Fantasy book review: Fatal Revenant by Stephen Donaldson

I loved the first Chronicles and applauded the second. The third Chronicles began in a cunning way, and I was eager to be swept away into the Land once again. But this book, Fatal Revenant, dragged at my heels.

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It could be cut by 400 pages and still tell the same story, and the excessive use of anachronistic (damn, he's doing it to me too now, I mean to say old) and downright obscure adjectives highlight the problem: Donaldson insists on telling us exactly what every single thing means, and every possible outcome, repeatedly, with painful precision. There is no space to wonder, to guess; to fill in the blanks in the writing: to be amazed.

In the earlier books I enjoyed the poetry of the Land, the way the atmosphere of the story made me feel. There was a special beauty to the fact that the world was a dream-world which Covenant did not believe in. It was real but unreal–that ambiguity was essential to the magic of the book.

But now the Land has become too real or too defined to be believable. Being the only world that exists for the lead character, it becomes a stock-fantasy story and reads like a fictionalised role-playing game with staged combat scenes. The plotting is arduous, with character motivations analysed so often that I became suspicious of the plot. I knew that if I stopped to think about it, I'd see that the characters probably wouldn't do what they were doing unless the author had insisted that they did. It doesn't ring true.

There are some high-points, great fantasy inventions, wonderful wizardry and moments when Donaldson works his old magic to good effect, but on the whole I found I couldn't empathise with Linden Avery. I just didn't care what she did.

Fatal Revenant also has tons of back-story. It's a classic case of 'show don't tell' gone wrong. I can't believe that anything Donaldson writes is accidental, but he has perhaps over-analysed this manuscript, filling it with reminders, patches and information readers 'should know'. This exposition drags the whole series down. Linden is so insecure and uncertain. She is a woman of shallow emotions who is rather desperate as a heroine. The Extended Unabridged Chronicles of Linden Avery, the Chosen has become too tiresome for me.