Gurglings of a Putrid Stream

WWII era film, about a disparate group of men and women who are forced to spend the night in a train station that local legend claims is haunted. One of the stranded passengers is an old woman with a pet parrot named Polly. Another, the star of the film, is a vaudeville comedian who, speaking to the parrot, quips, "I say, I wonder if I could teach you to talk. I wonder if you could say 'Heil Hitler.' Eh? No, not with a beak like that."

Movies made during World War II have their own special charm. That isn't really the right word for it, or it shouldn't be, but history buffs will know what I mean. Here, in this British feature, in addition to the Hitler joke, we've got ration books and a pointed reference to the blackout. We've also got a young couple about to be married, a cricketer, and a handsome man chasing a beautiful girl. Funny how, even in wartime, life goes on. (Funny, too, that the cricketer is the girl's cousin, which isn't enough to stop the handsome man from wondering if the two of them aren't involved.)

Arthur Askey, already a famous British comedian by the time this movie was made, turns in a remarkable performance, but what I liked best about him is his character. He plays the clown without actually being one. In one early scene, Askey tries to liven up the gathering by winding up a phonograph and singing a song. The cricketer gets up from his game of chess with another passenger and tosses the phonograph out the door, smashing it to bits. After taking in what has just happened, Askey saunters over to the chessboard, picks it up, and tosses it into the fireplace. (When the cricketer is about to get violent, it's his cousin who tells him to stop, that, after all, "you started it.") Askey's small, bespectacled, and inveterately goofy, but he's neither a coward nor a fool.

And somehow, despite Askey's almost non-stop patter, this movie manages a bit of actual suspense. The plot thickens when the old stationmaster, after warning them about the legend of the train that crashed on a nearby bridge a half century earlier, turns up dead. But make no mistake, this isn't a creepy thriller by any means. It's a pleasant ghost story with just enough atmosphere and laughs to keep you entertained for 90 minutes.

Sometimes when I finish a book I think back and wonder how in the world the author filled so many pages. Out of the Deeps is like that. It's one of those stories in which a great deal happens -- and yet not much happens at all. On the one hand, it's about aliens who take up residence in the deepest parts of the world's oceans and the inevitable war with mankind that results. On the other, it's about a husband and wife team of radio news reporters who, for the most part, take it all in stride. Countless millions of people die; the wife suffers a minor injury to one arm.

John Wyndham keeps his distance here, but that isn't always a bad thing. I appreciate how months and years pass, just as they might if this were real life. I appreciate how the main characters aren't always facing life or death situations, a conceit that few authors are willing to eschew, despite (all too often) its improbability. And I appreciate this book.

But I would have liked it a whole lot more if it weren't so bloody genteel. Out of the Deeps (or The Kraken Wakes in its original British edition) may be the quietest apocalypse on record.

Again, though, we find something to appreciate. Published in 1953, at a time when one intelligent woman encounters the word "ecology" and wonders what that might be, this book puts a very contemporary spin on disaster. As another character points out, alien invasion need not follow the pattern of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds. It could happen, as we discover, rather quietly and over a long period of time.

Still, for all the worldwide calamity, the book lacks drama. The central characters are happily married successful professionals, and that never changes. Sure, the wife breaks down and cries a time or two, but that's about it. One time she gets surly, prompting what may be the best line in the book, a reference to a personal catastrophe that, unfortunately, seems to have had no other effect on either of them. Their capacity for stoicism is all very British, I suppose.

On a happier note, I read the US edition, which features a modified ending. The original UK edition, according to Wikipedia, is "less bleak." Which, to me, translates as less interesting. So there's that anyway.

TTKK is a truly remarkable book, albeit one with very little intrinsic value. It's about Colonel Hudson Kane, who comes to the Bela Slovik mansion as a famous psychologist tasked with "curing" its nutty Air Force inmates, among whom is the astronaut who flaked out prior to America's first mission to the moon. Kane, however, doesn't much act like a psychologist and Cutshaw, the astronaut, doesn't appear to be entirely batty. Things aren't exactly what they seem.

