own moment of recognition, pulling us momentarily into a moment of solipsism: “with a sickening vertiginous twist of insight, he caught a glimpse of Lord Foul’s plan for him, glimpsed what the despiser was doing to him. Here was the killing blow which had lain concealed behind all the machinations” (353). In Lord Foul’s Bane the omniscient narrator seems to be seeing only through Covenant’s eyes, so is perhaps limited-omniscient. This limiting affects both the presentation of the hero and of that which he moves through. In this kind of fiction descriptions must tell us more than we can possibly know because we do not have time to learn about people, nor do we believe that minor characters can change, because they are as much scenery as is a tree. Just as a tree is described, so are people: Lena’s “face bore the signs of that truce; her forehead seemed prematurely lined, and her eyes appeared to open inward on a weary battleground of doubts and uneasy consolations” (69). One consequence of this shorthand is that the characters who surround Covenant do not become real to him. Instead, they are merely information sources: Lena explains hurtloam, Altarian tells stories (80) and, on page 158 and elsewhere, Lena reveals that she has secret knowledge. In part this distancing is because Covenant cannot have proper discussions with other people: they are not real, they are simply devices. The alienation is exaggerated in Lord Foul’s Bane where that unreality is partially the point. The result, however, is to insist that any real sense of Covenant’s alteration comes not through how we see him behave but again through reverie, or through what he tells us of himself: “Of course he could not play the hero in some dream war. He could not forget himself that much; forgetfulness was suicide. Yet he could not escape this dream without passing through it, could not return to reality without awakening” (83). The overall effect, as it was in The Sword of Shannara, is to render the reader as therapist, required to accept this continuing internal analysis.
W. A. Senior points out, quite rightly, that this structure is prone to exhaustion. How long can a character remain new to a world? Donaldson revives the intensity of the books as he moves further into the sequence, by moving the Illearth Chronicler from the site of a portal fantasy, to the location of immersive fantasy with a fully immersed protagonist (Hile Troy). Just as Donaldson used leprosy as his driving metaphor in the first part, he comes to use “belief” as the controlling paradigm for the sequence as a whole, in neat parallel of form and content:
the narrative of the entire trilogy falls into three discrete parts, each matched to a book and predicated on the current value of Covenant’s Unbelief as its importance to him wanes: in Lord Foul’s Bane Covenant’s rejection of the Land is total, so the narrative does not diverge from his perception in any way; in The Illearth War his system of Unbelief begins to erode and fully one-third of the events of the Land are narrated from Hile Troy’s point of view in Covenant’s absence; finally, in The Power that Preserves, the narrative in the Land begins without Covenant present and separates into three tracks as Covenant’s Unbelief becomes a moot point, and he ceases to dispute with himself the Land’s reality or unreality. The evolving alteration of perspective within the text confirms, from our exterior understanding, the reality of the Land and concomitantly denies Covenant’s beginning premise of dream.” (Senior 140)
Having established the formula, we can begin to look at the degree to which authors are able to play with the form. From 1977 onward, quest fantasies in particular came to dominate the bookshelves of many bookstores, to the degree that in many minds, it was thought of as the default form of fantasy. Even the conventional portal fantasy diminished in popularity, while the shift between the mundane world of the quest hero and that of his fantasy world often became more marked. What remains of interest here, however, is the extent to which a number of very fine books were written in this period that, while often stretching the genre in terms of content conventions, continue to show the markers I have been discussing. For example, in Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree (1985), which is both a portal and a quest fantasy, Kay deals with the problems of the negotiated fantasy, the stranger in the land phenomenon, by developing one of his characters as a seer. Kim has foreknowledge and familiarity with the world she is in and is thus able to be the competent character of the immersive fantasy: we can see the world through her accumulated understanding rather than riding beside her as she greets it for the first time. However, it also means that Kay can download the history we are going to need through Kim’s initiatory dreams: “And as she was whirled away from that bright vision, she came abruptly face to face with the oldest Dark in his stronghold of Starkadh … and she knew him for Rakoth the Unraveller” (97).
The vision, of course, is unquestionable. In the hierarchy of quest fantasy, street conversation is the least reliable, information given by a guide is very reliable, and visions generally unchallenged; because the vision is buried in the learning process, however, it is less ostentatious than someone sitting down to narrate a prophecy. To balance this, to make this approach work, Kay has also constructed Kevin. A rather relaxed character, Kevin is able to accept things without explanation. Between Kim’s visionary knowledge and familiarity with the fantasy world, and Kevin’s acceptance of it, Kay is able to sidestep at least some of the miniature show and tell sequences that form the backbone of his world-building. Elsewhere, because we still only know of the world what the characters learn as they travel, the world-building is not so easy. Dave and Paul, our primary guides in The Summer Tree, part company at least to some degree to expand our knowledge of the world: the more complex their routes, the more we shall come to understand the Land. Although each, individually, constructs a fellowship, and seals himself off from those external to that fellowship, these groups are linked so that the “conspiracy” or the club narrative is not entirely sealed.
At times Kay is forced to retreat to prediction within the tale, the narration of understanding rather than its depiction. When Paul and the King play a game of chess, they reach a point of almost understanding: “It was not to happen, but something else was born that night, and the fruit of that silent game would change the balance and the patterns of all the worlds that there were” (69). This narration succeeds in being simultaneously clumsy and subtle. Clumsy in that the import of the future is oversignaled; this is a novel so we expect something of import to happen. Subtle in that we are misdirected: we expect this to be a change of adventure; instead, the change is internal to Paul. As readers, however, we are dependent on a directed gaze. We are not allowed to look for significance elsewhere.
Tad Williams’s The Dragonbone Chair (1988) is technically an alternative world in which everything seems to have slipped sideways (the savior is hung upside down on a tree, and one of the swords was made from the meteorite that hit the temple when he died). Because Williams narrates his tale almost entirely through the story of Simon, we are tied to Simon’s side in what should be a rigid form of the reader positioning. We can see only what Simon passes through, understand the world only through his comprehension. At first, Williams seems to tackle this conventionally enough: “[Simon] could never understand how rooms that seemed as small as the doctor’s did from outside—he had looked down on them from the bailey walls and paced the distance in the courtyard—how they could have such long corridors” (14). Although this is the conventional inner musing as download, it also functions to tell us that we have a complex space (which will be significant later), and that Simon is capable of independent thought, curiosity, and the research to satisfy such curiosity. Williams has taken a conventional trope, the reverie, and embedded within it the castle as character (at least the doctor’s rooms) and a sense of who Simon is. Accompanying this, we also learn about Simon first in his own actions—the fascinated observation of a beetle (3–4)—then through the use of the castle as a foil to Simon (5–6), and later through the mind of Rachel (22–26), contextualized in terms of her frustration, sense of duty, and of love. While in part this method of description is an indication of the quality of the writer, it is also a subtle shift of the reader position. Although we shall walk through this quest with Simon, observing mainly what he observes, we are focused not only on his interests, but on Simon himself. Simon is to us as he is to the beetle. To add to the interest, when Simon does consider himself, in the way used in Sword of Shannara, he does so in a way that does not merely download information, but moves the discussion on: “When you stopped to think about it, he reflected, there weren’t many things
