectedly with a request for a review. Normally, when I’m asked to review a later book in a series, I go back and read or reread the earlier volumes first, but it wasn’t practical in this case. Fortunately Donaldson supplies an unusually detailed and generally quite coherent “What Has Gone Before” summary for new or forgetful readers, and as I worked my way through it, I found myself remembering, often with delight, some of the highlights of the earlier works. This increased my interest in reading this last volume considerably.

Thomas Covenant is at the center of the novel, of course, but his on-again/off-again girlfriend/companion Linden Avery, the Chosen, by now a figure of almost as much power and as many honorifics as Covenant himself, gets essentially equal billing with the ur-Lord. Linden’s deeply autistic adopted son, Jeremiah, also emerges as both a major character and figure of great power, particularly after he resolves his own disability. Backing them up is a huge cast of supporting characters, some of them dating from Lord Foul’s Bane, and others more recently introduced. It is perhaps only Donaldson’s willingness to kill his characters off that keeps his dramatis personae under any sort of control, though it must be noted that a number of dead characters in the series simply refuse to stay dead or otherwise manage to have active roles after their deaths.

In the previous volume of The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Against All Things Ending, the end of the world is clearly at hand. The Worm of the World’s End, which “formed the foundation of the Earth,” according to the Elohim (a “mystic people” who may in fact be incarnations of the stars themselves), is poised to eat, well, everything, the entire pocket universe that is Donaldson’s the Land. Linden Avery has just rescued Jeremiah and is attempting to free him from the croyel, a succubus-like creature which holds him captive, and Thomas has had to fight off his own evil son, Roger, with a powerful magic dagger called the krill. Transported by a magical being called the Ardent to the Lower Land, a great swampy area to the east of much of the series’ main action, Covenant, Avery, Jeremiah, and their small band of colorful and disparate followers, each of whom has different powers or magic items, fight a series of battles with a wide variety of evil creatures of many different species, with one or the other of our two protagonists often rendered either temporarily mad or unconscious so they never really have much time to talk to each other. Eventually, though they don’t want to, Avery and Covenant must split up, each going on her or his own desperate quest to save the world or some subset thereof. These quests, continued in The Last Dark, involve an enormous swamp monster called the Lurker, various giants with names like Frostheart Grueburn and Onyx Stonemage, evil Cavewights, intelligent horses and their men, Ravers, Haruchai warriors, Forestals, Feroce, awful “laval” monsters called the Skurj, She Who Must Not Be Named, and even Covenant’s mad but magically powerful wife, Joan, the evil Roger’s mother. As the Worm approaches from the east, eating the stars as it comes, preceded by an enormous tsunami (and remember our heroes are on low ground), Kevin’s Dirt, a hideous miasma that destroys both magic and the will to survive, spreads from the west. Lord Foul lurks in the background, and everything seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Oh, and when day comes, the sun doesn’t rise.

The plot of The Last Dark is every bit as byzantine as the other novels in the series, but Donaldson is at the same time fairly predictable. We alternate between several chapters spent with Linden Avery and several spent with Thomas Covenant. Later they join forces again. Scenes feature the protagonists and secondary characters proclaiming their purposes, desires, fears, loyalties, or shortcomings or, alternately, thinking about their purposes, desires, fears, loyalties, or shortcomings in the third person. Tactics are debated and plans laid. Then, the talky bits over for the moment, violent action occurs, often involving a gallop across a ruined landscape, a heroic climb up a cliff, a dangerous wade through a swamp, or rapid movement through some other, larger-than-life, hideously dangerous, and intensely foreboding setting. Monstrous and exotic creatures are discovered (only some of them mentioned in the previous paragraph), each of whom speaks in its own unique voice, each of whom has its own unique magical powers. These monstrous creatures may be sympathetic to Avery’s or Covenant’s quest, hostile to it, or neutral. Meeting them invariably leads to either violent and deadly altercations (with significant numbers slaughtered on both sides) or extended negotiation or more time spent on proclaiming purposes, desires, fears, loyalties, or shortcomings. There are always new magics and magic items, new monsters, upped antes. This gives the plot a feeling of being not only formulaic but grand operatic. The soprano and the tenor are always singing their hearts out in various duets and trios with the bass periodically thundering out a showstopping, earthquake-inducing aria of mythic proportions. It’s all larger than life sorrow, Sturm und Drang, Wagnerian over-emoting. That Donaldson is in fact a fan of Wagner’s work should surprise no one.

Now the above paragraph may sound negative, but it really isn’t. There’s more to the novels than what I’ve just suggested, of course, but these formulae and set pieces, I would argue, are at the center of Donaldson’s fiction. From day one with Lord Foul’s Bane to now with The Last Dark, Donaldson has always been over the top. That’s his method. His tales have always been operatic, his characters always bigger than life, their odds of success always longer and longer. The Sturm und Drang, the constant emphasis on the protagonists’ self doubts, the violent action scenes, the exaggerated vocabulary, and the kitchen-sink plotting are simply what he does. It’s perfectly okay to not like this kind of thing, and many people, including a fair number of reviewers and academics do not, but these formulae aren’t faults in his method; they are his method, and guess what? When all is said and done, he does this sort of crazy thing, as his legions of fans will attest, better than anyone else in the field. Donaldson might not be for everyone, but then neither is Wagner.

You will, of course, notice that I’ve given almost no attention to the plot specifics of The Last Dark. Obviously those specifics are the heart of the book; they are what those who love Donaldson’s work will love about the novel, and they will cause those who don’t appreciate his fiction to once again sneer and turn their back on it. But in a critical sense, those specifics don’t really matter. Which monster is vanquished and which one ends up helping Covenant is almost irrelevant. Who wields which form of magic doesn’t really affect things. You can substitute the monsters and magics or others pretty much at random throughout the book, and the plot will still go crashing on in the same direction. Donaldson does what he does extremely well, and he knows exactly what he’s doing. The colorful, chaotic complexity of his work is what his readers love; even the sadness, agony, and suffering with which he inundates his characters are larger than life and can prove greatly rewarding to those readers. Since this book has been clearly proclaimed to be the last volume of the last chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a somewhat greater amount of tying up of loose ends occurs than previously, but I have to say that it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if, a few years from now, we see the publication of the first volume of the chronicles of Jeremiah Covenant. In the novel’s last two pages, Thomas, Linden, and Jeremiah may have recreated the nuclear family, but Thomas still says, “we’re too dangerous, Jeremiah and me,” to stick around the Land, and it’s clear that he will never be an entirely happy camper. He’s actually carrying Lord Foul the Despiser along with him in his mind at this point, though Thomas hopes that he “can persuade him to relax. Maybe I can even convince him to think of me as something more or better or at least kinder than his worst enemy” (534). If Donaldson should grow to miss the Land, which is, after all, one of the great playgrounds of modern fantasy, there are still plenty of possibilities for grand opera and awe-inspiring fireworks.

Michael Levy still lives in Menomonie, Wisconsin, where he has been tricked once again into being a department chair at his university. He is beginning to understand why Thomas Covenant is so damn grouchy.