Laura Seabrook's Ramblings

I've just finished reading Fatal Revenant by Stephen Donaldson. This is the second book (in a series of four) in the final Thomas Covenant series.

When I first saw a copy of this at the City Library in the display area, I immediately requested a copy of it. I put down the book I was then reading - The Venus Throw by Stephen Saylor - and immediately read it from start to finish. Funnily enough I borrowed the other book again from Wallsend Library again and it still has my bus ticket bookmark in place!

Any way, I had to read it. It's been one reason I've been putting off my proposal (not the biggest reason, but one anyway). The books in these series are "Tolkienesque fantasy", but they have also always dealt with issues of doubt, hope and despair. That combination gets me in all the time.

Even so, it was a hard slog. Donaldson's text is dense. I would read it on the bus, I would read it out the back under the trees on the sofa with Pegasus lying next to me. And it took just over a month. I know I have a "Victorian" (period, not State) reading rate, but it was still slow moving. For example, imagine someone else writing:

The cat strolled into the lounge room and curled up on the mat. The dog, upon hearing the cat, woke up and looked at it, then let out a small bark. The owl which had been on a perch in that room, flew out the window.

The "Donaldson equivalent" might be:

The cat thought about all that had led it to this place and moment in time. Get out of the kitchen her owner had screamed, I'm not feeding you until dinner time! She considered all that this might have meant and doubts concerning the rightness of her action impeded upon her consciousness. Using her slightly impaired prescience granted to her by right of wearing the flea collar, she ascertained a clean mat within a large room nearby.

Memories of conversations held between Her Owners and The Child seemed to indicate that this room was called, in the ancient tongue of the two legs, the Lounge Room. This implied connotations of lounging, of sleep and rejuvenation long held essential to the well being of The House. Cautiously entering this space she spied both the mat and also a being whose ambivalent pussience seemed to belie the inherent goodness of the situation. But, she was too hungry and too tired to face the prospect for withdrawing and finding some other source of rest and nourishment.

Reaching the intricately interwoven raft of natural fibre, the cat saw an intriguing interplay between colour and shape within the mat. Her health-sense immediately responded to the source of warmth near it, the so-called "Fire", and bereft of energy she fell, curling up in a protective ball.

To one side, the being that the cat had spied broke its period of inactivity and raised what appeared to be its cavernous head. the cat was familiar with this being from previous occasions and was conflicted about the possible motivations it might have towards her. The being, called "Rover" in two leg parlance, opened its maw wide, displaying sharp white teeth that might otherwise have alarmed the cat, had she not known that the being was also ancient to this world, and had worn down its fangs by chewing on hard white oblong objects.  From within the being came a cacophonous sound that hurt her ears to behold.

Anyone else perhaps would have fled before such a visage, but the Cat had changed since it had come to this place, changed forever by The House into something new and different from what she had once been. Her gut feeling told her that the noise was a sign of friendship, and she simply closed her eyes.

Far above another pair of eyes viewed all that had transpired below. Had the cat seen the presence that loomed above she might have chosen another course of action, one other than lying upon the mat. With movements that echoed countless generations of natural selection, with a look that, had the cat seen, shone like a beacon of malevolence, the avian took flight and without further delay exited "The Lounge Room" via an opening made possible by an altered state of rectangular constructs. At times these constructs were arrayed in a variety of configurations, but today they acquiesced to the exiting of the room by the Owl.

As the cat finally drifted off to sleep, she vainly tried to comprehend the meaning of --until dinner time!