Before he wrote The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty wrote three comic novels, this one being the last and, I can only hope (not having read the others), the worst. Yet I feel pretty confident in saying it is the most interesting of the three.

What makes it bad are the characters: they're all insane. Or, worse, they're all pretending to be. Either way, they act like fools. It's a particularly lazy brand of comedy that finds its humor in absurdity for its own sake. One character continually hammers the walls of the mansion to make their atoms pay for not allowing him to pass through without benefit of a door while another spends his time writing (and eventually casting) the plays of Shakespeare...for dogs. Oh, Blatty manages some funny lines along the way -- one about whether or not it would be considered bad form to cast a Great Dane as Hamlet -- but that's easy enough when you can tailor the situation to the lines, rather than the other way around. Nor does it help that, this being an irreverent, vaguely anti-war novel (it was published in 1966), the brass, including a Senator, are portrayed as idiotic madmen.

What makes it interesting, though, is this: it is one of the most blatant blueprints for a later work you will ever read. Not that it was intended that way. But all the obsessions that led Blatty to write The Exorcist are present in TTKK -- from the simple love of movies to the coexistence of evil and a benevolent God; everything, in fact, including a discussion of possession and exorcism. Readers of The Exorcist will note that Blatty even uses an astronaut in both.

The religious and philosophical discussions of Kane and Cutshaw are the meat of the book (and if that juxtaposition, of absurd comedy and religious exploration, seems odd, you're right, it is), but there's too little of it to make a decent meal. Especially when the rest is fluff -- meringue minus the pie.

1. Atheists tend to present themselves as "rational" people, which amuses me, since atheism is nothing more than unprovable faith that God does not exist. A more rational approach would be agnosticism, which doesn't require any faith. Atheists seem to have as much need to believe in something as, say, Christians do. Which makes it weird that so many of them berate Christians for their "need to believe."

2. Blues Traveler has the greatest Biblical reference I've ever heard in a pop song. The quotation, from King James, is, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you." In the song "Run-Around," BT, focusing on the second part of the quotation, says, "As we seek, so shall we find." And what makes it so great is that it isn't saying the same thing, yet it is saying something of profound importance; something that, like the best Biblical quotations, can be applied in a myriad of situations. The only caveat is, the Bible (not surprisingly) already said it: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

3. I am not a Christian. You cannot *not* believe in free will and be a Christian. You can be a Calvinist, though. Calvinists are tough. Much tougher than I am. I believe in the interconnectedness of all things. I accept Einstein's thought that "Coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous" -- provided it is filtered through Jung and "synchronicity" is substituted for "coincidence." The fascinating thing about this, though, is that once you accept *something*, much of what the Bible says regains its relevance, just from a different perspective.

4. The scariest part of the Bible, to me, is not Revelation. It is Jesus' words on the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" For these do not sound like the words of the son of God, but of a man discovering that he was wrong. And yet -- to the eternal credit of Christians -- these words were written down and have been preserved ever since, allowing people to draw their own conclusions.

5. I am a friend to reasonable people, which includes as many Christians as any other group. (My wife is a practicing Catholic and she's a whole lot more stable than I am or ever was.) Yet I occasionally have fun at their expense. One of my favorite stories is of the biologist Louis Agassiz, who spent his entire life trying to find support for the traditional God yet who instead, at every turn, helped to prove evolution. I feel sorry for the guy. When I'm not laughing.

1. A female Thor. Please. And I didn't even read Thor as a kid. Nor do I have anything against female superheroes. In fact, my favorite Avenger wasn't Thor or Captain America or Ironman; it was the Scarlet Witch. Because she was, like, a witch and stuff.

