I found a place that I hoped would be obscure, over on one side, in the back, and went to it without genuflecting, and knelt down.  As I knelt, the first thing I noticed was a young girl, very pretty too, perhaps fifteen or sixteen, kneeling straight up and praying quite seriously.  I was very much impressed to see that someone who was young and beautiful could with such simplicity make prayer the real and serious and principal reason for going to church.  She was clearly kneeling that way because she meant it, not in order to show off, and she was praying with an absorption which, though not the deep recollection of a saint, was serious enough to show that she was not thinking at all about the other people who were there.

What a revelation it was, to discover so many ordinary people in a place together, more conscious of God than of one another: not there to show off their hats or their clothes, but to pray, or at least to fulfill a religious obligation, not a human one.

photo from flickr.com

That’s Thomas Merton writing about the first time he went to Mass at about the age of 20.  It reminded me quite a bit of my first Latin Mass.  He wasn’t Catholic at that point, and I wasn’t a very good one, but I too remember sitting in the last pew and being impressed by the silence, the seriousness, and the reverence that people showed.

I’ve been wanting to do more spiritual reading and I’ve seen a lot of recommendations for this book, so I thought it might be a good one to start with.  It’s the autobiography of a man who seemed to have it all by conventional standards: enough family wealth that he could travel the world and live pretty much how he liked.  He’d spend a year in college, then live as a tourist in Rome for a while, then pop over to America to live with his grandparents and explore New York.  But as the years passed, he felt more and more that something was missing, and eventually realized that something was God.  This is his story of that journey from misspent youth to baptism and faith, and eventually to becoming a Trappist monk and priest.  (I don’t think that’s too much of a spoiler, since there’s a picture of him in his robes on the back of the book.)

One thing I like about his story is that it was a gradual process.  We hear a lot about big explosive conversion experiences, like Paul on the road to Damascus, where someone gets whapped upside the head by God and lives a saintly life thereafter.  That’s great, but I suspect it’s hard for most people to relate to.  It is for me anyway.  Merton, on the other hand, comes to the faith little by little.  First he’s simply awed by the churches and cathedrals of Europe, but as someone who was raised to think Catholics were somehow diabolical, he never paid much attention to what went on in them.

When he is baptized, it’s clearly a very meaningful event for him, but it doesn’t really change his lifestyle much.  He’s still mostly partying with his college drinking buddies and basically cruising through life.  But he starts to pray more, to attend Mass more often, to read spiritual works, and eventually he somehow finds himself thinking about becoming a priest.

photo from flickr.com

Even then it’s not an easy path, as he assumes his sinful past will disqualify him for the priesthood or religious life, and in fact it does cause the Fransiscans to reject him when he first applies to join them.  But over time his unhappiness at the thought of never being able to enter the religious life makes him realize it is his true calling, and he joins the Trappists at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky.

It’s encouraging to read about his stops and starts, to see that someone could go to Mass on Sundays and be too much “in the world” on weekdays; but that by persevering and working on it, he could gradually build his faith to deeper and deeper levels.  If we don’t hear God’s call (or hear it and reject it, more likely), He doesn’t stop calling.  No matter how many times we say “I can’t” or “I won’t,” it’s never too late for us to shape up and listen.

On a historical note, one interesting thing about this book is that, if it didn’t have any dates, you’d probably think Merton was growing up in the 60s and 70s rather than the 1930s.  He spends a good part of his twenties hanging out at colleges like Cambridge and Columbia with a bunch of other intellectual types, hitchhiking around Europe to see the sights, letting his hair and beard grow long, becoming a Communist for a while, and just taking it easy.  He was like a 60s hippie prototype, 30 years before his time!  It goes to show those things weren’t invented in the 60s; they just became more popular then.

Anyway, it’s a very good book.  He’s pretty quiet about the actual details of his sordid past, but that’s probably appropriate.  There’s often a fine line between relating those things for educational purposes and bragging about them.  When he starts riffing on God’s grace and divine love, on the other hand, sometimes he’s downright poetic.  The book ends soon after he’s accepted into the monastery, so it doesn’t go into the Trappist life much.  I’ll have to see if he wrote any more books that cover that.

