Stephen R. Donaldson’s Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: Fatal Revenant
Saturday, May 24th, 2008We had to actually look up what “revenant” meant. Normally I would’ve had that one.. but unfortunately D&D references always skew my memory. It means, literally, ghost. Or more exactly disquited spirit (thank you Wikipedia) from Eastern European folklore.
Not having finished the novel I can’t comment on if it ends well, but at the halfway point it’s proved to be up to Donaldson’s usual standard. Characters filled with emotion and human foibles thread through the story along with the empowered embodiments of ideas and extremes. While there aren’t a huge cast of central characters each one is thoroughly, almost exhaustively, plumbed for depth in typical Covenant novel fashion.
Even taking the detail of Fatal Revenant into account (normally something that turns me off to a novel) I like the book. For some reason it clicks quite a bit better than other novels that expound at length on detail. Thinking on it, that’s probably due to the exposition being used on the characters, rather than merely their surroundings. Thomas Covenant novels evoke a visceral reaction that most books can’t, and this latest book is no exception.