This is, for the most part, a Very Good Fantasy.

The world is beautiful, the characters aren't entirely one-dimensional, and the story is interesting. 

Thomas Covenant is a leper, transported to a fantastical realm where his resemblance to a hero of legend brings forth a great quest to end the menace of the greatest evil reborn. 

Tick, tick, tick. Only (CW: sexual assault)

MC rapes a child, early in the book, and it's handled in a way that felt had me disgusted more with Donaldson than with Covenant.

It also suffers with Things Important to the Story only being important when it pushes the story along. So we get a leper that compulsively checks his extremities for potentially lethal small cuts and abrasions, quite happy to ignore these checks after falling from a cliff and knocking himself out. It's okay, he is ungrazed. He believes himself to be dreaming and says so whenever it's inconvenient to the smooth running of the quest, but travels and eats and drinks and sleeps and dreams without mention of it for dozens of pages at a time.

It makes an otherwise really pleasant read something more deeply flawed, and that's a shame.

I'm having a hard time solidifying my thoughts on Lord Foul's Bane. In some ways I found it very enjoyable, in others it was a massive slog. The worldbuilding was, to borrow a cliche, wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle. Donaldson's prose was sometimes extremely effective, especially in his use of figurative language to describe both emotional and physical things, but I never felt that I fully understood Thomas Covenant's thoughts and feelings, despite the book being solely dedicated to his point of view.

Donaldson did make a lot of very interesting and meaningful choices when writing this book: Covenant is an unlikable prick who has no agency throughout the entire plot, but he is those things on purpose; he even takes the time to consider the fact that since the plot began he has simply been caught up in the flow of events beyond his control. A protagonist lacking agency in his own story is not inherently a bad thing if he is written that way intentionally. Covenant's lack of agency in the Land (we really couldn't come up with a better name than that, eh?) was very clearly a deliberate choice by Donaldson and I do think it works well. It mirrors the lack of direction he has experienced in his own life on Earth since his diagnosis. He goes through the motions, he refuses to die, but he doesn't consider why. He has nothing to live for, yet he continues to live. He has built these impenetrable emotional barriers as a defense almost out of instinct and he never once considers if they are actually helping him. Repeatedly he is told by denizens of the Land "You are closed to me." He makes the effort to remain closed.

I can recognize these facts about Covenant and recognize that there are two more books that will hopefully continue to explore these themes but I am still left wondering at a lot of his choices throughout the book simply because they are not given much, if any, actual explanation. In a late scene, Covenant exerts a rare moment of control over the narrative and summons the Ranyhyn, a noble race of wild horses very clearly inspired by Tolkien's descriptions of Shadowfax. He is surrounded by scores of them, more than anyone has ever seen before, and he spurns them all. Later he refers back to this moment as the moment when he made a bargain as a way to cope with the impossibility of the place he found himself fighting with the impossibility of denying what he was experiencing, says this was where he swore never to kill again, but in the moment none of this really comes through. It creates an off-kilter experience where even the important moments of Covenant's internal growth feel obfuscated and I don't know how intentional any of that is.

Also of note is the subtle undercurrent of environmentalism to the story. It's not a main focus and I don't even know how intentional it was, but there is often a sense that part of what makes the people of the Land good is their reverence for and ability to live and work in harmony with the Land itself. There's a conversation where Covenant says something along the lines of not being used to views like he often sees, that on Earth they would call it "scenery." The person he is talking to says they don't like that word, that it has a dark undercurrent to it. Covenant replies that it means that people think they can do without it. This stance, that "scenery" is something people could do without, is not presented as a positive one at all. There are a few other moments like that that make for an interesting little throughline to follow.

I am going to continue with the next two books because I want to see where the character of Thomas Covenant ends up and also because I told my girlfriend's dad that I would read them and I don't want to disappoint him but I also think I might take a short break before reading The Illearth War.

Uncomfortable with reaction to main characters rape of secondary character