I first read The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever by Stephen R. Donaldson when I was a youth. I was so enraptured by the story that I drew the cover of The Wounded Land on my bedroom wall with colored pencils. When I read an announcement online that the book publisher of the Thomas Covenant series had signed a movie deal, I was dumbstruck. The Unbeliever in a film? I was very excited, imagining that now, with the success of films like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, not only are wider audiences ready for fantasy adventures, but the special effects may live up to the author’s visions. Now is the perfect time for films like Thomas Covenant and Xanth to be made into films. (Sadly, the movie options for Thomas Covenant expired and, as of yet, have not been renewed.) The more I thought about it, the more I realized that while the warm fuzzy feelings associated with the book remained, the details of his journey were no longer well defined in my memory. I thought the best way to fix that would be to read the series again. I am so glad that I have. From the moment I picked up the first book, Lord Foul’s Bane, I have been unable to quit reading them, sometimes for hours at a time. I’m getting so much more out of the books now, seeing it and feeling it differently as an adult than I did when I was young.
Thomas Covenant, author, husband and father, loses everything when he becomes a leper. What started as a bruise on his right hand soon becomes an infection that leads to the amputation of the two outer fingers on his hand. His idyllic life on Haven Farm Ranch comes abruptly to an end when his panic-stricken wife Joan runs away with their young son Roger and files for divorce. Ostracized by his community and losing his identity, he’s still trying and failing to come to terms with his new reality when, after a strange encounter with a homeless man, he finds himself pulled into another reality. This new place, called “The Land” by its inhabitants, sees his newly scarred deformity and the white gold wedding band he couldn’t bring himself to remove as a sign, a fulfillment of prophecy. They believe him to be the second coming of Berek Half-hand, a hero from long ago whose return was foretold. As he finds himself forced to push forward on a journey to deliver a message from the evil-incarnate Lord Foul to the peace loving High Lords of the Land, he struggles with his inadequacies, impotence, ineffectiveness and helplessness, while others repeatedly thrust the mantle of “savior” upon him.
To accept the Land as real goes against everything a leper is taught to survive. How can he, a leper, a helpless and hopeless creature, be anything special? They call him the White Gold Wielder. He calls himself Unbeliever. How can he believe? He’s someone to be pitied, someone to be feared. He’s horrible and wonderful. He’s a hero and he’s a villain. He is everything and nothing.
Stephen R. Donaldson has created such a rich and vivid world full of layered history and complex cultures. It’s beautiful and horrible. It’s as compelling as it is appalling, and the journey that Covenant goes on explores everyone’s feelings of ineffectiveness, of hopelessness, of feeling responsible for everything that is wrong in the world and yet feeling like a helpless victim of it at the same time. Filled with violence (and a rape in the first book), Donaldson doesn’t flinch as he drags his characters through Hell and back for a second go around. What amazes me more than the vivid world he’s created is the fact that he can make the reader feel empathy for someone as pitiful as Covenant. What many people may not see, and would criticize about the books because of it, is that every single one of us has within in us the capacity to do horrible things. Covenant does. We grovel in our helplessness, we blame others for our failures, we blame ourselves for things we could not possibly have controlled. We hate ourselves and deny ourselves and cause people to suffer because of our own lack of faith in anything. Covenant does all these things and more. He’s an antihero and a paradox.
Reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant is not easy. You will be offended, angered and hurt, but you will find yourself conflicted and moved to tears for someone who is all too much like ourselves at our worst and at our best.
The Thomas Covenant series was first published in 1977, with The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant being published in 1983. In 2004, Covenant returned to the Land with The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, two volumes of which have not been published yet.
The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
Book 1: Lord Foul’s Bane (1977)
Book 2: The Illearth War (1978)
Book 3: The Power That Preserves (1979)
The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
Book 1: The Wounded Land (1980)
Book 2: The One Tree (1982)
Book 3: White Gold Wielder (1983)
The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
Book 1: The Runes of the Earth (2004)
Book 2: Fatal Revenant (2007)
Book 3: Against All Things Ending (2010)
Book 4: The Last Dark (2013)