2. One of the many things that separate film and TV in a very special way from books is the musical montage. When editing, situation, mood, and music combine so beautifully that the result is two or three minutes of perfection. For my money, the best few minutes of Lost, which I just recently finished re-watching, occurs at the opening of Season 2, Episode 1, when Desmond Hume goes about his daily ritual to the accompaniment of Mama Cass Elliot's "Make Your Own Kind of Music." (http://vimeo.com/13158705)

3. On a related note, ever wonder why "cool" film and TV characters are often blues/jazz fans? I don't know it for a fact, but I have suspicion. I think it's because blues/jazz music comes at a much lower cost than rock/pop. And I find that disturbing in the sense that it perpetuates a stereotype (intelligent and/or sensitive types prefer this type of music) not because of whatever truth there is in the trope but because of simple economics. The "truth" here is a lie. Poor (or perhaps greedy) people should listen to blues/jazz. That's the real truth.

4. I have a neighbor one of whose trees has become the nesting place of a couple of exotic birds. She tried to hose them out. Why? Because they're defecating on her driveway. Clearly, somebody missed the satire in the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday." If it *is* all about appearances, I'd rather my house looked good to exotic birds than to random people driving down the street. (Although even I have limits. I have another neighbor about a block away whose yard is a crazy jungle of brush and trees. We've lived here more than a decade and the homemade sign this guy put in his yard has been there the entire time. It reads, "Martha Stewart is out here somewhere.")

5. Conceptions of utopia baffle me because, or so I presume, they come from people who believe human beings possess free will. If humans have free will, then *this* world is utopia. For what more could one ask than to have control of one's destiny?

Alfred Hitchcock was a master of turning minor works of literature into major motion pictures. "Rear Window" and "The Birds" were short stories, although very good in their own right; Psycho was a simple potboiler. But before all of these was John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, an enjoyable but episodic and largely superficial thriller. In Hitchcock's hands it became what we can still see today: a masterpiece of ingenuity and pacing, as taut as it is entertaining.

It's still about an everyman-type who must go on the lam after learning of a plot against the British government. And Richard Hannay (Robert Donat), the runner, is still a genial, likable sort of chap. Beyond this, however, Hitchcock uses only what is convenient from Buchan's novel, changing elements at will in order to tighten the story, heighten the suspense, and give it a different sense of humor.

The alterations begin immediately. The film opens at a vaudeville theater featuring the act of a man called Mr. Memory. Shots ring out and the audience stampedes for the doors. Outside the theater, Hannay is joined by a woman who desires that he take her home with him. None of this is in the book, although it is too much to say that the woman is a new character, as other reviewers, blithely unaware of the contents of Buchan's novel, have claimed. She is simply Scudder, Hannay's neighbor from the book, revamped. Here, she is the one who spills the beans about the conspiracy and mentions "the 39 steps." The "steps" themselves are different here, but even less time is spent solving this particular "puzzle."

Another woman added by Hitchcock is a genuine departure. Madeleine Carroll, destined to become the first of the director's famous "icy blondes," plays Pamela, who only tries to do what she thinks is right but winds up handcuffed to Hannay for her trouble. Everything having to do with Pamela is new to the film, and it delightfully binds the picture in a way Buchan could never have imagined, with sexual tension and screwball comedy.

The story is fast-moving, spinning from one idea to the next with abandon. I complained that the novel was often implausible, and the movie is, too, if you stop to examine it. The difference is, the movie eschews the episodic development of the novel and everything dovetails so nicely here that you feel that all those implausibilities would somehow make sense if a few missing pieces had been supplied. They are well dispensed with, however, for they would only have slowed down this exciting and fun adventure.

John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps has survived as a classic of the thriller genre for almost a hundred years now, a fact that I think says less about either Buchan or the book itself than it does about Alfred Hitchcock, whose 1935 adaptation is better in every way.

The book is a breezily written story about a fairly ordinary man, Richard Hannay, whose neighbor reveals to him the existence of a conspiracy to start a war (World War I, as it happens). The neighbor is murdered, leaving behind his cryptic notebook and, of course, the murderers, who naturally believe that Hannay knows too much and must be silenced. Wanted also by the police, who suspect him in the neighbor's murder, Hannay is forced to run for his life. Along the way, he must figure out how to get his information to the proper authorities, information that will be useless unless he can also decipher the meaning of "the thirty-nine steps," a phrase repeated several times in the notebook.