Transported out of all restraint, Linden turned at last to Mhoram.

“And you,” she said, quiet as venom.  “You.  They called you ‘seer and oracle.’  That’s what I’ve heard.  Everytime I turn around, he tells me he wishes you were with him.  He values you more than anyone.”  Her anger and grief were one, and she could not contain them.  Fury that Covenant had been so misled; tearing rue that he trusted her too little to share his burdens, that he preferred despair and destruction to any love or companionship which might ease his responsibilities.  “You should have told him the truth.”

The Dead High Lord’s eyes shone with silver tears—yet he did not falter or vanish.  The regret he emitted was not for himself: it was for her.  And perhaps also for Covenant.  An aching smile twisted his mouth.  “Linden Avery”—he made her name sound curiously rough and gentle—”you gladden me.  You are worthy of him.  Never doubt that you may justly stand with him in the trial of all things.  You have given sorrow to the Dead.  But when they have bethought themselves of who you are, they will be likewise gladdened.  Only this I urge of you: strive to remember that he is also worthy of you.”

Formally, he touched his palms to his forehead, then spread his arms wide in a bow that seemed to bare his heart.  “My friends!” he said in a voice that rang, “I believe that you will prevail!”

Still bowing, he dissolved into the rain and was gone.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Finally, my review of the last book of the second Covenant series.  When I first read it twenty years ago, I was sure it was the last book, period, because the ending is very final.  Surprise surprise, it turns out that when Donaldson wrote it, he already had the Last Chronicles planned out to follow.  Those are only half-finished though, and the last book won’t come out until 2013, so this will be the end of my Covenant reviews for now.

This book parallels the ending of the first season in some ways, but it’s also very different.  Covenant reaches a point again where he knows he has to face Foul, but instead of needing a way to trigger his venom-enhanced power, this time he needs to keep Foul from forcing him to use it.  The Haruchai reach a crisis of faith in themselves much as the Bloodguard did in the first series, but they’re able to find a different (if not better) answer this time.  The Giants are as strong and loyal as ever, but their choices aren’t as simple as Foamfollower’s were.

Just when Linden is beginning to make peace with her own power, she discovers that Covenant means to face Foul essentially unarmed.  Without his power he can do nothing but surrender, which is the one sin she never forgave in her parents and can’t accept in him.  Yet her health-sense tells her he doesn’t have a surrendering bone in his body, so he becomes an enigma to her.  She can see his sanity and confidence and the strength of his resolve, but she can’t imagine how those things can exist without power to back them up, which leads to the scene I quoted above.

I really love this last book; it does a great job of tying up all the threads from this series and even some ideas from the first one.  The scale of this series is bigger, and so are the stakes, and the characters expand to meet the demand.  Linden is an amazing character; possibly my favorite female character of all the books I’ve read.  Many male authors aren’t very good at writing women, but Donaldson attributes his success in that area to being the only boy in a family full of sisters.

In his interviews, Donaldson says one of his main goals in any story is to give all the characters their own dignity.  In other words, whoever the character is, whether he’s a main character or a bit part, good or evil or indifferent, he should always act true to himself.  In so many books, even the main character is a cipher or a stereotype, and the other characters are little more than window dressing.  Every character, even the evil or crazy ones, should think his actions make sense.  All Donaldson’s characters, though they’re often desperately flawed or broken people, are true to their own perspectives.  In this book, so many of them carry that dignity to completion—for good or ill, each one finds a resolution to his own hurts and failings.  It’s emotionally draining, but if you’re someone who was able to really get immersed in the story, it’s a true experience.

Well, I think that’s enough gushing from me.  I hope people have enjoyed it, and that I’ve encouraged a few to give the books a try sometime.  I’m not sure what I’ll review next.  Any suggestions of genre?  I’ve got a little of everything.

“I know nothing of that,” retorted Brinn.  “I know only that she attempted Ceer’s life.”

