Wounded, Wasted, Scarred | The Wounded Land | Book Review

Countless millennia have passed, and the Land has been Wounded beyond recognition. All peoples are now isolated into closed off tribes, each Stonedown fighting for their own. They engage in regular human sacrifice in order to live off of the land that is now unrecognizable, even from the nadir experienced at the end of the last series. Lord Foul's control is so totalizing, and so corrupting, that his presence is felt even in the real world. This is the setting of The Wounded Land, the first book in the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

For Covenant, ten years have passed, and his experiences in the Land have changed him utterly. He has written a number of new books, and they all reflect his changes. But his ex-wife returns to him, and she seems possessed. Lord Foul claims her, and uses her to get to Covenant. The exact nature of this is not understood yet, even by the end of the book.

The next element of the story is just as significant. A new character, Linden Avery, is introduced—and she is chosen by the Creator to assist Covenant throughout the book. She has her own dark side that she must confront throughout.

Overview

Finally, I have come back to the Thomas Covenant series, choosing to start the Second Chronicles for the first time. Looking back, it seems like I posted my review for The Power That Preserves as far back as December 2024. I did not imagine it would take a year and a half to get to this moment, but here we are.

Lord Foul's Bane opened the reader up to a story that was rather unique, despite some forced Lord of the Rings cloning issues. The main character was dour and disturbed, psychologically, and it is all downstream of the fact that Covenant has Leprosy. At the same time, he is situated in a world that is essentially the opposite. People, as a rule, are self-sacrificial and kind. They are in tune with the Land around them, making their lives work in ways that aren't exploitative of the surrounding landscape. Covenant recoils at this world, he recoils at its miraculous ability to heal his leprosy, and he rejects it; he calls himself the Unbeliever. And it is his actions, one in particular, that distorts the social fabric, as he is expected to take up the role of this Land's savior.

The trilogy in its entirety is a reckoning that Covenant must undertake as he simultaneously confronts Lord Foul to save the Land. His fierce refusal to be responsible for the Land is slowly broken down as he comes to care for these people.

In many respects, The Wounded Land, and the Second Chronicles overall, seem to be the inverse of the First Chronicles. While he was a bitter and nasty man in the previous work, set to contrast a world of people who loved freely and readily sacrificed themselves, in this new setting, he has changed. He is still arguably a curmudgeon, he is still Thomas Covenant, but he cares about the Land and the people he has loved and wronged. This is set to contrast a vicious world of brutality, where the landscape is barely hospitable, and where the people there only see him as blood to be spilled to feed themselves for the next day or two.

Much of the book is spent trying to figure out what has happened, all the while trying to escape harm. And the contrast is stark. There is no Foamfollower to carry him across the Land. The tragedy is not only the state of the Land, but also what it could be and what was lost.

Worldbuilding

The worldbuilding is probably the strongest component of this entry in the series. While Covenant's character carried the first three entries, his psychology has not simply regressed to reboot the story. He is continuing from where he left off in The Power That Preserves.

The Land has been corrupted by Foul through the Sunbane. The exact nature of this corruption is at the center of the story's mysteries, and I imagine our understanding of it might be askew or even outright wrong. What we do know is that the people of the Land are subject to alternating suns, including desert, fertility, pestilence, and more I am probably forgetting. Every three or four days, the sun will change, subjecting them to a new kind of landscape that corresponds. The desert sun causes things to wither away in extreme heat, the fertile sun causes things to grow to such extreme lengths that they are dangerous, and the pestilent sun causes insects and other kinds of dangerous threats to flourish and terrorize the population.

This is not simply a change in the landscape. It alters how the people of the Land interact with one another. As I mentioned before, the people are hostile to outsiders from their Stonedown, and they practice regular blood sacrifice by killing other people. Revelstone is also unrecognizable from afar, as they exploit these people and rule over them as a perpetual terror. Whereas the previous Land lived in harmony, this Land lives in disharmony.

Worse, their understanding of the Land is wrong. Their histories of the Land are wrong. They think Berek Halfhand is evil. They have no concept for certain important things that move their entire lives, and this leaves humanity in a rut.