What follows is an episodic cat-and-mouse game that isn't quite fair since Hannay gets one lucky break after another. It's a book that is probably best read one chapter at a time in an approximation of how it first appeared, as a serial in Blackwood's Magazine. To read it straight through is to be distracted from the enjoyment of each adventure by the accumulated weight of its implausibility. On the other hand, Buchan doesn't take any of it too seriously, so if you don't either, you likely will be entertained.

It's light stuff: amusing at times, exciting at others, and Hannay himself is a pleasant everyman, more given to action than self-reflection. In most chapters he meets a Scottish local -- the "literary innkeeper," the "spectacled roadman," the "bald archaeologist" -- who either wants to help him or kill him. The "radical candidate" wants him to make a speech!

What it isn't, is a mystery. I was fooled somewhat by the fact that it is titled after a mysterious phrase. I thought Hannay was going to encounter a series of clues gradually revealing its meaning. The truth is, "the thirty-nine steps" is only a part of the phrase; the whole thing, which Hannay has before long, is much less baffling.

Unfortunately, it all builds toward a rather disappointing climax. For one thing, Hannay's role at the end of the book seems hardly plausible. For another, it hinges on an observation about disguise that may be difficult to swallow. And finally -- strangely -- it is quite sedate. I won't say that it makes you wish for the equivalent of another third act car chase, but it does make you wish for something to happen. But very little does.

In all, it's a nice little book. But it's a wonderful movie.

I'm driving home today, listening to music, thinking about writing and how the creative process works, and then I thought, What if writers took a page out of the pop music book? What if writers, like rock musicians, formed a band? Say, the standard 4-person combo. Oh, sure, writing's supposed to be all personal and intimate, but I think most people would rather be in print. What if they got together, pooled their talents, and produced better stories more quickly? Stories in which the different elements -- plot, character, dialogue, structure, and so on -- were all improved by the individual talents of the band members? And what if those stories sold?

Is that a crazy idea?

I don't know, but I'd be open to forming just such a band to try to find out.

Any one else nuts enough to give it a shot?

Jenny Trout is an idiot. How do you throw away both your credibility and your integrity as quickly and easily as she did if you aren't an idiot?

Trout is the author who took exception to Anna Todd's WattPad book, After, and berated the publishing industry for basically applying a double-standard by signing her up on the basis of a very unprofessional "manuscript." While she was wrong in her attack on the industry -- the rules don't apply to people who can hand-deliver a large audience to the publisher -- I thought maybe she was on to something when she attacked the book.

She wasn't.

Not that the book is particularly good, but Trout's motives were much worse. Recently she admitted she wasn't attacking Anna Todd's book, but rather the author and her imagined motives for writing it. Criticizing the book was just a cover for her real agenda. Then, too, it's painfully obvious that her about-face was motivated by her own bottom line: all those Anna Todd supporters were killing her.

Normally this wouldn't bother me. Normally I wouldn't even be aware of it. But this time I found out about it and, because I thought maybe Trout was on to something that is important to me, I paid a little more attention. Well, as the Beatles said 50 years ago, I should have known better.

I've read all of four chapters of After on WattPad. It was enough. And it was enough that I feel safe in extrapolating beyond those chapters all the way to the end of the book.

After is immature, shallow, and monotonous, and I can  barely imagine the work that will be necessary to put it into publishable form. That said, Todd has a certain talent, and I can see how the book hooked a lot of people. It's unpretentious; and it's like the "literary" equivalent of an old Penthouse letter: the pull is built in -- not by sex (four chapters in, anyway), but by the whole fish-out-of-water / relationships thing. Its very naivete gives it a kind of simple truth. And she keeps it moving, hitting her points and moving on -- which isn't as easy as it sounds. In the reader, it evokes that all-important  question, What happens next?

Yet it's crap.

