The Illearth War [Anglais] [Relié]

It's obvious that Donaldson was cutting his teeth, so to speak, while writing Lord Foul's Bane. To be certain, that book had periods of brilliance, such as the occurrences in Andelain, but all in all it was probably the weakest book in the series. (That doesn't mean it isn't good - just that the rest of the books are incredible.)

In The Illearth War Covenant is called back to the Land for a second time, and his image of a reluctant hero is burnished in our mind even more than it was in the previous book, for while he was being summoned he was also on the phone with his ex-wife, Joan. The woman who left him for fear of his leprosy, the woman with whom he was still in love, the woman who was telling him, right then, that she missed and needed him. So he protests his summoning vehemently, but to no avail. As the new High Lord Elena indicates, they have no knowledge of how to send a person back once a summons is complete.

The Council of Lords has some new faces on it. It's been forty years since Covenant has been to the Land, and seven years (seven "Land" years) remain until the fulfillment of Foul's ominous prophecy from Lord Foul's Bane. The Lords are desperate. While they regained the Staff of Law and found High Lord Kevin's Second Ward at the end of Lord Foul's Bane, they have learned very little. The language, they find, is difficult to penetrate, and they find themselves unequal to the task of mastering the lore. Due to their sense of overwhelming failure and inadequacy, and other baleful events, they make the decision to summon Covenant.

There is another addition to Revelstone: Hile Troy. He is a character from the "real world", someone who has read (or had read to him) Covenant's best selling novel. This is, perhaps, Donaldson's way of telling us that Covenant's experiences most definitely is not a dream (which Covenant is still convincing himself of). He's also blind, and unlike Covenant - who maintains fierce unbelief - Troy believes in the Land with a passion that precludes life.

Many readers interpret Troy's character as what Covenant *should* be. If Hile Troy had a white gold ring, his passion, his love for the land (for it allowed him to see again - and besides, everyone, even the readers, fall in love with the Land) would lead him directly to a confrontation to Foul. Unfortunately, not understanding the dilemmas of power, he would likely experience a resounding defeat. What people don't understand about Covenant, and Troy's character is supposed to help them understand this, is that Covenant's stubborn unbelief exists for a reason. In Lord Foul's Bane, Donaldson meticulously discussed the rigors of leprosy, what it meant to be a leper, what it meant to *survive* as a leper. And though bitter and angry at life and everything around him - or perhaps because of his bitterness - Covenant made the decision to live. And living entails never, ever letting your guard drop for one second. Because if you do, you can bump into something, not realize that you're bleeding internally, and die of hemorrhaging; gangrene can set in; and much more. So Covenant's unbelief, while incredibly frustrating, is completely understandable. He needs to believe that the Land isn't real, because if he gives in to it, then when he wakes up from his dream (for it may be a dream), his guard may drop, and he could die.

So it's unfortunate that people don't recognize Troy for what he is, and see him for exactly the opposite of what Donaldson intended.

Other reviewers have said this is the best book in the series. I love this book, as it introduces some extremely intriguing relationships and concepts (Elena and Amok, the latter of which is the key to High Lord Kevin's Seventh Ward - talk about heightened anticipation), and the devastating fear that Foul has mastered the Illearth Stone to such a degree that he can cut chips off of it and give it to his servants (Ravers).

The battle of Garrotting Deep (yes, similar in placement and scope to the epic Battle of Helm's Deep in The Two Towers) shows that Donaldson, like Tolkien before him, can write both of beauty and of beauty's absence in the heart of darkness of war. He is quite adept at handling battle scenes.

Many second books suffer from the so-called sophomore slump. Not this one. I don't think Donaldson is capable of writing such a book, as The One Tree (the second book in The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant) is arguably the most intriguing of the series, and within that book in particular are the seeds for the Last Chronicles, which everyone - and I mean everyone - should read.