I mentioned in The Power That Preserves that I understood why some people thought that this series was a precursor to grimdark. The character aspect was always obvious, but once that book came along, the worldbuilding also seemed to reflect it.

This is even moreso the case for this series. The default state seems to have been altered, which is significant. No more is there a utopia, but now a dystopia.

Character

Thomas Covenant

Covenant's most significant changes came in the first trilogy. In this trilogy, he is different, with a very different world to confront, but his character is still very relevant. Here, he struggles with despair and fear at what his own powers are capable of, as well as the fear that Foul may have already won due to a mistake in the beginning. We also get to see him more active in this one, relative to any of the other entries. The Power That Preserves showed glimpses of that, but it is in this one that he is forced to take the initiative, and he readily accepts it, too.

At the same time, I think his character change and struggle is very slow, and this first entry only covers part of it. It is very similar to the first trilogy in that sense.

Linden Avery

Avery is another major character, and one we actually get a perspective of in the book, alongside Covenant. The book actually opens in her perspective. She is a very interesting character in that she is a doctor who rejects good and evil. She believes that everything is diagnosable, but she is forced to confront that almost immediately when she enters the Land and sees the corruption around her. She is also very severe, and a great fit for someone like Covenant. She apparently thinks that people who attempt suicide deserve to die. Harsh, indeed. Even then, she is willing to doggedly save a life she thinks is worth saving.

She also has a very cryptic backstory involving the deaths of both of her parents. Her father apparently at least attempted suicide, and her mother blamed her. Independently, it is mentioned that she is a murderer. The implications of this line are left open to interpretation. She is a doctor, so that could be a context in which this makes sense, but even by the end, the reader has to wait.

Other Characters

Other characters include a cast that is slowly picked up along the way. Sunder, Hollian, the Haruchai, and more. They all reflect the broken nature of the world in their own unique ways. The return of the Haruchai is also perfect, and how they break the mold set before is well chosen, given the nature of the characters.

Plot

The plot of this book is slow moving, just like all of the prior entries. Like most old fantasy works, you have to go into the work with the right mindset, and then I think you will be fine. That said, I don't think the book felt as tedious as Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn. I don't know why.

I do have a few things that I want to comment on. There is one chapter from Avery's perspective describing when she arrives at Revelstone that I thought should have been cut entirely. I think the story would have been more interesting and would have kept the readers on edge far better if it had not given the details that it had.

Another thing. The last part of the story seems to lack focus. The characters have a goal in mind, and they set out to accomplish it, but it becomes obvious that this goal is actually the plot of the second book, The One Tree. The last part, then, lays the groundwork and is essentially an intermediary plot to the "real" goal in book two. This has an effect on the perceptions of the reader, making them wonder what the point of the last section is. There is a point, and it ends up working in the end, but I think Donaldson should have more carefully defined his goals to make the plot more purposeful in that last section.

Prose

The prose of this book is exactly like it was in the previous entries. Dense, especially with respect to the diction. The word choice is archaic and specialized, so I recommend a dictionary by your side when reading it or any of them.

The Ending

While the book was fairly slow paced, and the last section lacked purposefulness, the ending was probably the highlight of the story for me. The Sarangrave Flat is such a terrifying concept, and its place in this entry was as effective as it was in the prior entries.

I also like the very end, and how the series finally seems to be taking a different direction from prior entries. You'll know what I am talking about when you get there.

Conclusion

Overall, this book was a satisfying continuation of the overall Thomas Covenant series. There are multiple twists to the story that take it in interesting directions, all the while maintaining the core identity of the original series, and I am looking forward to seeing how it ends. I think I will give this an 8/10.

Spoilers

I liked how the people of the Land are suspicious of the unaffected parts of the landscape, like the Andelain. It immediately reminded me of how Covenant saw the Land as a leper. And sure enough, he compares them to lepers. The people are one with the Land they live.

Prediction

I have a prediction that the explanation for the sunbane is incorrect or incomplete in this entry. It was provided by the raver in Revelstone, which makes me question it. This should be taken with the idea that Foul seems to be using them for a particular end. In their attempt to stop him, they will enable him.

Video: https://youtu.be/d1YM6TjQlhc