Todd may write a good book some day, but this one isn't it. I strongly suspect that the published version will be the equivalent of a Hollywood screenplay that gets credited to one author when in fact it was written by many. I certainly hope so.

What really makes the book so pernicious, though, isn't the book itself, it is the success it has enjoyed -- a success that is only possible because readers have been rendered so dumb and uncritical that "escape" is no longer the lowest rung on the literary ladder, but litporn is.

It's easy to celebrate the self-publishing phenomenon as a boon to readers: more choices, more voices, and, ultimately, more great books. The reality, I think, is not so rosy. The reality is lowered expectations, lower standards, and the dumbing down of the whole literary equation, writers and readers alike.

Remember when "reader" and "bookworm" were synonymous with "smart"? Or the stereotype of the reader as a thoughtful (if shy) guy or girl with glasses? It was better then, for like most stereotypes, it embodied a certain core truth. That truth is fast becoming a memory. Nowadays you can be a "reader" when all you read is self-published drivel that no legitimate publisher would ever touch.

"Reading" itself is changing. I called the new category of fiction "litporn" for a reason. Much of the new fiction, it seems to me, exists not to tell a good story in a professional manner, but to stroke the reader's predefined desires. The plethora of material available mirrors the hundreds of categories of internet porn: there's something to appeal to everyone. The shared experience of reading -- people reading the same book which was written for everyone -- is being replaced by niche reading, from which each individual takes what most appeals to him- or herself.

Quality is a secondary consideration, if that. Like porn, the presentation doesn't matter nearly so much as the content. And the content hardly needs to be original. Originality, in fact, is dangerous, it risks muting the core content, which is the reason the reader (or porn viewer) clicked on the thing to begin with. This is the problem with the niche philosophy: as new niches are added and existing ones become narrower, people come to expect more and more of the same content, with increasingly superficial differences.

Reading has always been like this -- it's why we have so many genres, for one thing -- but the situation is getting worse. Just as you wouldn't call a person who principally watches porn a "movie buff," so it is now becoming true that many people who focus on self-published fiction or follow the same reading philosophy aren't really readers at all. They're litporn addicts.

I see no way to spin the implications of this in a positive direction.

Love this stuff.  Just discovered it today.

The first third (plus a few pages) of Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying is among the best suspense fiction you will ever read. I'm certain it was the memory of this portion of the book that earned it a 1954 Edgar Award, but the rest of it explains the category: Best First Novel.

It's about a man whose plans to marry into wealth are jeopardized when his girlfriend, the daughter of a rich copper magnate, tells him she's pregnant. Knowing her strict father will cut her off if he discovers the truth (and he will, in a hurry, because she's two months already), he feels betrayed, helpless, and trapped. But he's not one to give up his dream easily, and he devises a plan to salvage the situation. He is, as we discover throughout the novel, a man with many plans.

None of them, however, are as deliciously chilling as those of the first act -- plus a few pages. I stress this because the beginning of the second reveals the meaning of a number of small clues introduced in the first that add a terrible poignancy to previous events. When Stephen King referred to Levin as "the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels," he could have held up this section as Exhibit A. It unfolds gradually, yet with a dreadful inexorability derived from the precision with which Levin merges character, situation, and event. It is, in short, a little piece of perfection.

Hardly surprising, then, that the rest of the book is unable to live up to it. In the last two-thirds, we get a new character who, though Levin tries very hard, never comes across as quite believable; an existing character whose sudden proficiency in spycraft is laughable, really; and a drawn out climax that holds no surprises whatsoever. The best thing about it is simply that it fills out the book, making it publishable, and thereby giving us an opportunity to read the first part.

It rarely happens, but sometimes that's enough.

You write a review of Bob's book. Bob has an issue with your review and wants to comment on it, probably negatively. Does Bob have a right to make his comment?

The bad news is, Godzilla sucks.

The good news is, when it comes to the Godzilla franchise, I'm totally out of synch with the rest of the world.