This is Donaldson's best book -- the best of the Covenant series and better than any other fantasy written in the past 20 years. It's that good. Continuing the story from Lord Foul's Bane, the reluctant anti-hero leper Thomas Covenant returns to the mysterious Land, where he is again called upon to save it even as he must deny its existence to try and maintain his sanity. Of course, there is the added twist that he doesn't even know how to use the awesome power of the white gold wedding band at his wrist, even if he wanted to. Meanwhile, in the "real world," life is getting even tougher for Covenant. The forces of evil are at work in both worlds, with a titanic war splitting the Land and threatening to destroy it utterly. It's rare these days for a fantasy to be truly fantastic. Too often, hacks like David Eddings or Terry Brooks simply recycle plots from their earlier days and write hack and slash 'em pulp novels that are read one day and mind-flushed the next.

Donaldson's novels sear themselves into your brain, so that you remember them for years, decades after you last read them. The characters -- Foamfollower, the Bloodguard, Lord Mhoram, Lena -- each is deep and rich with emotional scars and a quiet strength and courage. Covenant in comparison can't help but appear bad, yet somehow, through his travels in the Land, he slowly, slowly manages to find his humanity again that had been stripped away by leprosy and VSE. If you haven't read the Covenant series, do yourself a favor and go read Lord Foul's Bane, then the Illearth War and the rest of the books. They are the treasure of modern fantasy.

4 1/2 stars.

Having reread Lord of the Rings in anticipation of the films last year, I recently also paid a visit to another fantasy series that I enjoyed while in middle school: Thomas Covenant. Nearly 20 years later, I appreciate the books more. The themes are very adult and while I enjoyed the books as a child because Donaldson creates a great fantasy-world that will interest and draw in readers of all ages, I am better able to understand what Donaldson was trying to accomplish now that I'm older.

The Illearth War is probably the best book in the series. The quick maturation of Donaldson's writing style makes this book a much better read than the first installment. In fact, after rereading the series, I think that Donaldson knew that his second book was put together better than the first to the extent that he made it so that reading the first book really isn't necessary. There is enough back-story revealed in the first few chapters so that any reader could grasp most of what happened in the first book, as it happened, without having to read it.

In my review of the Lord Foul's bane, I was preoccupied with detailing the many similarities between the Thomas Covenant series and Lord of the Rings and, thankfully, there is much less of this in Illearth War. Obviously, the basic principles of the story are retained, but the only new thing added that seems LOTR-related is that this second novel in the TC series is a war novel (with a side story of two major characters being led by a strange guide in search of something), and thus the general structure of Illearth War is copied from The Two Towers. But Dondaldson is more his own voice here, and that is a welcome change. The psyche and personality of Thomas Covenant is fleshed out much more fully here than in LFB; ironically, since Covenant has a far less prominent role as a character here than in LFB. This is accomplished by two foils for Covenant: the Lord Morham (a good man by which we can see how Covenant may have turned out had he been born to the land), and the character of Hile Troy, a blind man who is from Covenant's world (a man who is in nearly every sense the opposite of Covenant).

Aside from some highly unlikely military tactics on the part of Lord Foul's army (I have no idea why an immense invading army would ever chase the much smaller defending army across a continent to do battle on the smaller army's terms; the larger invaders could simply set about their business of destruction and occupation and force the defenders to come to them), there is nothing about this novel that bothered me the way some small things about the predecessor did. This is a richly detailed, yet taut and economical fantasy novel -- certainly one of the best that I've ever read. Even Lord Foul is made more menacing by eliminating him from the dialogue: the reader gets to see the effects of Foul's evil rather than experience it from his mouth [a mistake Donaldson made in the first novel, IMO, was to give Foul too much to say. How do you characterize pure evil? The more Foul said, the less evil he seemed, and the more he appeared to be like the standard chortling, pontificating villain that we've seen a million times in novels and film; the type where the hero makes his escape while the self-satisfied villain goes into exhaustive detail about the various ways in which he is going to torture and kill the hero].

The novel is dark stuff, and sometimes emotionally draining. But the life put into these characters makes their every decision and action one to linger over and abosrb before moving on. If you're not hooked on the Thomas Covenant series after reading Illearth War, nothing else in either of the two series will likely do it for you.