Without warning, Covenant broke into a shout.  “I don’t care!”  He spat vehemence at Brinn as if it were being physically torn out of him.  “Linden saved me!  She saved all of us!  Do you think that was easy?  I’m not going to turn my back on her, just because she did something I don’t understand!”

“Ur-Lord—” Brinn began.

“No!”  Covenant’s passion carried so many implications of power that it shocked the deck under Linden’s feet.  “You’ve gone too far already!”  His chest heaved with the effort he made to control himself.  “In Andelain—with the Dead—Elena talked about her.  She said, ‘Care for her, beloved, so that in the end she may heal us all.’  Elena,” he insisted.  “The High Lord.  She loved me, and it killed her.  But never mind that.  I won’t have her treated this way.”  His voice shredded under the strain of self-containment.  “Maybe you don’t trust her.”  His half-fist jabbed possibilities of fire around him.  “Maybe you don’t trust me.”  He could not keep himself from yelling.  “But you are by God going to leave her alone!”

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

In this middle book of the second Covenant trilogy, Covenant decides his only hope is to create a new Staff of Law, to give him a way to heal the land without unleashing his increasingly erratic power.  So with Linden, Sunder, and Hollian, he heads east out of the Land, hoping to retrace the steps of Berek Halfhand, the legendary hero who created the first Staff from a limb of the One Tree.

This book is unique of the first six in that it’s the only one where the characters leave the Land.  It really opens up the story, as Covenant and Linden encounter Giants and sail with them and encounter other beings and places which were only legends in the earlier books: the Elohim, beings of enormous power with their own agenda for Covenant’s ring; The Bhrathair and the Sandgorgons, poised against each other for survival in the desert; the Nicor, sea creatures so large humans are beneath their notice; the merewives of the deep, whose siren song is more powerful than any man’s will; and many others.

Along the way, they are beset by Ravers trying to push Covenant’s power beyond his control.  When Covenant is unable to defend himself, Linden has to find her own sources of power, without succumbing to her own demons.

The Giants are one of the best parts of the book.  In the first trilogy, Foamfollower had a huge impact on Covenant and the way the story turned out, but he didn’t appear that long overall.  Here, we get a shipful of Giants, in their element upon the sea.  The First of the Search, a warrior whose loyalty is absolute; Pitchwife, her deformed husband whose humor keeps the Quest from despair; Seadreamer, the mute Giant whose visions both drive the Quest and doom it; and his brother Honninscrave, the ship’s master, who is tortured by being unable to help his brother as his crisis looms.

Linden continues to find her way and begins to realize that maybe she’s not as evil as she thought, that maybe she can even do good in the world.  She and Covenant get to share some happiness on the way to the One Tree, and it gives the book some refreshingly light moments.

In the end, the Quest has to return to the Land, as Covenant’s Dead told him in Andelain.  They’ve lost some things and gained others, and Covenant has come to terms with the responsibility he left the Land to escape.  Linden…well, she keeps growing within herself and gaining strength, convinced that eventually she will have to accept Covenant’s power—or combat him for it.

Covenant snatched at her wrist. “Listen.” His voice must have held emotion—urgency, anguish, something—but she did not hear it. “This you have to understand. There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.”

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

In this first book of The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, by Stephen R. Donaldson, it has been ten years since Covenant’s last trip to the Land.  During that time, he gets control of his leprosy and begins writing again.  His life reaches a certain level of peace until Lord Foul is able to use someone close to him to pull him to the Land again, to give Foul another shot at using Covenant’s ring to escape the world which is his prison.

Everything is different this time, though, because Linden Avery, a doctor who just moved into town and met Covenant, is pulled into the Land with him.  Where Covenant’s leprosy makes him fear power, Linden’s childhood upbringing and vocation make her crave power—power to heal and make things right, whatever the cost.  Last time, Covenant had the power of the wild magic but didn’t know how to use it; this time Foul makes his power come too easily, so every time he uses it he risks destroying the world.