I think that the Roland Emmerich version (yeah, the one with Matthew Broderick) is not only the best Godzilla movie ever made, but one of the best action movies ever made.

So there you go: chances are you will like this new movie. My oldest son described it in one word -- "Intense." And it's received generally good reviews.

So go, have a ball. I'll never understand it, but then I'm used to that.

To all those who hated Lord Foul's Bane -- hark! and be redeemed. Thomas Covenant gets yanked back into the Land, where 40 years have passed for its people, but only days for him. In his absence, Foul has amassed an immense army and is preparing to march. The Lords have learned virtually nothing new to aid them in their own defense. And Covenant, who still believes he's dreaming, finds himself lusted after by the daughter of the woman he previously raped. That is, by his own daughter. Salvation is at hand. You need only pick up the book and start reading.

Huh? Where did I lose you?

No matter. The Illearth War is a terrific follow up to the first book in the trilogy, still with one of the great tragic heroes in the genre.

This book introduces something -- and someone -- new. Hile Troy, the new leader of the Lords' army, is a man who claims to be from Covenant's world. I say "claims to be" because Covenant believes he made him up, but the second part of the book is told from Troy's point of view, and tells of things of which Covenant has no knowledge. So we know what Covenant does not: the Land is real.

Troy accepts the Land, blesses it (for he was born without eyes, but now can see), and does everything he can to help the Lords defeat Foul. He is, I suppose, something of the sort of hero that many readers had hoped Covenant would be. And he shares their disdain: he neither understands Covenant's unbelief nor sympathizes with him in any way. But, again, we know something he does not: for all his military strategizing, he is not a rational man. He loves the Land because it loves him back. It's just the sort of alluring yet pathetic logic that Covenant fears as a pathway to despair and madness.

After the introductions of the first part, the book is split between Troy's war with Foul's army and the quest for one of the hidden wards of knowledge and power that the Lords believe can help turn the tide of battle in their favor. Covenant accompanies his daughter on the quest for the ward.

This line of the plot -- Covenant and his daughter -- was a stroke of macabre genius, wickedly encapsulating the central contradiction of Covenant's predicament, his desire to embrace the Land and his need to repudiate it. His solution, however, will appeal only to those who sympathize with his plight, for it leads him to do something that, if taken at face value, is even worse than rape.

No, this book isn't going to make converts of those who disliked the first. But for the rest of us, those of us who don't have it all figured out, it is another intimately compelling portrait of the tortuous struggle with the ideas and beliefs that define us, in a world that tells us every day in so many ways that we are wrong.

Post Script: In all the negative reviews of this book that I've read, the following quotation is probably the funniest and yet the most telling:

"He's still a leper, and it still isn't very important to this book." - Marianne

Skyfall made over a billion dollars. So you will probably like it. But I didn't.

You know that the Bond movies are all about the Bond movies when they start building stories around actors playing secondary characters. This one is a send off for Judi Dench. I'm not breaking any news when I say that this is Dench's last Bond film. She took over the role of M with Goldeneye. M, of course, is James Bond's boss. M is the person who sends Bond off on all his adventures. M is not 007. Yet here she is, the target of her own government (who think maybe she's too antiquated for her job) and a maniac with a personal grudge. The maniac blows up the MI6 building and sends a message to M's laptop: "Think on your sins." I want to send the same message to the filmmakers.

I'd love to see a "smaller" Bond movie, but there's no need to get incestuous about it. Something along the lines of Ian Fleming's novel The Spy Who Loved Me would be wonderful. Here, in addition to the main plotline, we have Bond returning to his family home. That's a touchy(-feely) topic. Bond won't even discuss it. Now add to that the (re)discovery of Q and Miss Moneypenny. It sounds like a reboot, but it isn't; it's a Bond family soap opera.

