The huge popularity of The Lord of the Rings led in later decades to a boom in similar epic fantasy. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, a trilogy subsequently expanded with further volumes, is one of the earliest and most interesting examples. The Illearth War is the second part of the original trilogy, which was retrospectively dubbed The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
I suspect what would have struck most readers when the First Chronicles first came out in the late 70s would have been just how different Donaldson’s work is to Tolkien’s. Donaldson has a deeply unsympathetic, flawed and psychologically complex protagonist hero, and the sort of grim realism found in popular contemporary epic fantasy. For a reader today the similarities to Tolkien stand out more. Though I am not a fan of that brand of epic fantasy, overall Donaldson does enough differently to keep me interested throughout this 500-page volume as well as its equally long predecessor.
Thomas Covenant is a successful writer whose life has been wrecked by the devastating condition of leprosy. In the first volume, following an accident that renders him unconscious, Covenant wakes to find himself in a sort of Tolkeinesque world. Unable to entirely believe or entirely disbelieve the veracity of his experiences, he is uneasily drawn into events in a world where the inhabitants seem intent on regarding him as a magical saviour. In this volume a similar event brings him back to the magical world, The Land. Though this is only a matter of weeks after the first incident, in the Land 40 years have elapsed and war with dark forces is now reaching the stage of an open clash of armies.
I liked the book a lot, even more than the first volume. It has more pace and less scene setting, with interesting new characters which are to some extent foils to the exasperating Covenant. It can be very grim reading at times. However Donaldson gives us something that is original (despite the heavy debt to Tolkien) and distinctive, complex and intriguing. The books are well known for their unsympathetic protagonist and that is very true. Covenant is certainly no heroic personality, not even an anti-hero. He is an original and clever creation nevertheless, not easy to understand and impossible to like (at least after two volumes). Some readers apparently find Donaldson’s prose style a barrier, finding it too purple. I like his style and I particularly liked the rather arcane vocabulary he frequently deploys, which I think is ideal for this kind of fantasy writing. I recommend you try this trilogy if you are interested in epic fantasy.
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- Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 April 2016
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- Mr SummersReviewed in Australia on 29 June 2020
Still good - but not quite up to the first one