Ten years in Covenant’s world translates to four thousand years in the Land, and Lord Foul hasn’t been idle.  He has corrupted the Earthpower that was the essence of the Land’s beauty and life, changing it over the centuries into the Sunbane, an extreme distortion of nature and weather that makes bare existence difficult.  The people of the Land have lost their wood and stone lore, and the Lords have been replaced by the Clave, who claim to be fighting the Sunbane with the blood of people they take.

Linden can sense the pain of the Land the way Covenant could on his first visit, and the fact that she can’t escape it or fight it tears at her soul.  She yearns for power like Covenant’s so she can rip the Sunbane out of the earth, though she knows that could destroy the Land entirely.

I’d have to say I like this series better than the first three books, although you shouldn’t read these without reading the others first.  It’s a completely fresh look at the Land, and Covenant is a different person after ten years and what he went through last time.  Having Linden as the co-protagonist makes a big difference too, as her aggression about power and fighting evil counters his hesitancy.  For people who found Covenant unlikeable, especially in the first book, she’s a much more sympathetic character.  Seeing them alternately through each other’s eyes offers insights into both of them.

The stakes are higher here, in a way, and yet more subtle.  In the first series, Foul came with armies to defeat the Lords, intending to defeat Covenant in the end and take his ring.  Here, he tries to box Covenant and Linden into a position where they’ll destroy the world for him.  He’s spent four thousand years setting up this scenario, and it’s a doozy.

Sometime later, Covenant climbed to his feet, hugging the pain in his chest. His voice was weak from the effort of speaking around his hurt. “Bannor.”

“Ur-Lord?”

“Tell the High Lord about this. Tell her everything–about Trell and me–and Troy.”

“Yes.”

“And, Bannor–”

The Bloodguard waited impassively.

“I wouldn’t do it again–attack a girl like that. I would take it back if I could.” He said it as if it were a promise that he owed Bannor for saving his life.

But Bannor gave no sign that he understood or cared what the Unbeliever was saying.

After a while, Covenant went on, “Bannor, you’re practically the only person around here who hasn’t at least tried to forgive me for anything.”

“The Bloodguard do not forgive.”

“I know. I remember. I should count my blessings.” With his arms wrapped around his chest to hold the pieces of himself together, he went back to his rooms.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

When I first read these books as a kid, The Illearth War was my least favorite. Middle books of trilogies are rarely the strongest anyway, since you don’t get the excitement of meeting a bunch of new characters or the climax of the ending. I didn’t like the fact that the main character from the entire first book disappeared for half of this one; and I didn’t like Hile Troy in the position of protagonist. Most of the interplay between Covenant and Elena went over my head at that age (probably a good thing). Foamfollower, one of the best characters of the first book, is missing in this one. All in all, I found it a disappointment.

Reading it now, I like it much more and find it just as strong as the others. Hile Troy is the perfect contrast to Covenant: a man who was also whisked away from our world to the Land, but who embraces everything about it and wants to be a hero. He has none of Covenant’s fear of power, and dismisses Covenant’s prediction that he’s setting himself up for a fall. If you spent the first book wishing Covenant would stop crying about stuff and start blasting bad guys with his ring—well, Hile Troy is your guy.

Bannor really starts to comes to life as a character here, as he’s forced to take a more active role between Covenant and the Land. The scene I quoted above sums up Bannor and the Bloodguard: they’re completely devoted to their honor and the Vow they made to the Land, and the power of that Vow has given them a nearly unstoppable ability to keep it. But if it is ever broken, how will they handle that?

Mhoram starts to shine here too, especially when Troy puts the survival of the army on his shoulders. A main theme of these first three books is the balance between passion and control—Covenant’s wild magic and Elena’s desperation versus the stoicism of the Bloodguard and the Lords’ Oath of Peace. That develops further in the next book, but Mhoram starts to see the possibilities here.

There is also more action in this book than the first one, with two armies on the move and other things going on elsewhere. That partly reflects Hile Troy’s influence, as he’s very much a man of action who makes Covenant look like a man of sitting around and fretting. By the end of the book, I like Troy a lot. He may not always do the smartest thing, and definitely not the safest thing, but he always has the right intentions.

