20101022.1834

I just finished reading Stephen R. Donaldson's latest book, Against All Things Ending.

Wow.

The book is sizable, well over 500 pages, but its physical size matches the immensity of the goings-on in the pages. In it, the end of a world is very much at hand, and the tragedies embedded in the very beginnings of that world are made manifest.

As with every volume of the series, Donaldson's command of language is exquisite. The extent of the man's vocabulary continues to be a delight. Reading him forces me to improve myself; I have to go to the dictionary every time I read him, and my own vocabulary is far from small. Donaldson's choice of words, though, is not a flashy thing; he does not write as though to show off that his knowledge of the lexicon is as it is. Instead, the words he uses are that right words; when he writes of "roynish" creatures or of the "caducity" of a formerly-fat character, or of the "atavistic vertigo" that afflicts the titular character, he does so because those words singly encapsulate phrases of meaning whose recitation would belabor and the text.

That text already does quite a bit. It is not easy, after all, to maintain the level of tension of the impending end of the world without sending the reader past the willingness to suspend disbelief, and Donaldson does do so, leaving the reader, following an uneasy triumph, facing the imminent final cataclysm but entirely without seeming contrivance (the victories are too partial and too dearly bought for the common stuff of fantasy). Nor yet is it easy to bring the reader into the minds of those who are not, for various reasons, wholly sane without losing comprehensibility--yet Donaldson succeeds in this.

The text, though enthralling, is not perfect. Page 511 displays a proofreading error (though it may well be that only my having spent time grading papers today attuned me to seeing such things). Also, like earlier volumes of the collected Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, there are incidences of the titular character enacting violence against women (in one particularly jarring case, against his own daughter--though not of the kind that that phrase would commonly bring to mind), which, coupled with his leprosy and his distinct lack of prowess--the more so in this volume than even in others--makes of him very much an anti-hero. But the book is very much more about a particular woman, the exigencies of her choices, and the ultimate revelation to her that the only choice that is ultimately effective is the choice to trust to others.

That is one of the major messages of the books, that trust in others is always necessary for success, even if it does invite the possibility of betrayal. Another is the reminder that there are always consequences for the acts we do, and that many of them are neither those we would intend nor those we would endure if given the choice. But the most important, perhaps, is that hope remains while life endures: while we continue to choose and to work to an ending of our design, however poor our situation looks, something might happen that none of us expect.