The first half wouldn't be bad if it weren't so freighted with the seeds of its own destruction. It begins with Bond (Daniel Craig) chasing a man who has stolen a list of NATO operatives. Recovering the list is so important that M is willing to sacrifice any number of agents to retrieve it. That includes Bond. As Bond grapples with the thief on the top of a train about to pass out of range, M orders a British sniper to "take the shot." The agent misses and hits Bond instead. Presumed dead, Bond figures maybe it's time to hang up the old Walther PPK. That is, until MI6 gets blown apart.

The rest of the first part involves Bond trying to get back into shape and going on a couple of missions, one of which is imaginatively shot in a high rise office building in Shanghai against the backdrop of one of those giant Asian electronic advertising screens. Bond's big break comes when he speaks to Sévérine (Bérénice Marlohe), the maniac's mistress. It may be the best scene in the film: dark, quiet, and humming with tension.

It is, however, nearly the end of the movie, the part of it worth watching anyway. Javier Bardem plays the madman, and his performance is creepy enough, but the character's a chump. Director Sam Mendes believes he is one of the great Bond villains, which shows that he and I have very different ideas on the subject. A great Bond villain doesn't whine about doing his job or others doing theirs, and he sure as hell isn't consumed by mommy issues. Silva is supposed to be a cyberterrorist, but we must take that on faith. All we know for sure is that he's a spoiled brat who got his butt spanked and isn't ever going to forget it. Some villain.

At well over two hours, the movie is too long by at least a half hour, with most of the drag coming at the end. Like a lot of Bond movies, the opening scene is more exciting than the climax. But what really kills it -- the end, and the movie, too -- is all the confusion over point of view. Is the story about Bond, M, or Silva? You get to take your pick. And that, for my money, isn't the way a "Bond movie" should work.

This isn't so much a review of the book as a response to other reviews I have read by people who hated it, and hated it specifically because they see the protagonist, Thomas Covenant, as unlikeable -- weak, whiny, and self-pitying -- and/or because of the rape scene included in it. My position is essentially this: You can hate a character for many good reasons, but having no clue who he really is, is not one of them.

Some readers seem to want to excuse Covenant to some extent as an anti-hero, but I think this misses a larger point: his Chronicles, of which this book is the first, are a kind of anti-fantasy. Oh, this is still escape literature, but it lacks -- intentionally -- the complete abandonment of a Lord of the Rings. It doesn't allow the reader to simply wish themselves into a magical new world. Like (and because of) Covenant, it fights back. It asks the reader to consider the distinction between reality and fantasy, or, as Covenant would put it, between sanity and madness. This tension makes the Chronicles unique, providing a different kind of depth to the story.

Briefly, Lord Foul's Bane recounts the first part of an epic battle between the good people of the Land and the evil that would destroy it, Lord Foul. Specifically, it tells the story of Thomas Covenant, a leper whose disease has cost him his wife, his child, and the succor of society; his sexual potency; two fingers of his right hand; and the nerves in his fingers and toes. The psychological cost has been no less extreme. His disease requires his full attention, if not directly (for example, through frequent visual surveillance of his body, searching out any cuts or abrasions that, because he can't feel them, could quickly become dangerous), then indirectly. In a world that hates and fears lepers, Covenant is compelled to undertake the hardest of all tasks, to give up all hope -- of health and love and meaningful human contact. This is the man who, after an accident, "wakes up" in the Land -- a place of magic, where health can not only be seen but restored: as he soon discovers, his leprosy is cured, and only his missing fingers are not returned to him.

Naturally, he rejects the Land, and all its inhabitants.

And here is where the story -- and Covenant, too -- begins to pall on some readers. For Covenant's rejection is not a polite one. Worse (for many of these readers) it is incomprehensible. How could he reject this wonderful gift? How, indeed, could he not wholeheartedly embrace it?

The answer, of course, is that Covenant is not, in fact, a weak man, but an exceptionally strong one. A weaker man would do exactly as many of these readers seem to want: he would embrace the Land and charge off to help the good guys defeat the bad. And because he carries with him a power equal to the task (the white gold with which his wedding ring is made), he would succeed. Then, truly, this book would be as bad as they think it is.

