SR Donaldson's Fatal Revenant

I've been consumed by Stephen R. Donaldson's Fatal Revenant, the second book in a tetralogy called The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I'm a big fan of the First and Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (mostly the First Chronicles), which subvert the Tolkien template and inject heavy doses of Hinduism and CS Lewis-style cosmology into the mix.

What distinguishes the Final Chronicles from the first two is that this one involves time travel. Donaldson seems to play fast and loose with this; he goes with the idea that history has a certain flow and momentum to it, allowing it to rebound from any damage inadvertently caused by time travelers; this resilience comes courtesy of the Law of Time, the fundamental law of sequence and causality. As long as the Law of Time isn't violated too deeply, history will remain intact. One powerful character in Fatal Revenant devotes his efforts to "cleaning up" history in the wake of activities by the protagonist, Linden Avery, who is transported 10,000 years backward against her will.

The history described in these novels is too complex to get into, so I won't even try that in this post. If you're a fan of the earlier chronicles, you'll probably enjoy the first two books of the Final Chronicles-- the only two out so far. Donaldson's story includes all the familiar Donaldsonian themes and tropes: women under pressure, beings with no eyes (or none that function), cosmic-scale machinations, self-sacrifice, madness (plenty of mad characters in Fatal Revenant), meditations on the nature of freedom and service, love of the land and of the wider Earth in general, and so on. Readers might find Linden Avery's inability to summon the power of the white gold to be a head-scratcher, given her mastery of it in the previous trilogy; Donaldson provides a thorough explanation for Linden's current incapacity, but it never quite rings true.

Give the books a read if you're interested. And even if you're a newbie to Donaldson's world, you can start the Final Chronicles without having read the previous two: Donaldson provides a lengthy "What Has Gone Before" intro in both of the new books, just as he did with all his previous novels-- except, obviously, the very first one.


_