| Stephen R Donaldson | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 04/12/07 | 17:46 |
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Ah yes, the famous rape scene. For newcomers, when Thomas Covenant awakes in the Land and finds his leprosy cured and libido restored, he more or less loses his mind and rapes his young companion. It's one of the defining scenes of the whole trilogy, and indeed is a key scene in the history of the fantasy genre itself. Before Covenant, classic fantasy heroes tended to be good and pure and upright, often oppressed or misused, but never actually bad. Covenant spends most of the first trilogy rejecting the reality of the Land, and as a result he's held up as one of the great anti-heroes of the genre. An editor with Penguin once said to me that Lord Foul's Bane was very much a product of the seventies, in a sense a rejection of the ponderous, almost cloying nature of fantasy up to that point. If the 70s was a decade in which people first got serious about stripping away the falsities of modern life, the first trilogy reflects that in the way it turns familiar fantasy tropes on their head. Of course, now everyone and his monkey has an anti-hero in an anti-magical anti-kingdom, but Donaldson was among the first to bring something as different as this to the shelves - and the antihero Thomas Covenant is much more of a "real" person than the more contrived anti-Conan of Moorcock's Elric of Melniboné books. Do you agree with this sentiment? That the first book is a product of the 70s?
Well I don't know about that. I've never had anyone say that before and I'm not entirely sure what your editor friend was getting at, but I guess it certainly was a product of the time in which it was written. Which was a time when there was a real dearth of fantasy on shelves.
Today of course you go into a shop and there are half a dozen new authors, there's just so much fantasy, but for us back then there was Lord of the Rings, there was Mervyn Peake, there was Michael Moorcock. It wasn't until Del Rey came along and launched with Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara that things started to change. And Lord Foul's Bane was the very next book. People seem to love to picket bookstores and religious groups threaten authors and filmmakers. Did you get any grief for the rape scene when the book was first released?
Interestingly I get more grief for it today than I did when it was first released. I think back then people actually had to sit down and write a letter, it was laborious and time consuming. Now you just need to visit the website!
Also I think in the early days people didn't communicate with each other, so people just didn't know unless they happened to have read the book. I've had people tell me many times that they read the rape scene and threw the book in the trash, and that reflects something I've always noticed: there are people who hate the Thomas Covenant books with a real passion. I mean, I say to those people, well why have you kept reading them for the last 30 years? But people engage, they really want me to know they hate Thomas himself, they hate Linden Avery so much, they hate the rape scene, they hate the lack of heroism throughout the books. I even had one guy - and this is hard to tell you with a straight face, and keep in mind the last of the first two trilogies was published in 1983 - I had one guy tell me he hated the books because they didn't take into account medical advances in the treatment of leprosy... that occurred after 1983. Well you could always do a second edition...
Oh wow yes, I could be like those film directors who are never happy with their work. But that would make a whole different bunch of people really angry.
People might start wearing "Thomas Shot First" T-Shirts. Do these sorts of people bother you on the website? Are there a lots of flamers or trolls?
I have to say, proportionally there are very few haters or flamers on there because I think nowadays people who don't like the books stop reading them and go and do something else.
When people do post something really aggressive, it's interesting that they always make a point of doing it anonymously so it's hard to respond when you don't know who the person is or where they're coming from. |