But -- thankfully -- that isn't Covenant. For him, the Land is no gift; it is a curse. He comes from our world, the real world, where places such as the Land are fantasy. And fantasy is dangerous, if you begin to believe it. That way lies a life of institutionalization and madness. Yet it seems so real, so full of beauty and wonder, friendship and love, it takes a man of extraordinary character to resist its temptations.

Reader complaints of whininess and self-pity seem to me to lack an appreciation of Covenant's dilemma (and perhaps simple human empathy). He believes -- and as a man of our world, he has every reason to believe -- that he is fighting for control of his own mind. And against impossible odds. Of course he despairs. Yet he perseveres.

How exactly is this man "unlikeable"? Because he clings to sanity? Because he refuses to allow figments of his imagination to drive him mad? Because he doesn't say "please" and "thank you"? From what I can gather, many of these one-star reviewers never did read about Thomas Covenant; they read about a Hero who wouldn't bow to their own desire for wish-fulfillment.

It's ironic. They come off sounding like the people in Covenant's town who hate him so much they want him to stay locked up in his house, alone, forever. Except that instead of leprosy, they cite the behavior and mode of thinking required by his disease as the reasons for their loathing. Significantly, they don't question the townspeople's reactions; but they don't follow that through, either. It's as if they're saying, Okay, sure, everyone hates you...but there's no need to be bitter about it. They don't seem to understand that Covenant doesn't want to be the way he is, but that he has no choice: that if he doesn't build walls between himself and the outside world, he will lose himself entirely. If he is overtly rude -- unlike, say, a shy person, whose "rudeness" is born of an innate social awkwardness -- it is because he isn't naturally anti-social. He has had to build his defensive mechanisms himself, against his natural inclinations. This makes him at once more rigid and more heroic.

And then there's the rape, a crime compounded by the youth of the victim, a girl of only 16. More than one reviewer, in the blissful simplicity of the knee-jerk reaction, wanted to throw the book at a wall at this point in the story. How is it possible to maintain sympathy for a man who would do such a thing?

Well, as it turns out, it is quite easy to do so -- provided you see the book through the lens of Covenant's dilemma. If you go into this book like other works of fantasy believing in the reality of the Land and you cannot fathom Covenant's unbelief, then you will have a problem with this scene. But then, I think, you will also have missed the point completely. For rape in a dream or a fantasy isn't rape. But, for Covenant, in a "dream" as real as this one appears to be, it is impossible to ignore. And it acts on him in two ways: it makes his rejection the Land more difficult even as it raises disturbing questions of his mental health outside the dream. Later in the book he has a similar reaction when he kills for the first time. Is he, he wonders, truly capable of such violence?

Rather than ask, How could he rape a 16-year-old, it would be more appropriate to think, Even in his dreams, this man has a conscience.

Post Script: Excoriating Covenant for the rape of Lena follows a logic that would have us holding ourselves accountable for the content of our dreams. If a man told a woman he had a dream in which he raped someone, should the woman henceforth think of the man as a rapist? If a woman told a man she had a dream in which she was raped, and she enjoyed it, should the man afterward believe the woman obviously wants to be raped? I hope I speak for a large majority when I say, Of course not.

But one of the fascinating things about Covenant is that he does follow this logic. He doesn't want to, and he tries hard not to, but the more things he does in the Land, the more those things affect how he sees himself. This is why he does so damn little. (This is another misguided complaint about his character.)

In this sense, Covenant's journey is one of self-discovery. Like many of us, however, he is afraid of what he will discover. By doing nothing (or as little as he possibly can), he can spare himself pain. He has enough pain -- from his disease, from his isolation; he doesn't think he can take any more.

Lord Foul's Bane is, I think, a very good book. But it is here, in the area of Covenant's self-discovery, that it is lacking. His "whining" isn't a problem in itself; it is a symptom of Donaldson's unwillingness or inability to fully explore the depth of Covenant's character. It's interesting that the Land is mostly exactly that -- land. While there is much to see on the surface, a few deep lakes would have been nice.