Covenant knew that he was going to pass out—wanted hungrily to pass out—but before he lost consciousness, the hurt in his chest made him say, “Giant, I— I need friends.”

“Why do you believe that you have none?”

Covenant blinked, and saw everything that he had done in the Land.  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Then you do believe that we are real.”

“What?”  Covenant groped for the Giant’s meaning with hands which had no fingers.

“You think us capable of not forgiving you,” Foamfollower explained.  “Who would forgive you more readily than your dream?”

“No,” the Unbeliever said.  “Dreams—never forgive.”

Then he lost the firelight and Foamfollower’s kind face, and stumbled into sleep.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

I’ve always loved to read.  When I was a kid, our mom had to limit us to five books per library trip, because we’d disappear into our rooms until we finished whatever we brought home, and she wanted us to get some sunshine too.  It’d be hard for me to pick out a favorite single book; one day I might say Monte Walsh, another day Atlas Shrugged, and another day The Stand.  Different moods bring to mind different books.

Picking out a favorite series is much easier.  I love the Belgariad, and I think it’s long overdue to be turned into a TV series or miniseries (the dialogue is perfect for it), but it’s a little too light to call my favorite.  I’d have to give that honor to Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Chronicles (and Second Chronicles) of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.”  Like a lot of Covenant fans, I first read the books in high school when some of the language and topics were honestly a bit over my head, but I stretched to understand them and loved what I could absorb.  I’ve reread them every couple years since.  The Land, the Giants, the Haruchai, the Lords, the Ranyhyn, Andelain, Revelstone—all the characters and places are incredibly vivid and deeply explored.  Even today, my computers are named Bannor and Brinn after two of the Haruchai, and my usual Internet pseudonym is my favorite character from the books.

People often report either loving or hating Donaldson’s books, and the reason seems to be that he explores his characters in such emotional depth.  He takes interestingly flawed people, puts them through hellish circumstances, and shows how they can conquer those circumstances (or not), chronicling every drop of blood and sweat along the way.  Some people get bored with that—stop talking and obsessing and do something!  But some of us love it.  I’ve rarely felt like I knew characters as well as these, even some that only appear in a single book of the series.  With a few paragraphs, Donaldson can make a person come to life: not just the way the person looks, but his hopes and fears and personality.

In the first book, Lord Foul’s Bane, Thomas Covenant is an author whose first book becomes a best-seller, soon after which he is diagnosed with leprosy and loses two fingers and the feeling in his hands and feet.  His wife takes their infant son and leaves him, and the townspeople ostracize him.  After an accident, he wakes to find himself in another world where his leprosy is healed and he’s hailed as a returning hero who will save the world from its ancient nemesis, Lord Foul the Despiser.  His white gold wedding ring, which he still wears in defiance of his divorce, is considered the ultimate magical talisman, with which he will “save or damn the Earth.”

His doctors at the leprosarium warned him against this very thing: when a leper is completely cut off from society, he may begin to have delusions of grandeur and begin to think he can have an ordinary life again—or even a heroic one.  If he accepts the delusion, he won’t be able to handle waking up to his real existence, and he’ll fail to maintain the careful life that keeps his disease under control.  So Covenant insists that the “Land” isn’t real, that he’s dreaming or hallucinating, and names himself “the Unbeliever.”  From then on, he’s torn between the Land and its people which he comes to love, and his absolute need to believe they aren’t real.  In trying to maintain that insistence, he makes mistakes that hurt the people around him, and the more he tries to atone for those mistakes, the deeper in he digs himself.

I won’t go into it any further and spoil it, because it really is a great story, and I hope anyone who likes epic fantasy will read it.  It was shopped around Hollywood for a while and some big names wanted to make a series of movies out of it, but all the studios thought it would be too much like Lord of the Rings because there’s a magic ring in it.  (That’s just stupid; when a teen slasher movie is a hit, all the studios line up to copy it!)  I’m still holding out hope for a mini-series someday, though; it’s really too deep for movies.  In the meantime, I’ll review all six books.  Then there are four more coming in the “Last Chronicles,” but they won’t be finished until 2013, so we’ll have to wait a while on those.