Lord Foul's Bane

"I was talking about this with somebody the other day, about how difficult it is to have unlikable characters, and whether you should make sure that everybody is engaging – someone that people can identify with and, to a certain extent, approve of. In contemporary fantasy it happens a lot, that it’s necessary to have people who are kind of relatable… Lord Foul’s Bane is a secondary-world fantasy of the epic type, but the protagonist doesn’t believe it’s real. The protagonist, Thomas Covenant, is a writer who has, by some method – he doesn’t even understand how it’s happened – been summoned into a place that’s quite a lot like Tolkien’s Middle Earth. If you look at the cover illustrations of the original editions, it’s obviously designed to look exactly like Middle Earth. But because he doesn’t believe in it, he won’t fulfil his role as the saviour of this place. They think he’s the saviour. They brought him there because he has the ability to wield white gold, which is a kind of magical substance, and his wedding ring, which is very normal for him, is white gold; and it’s the only piece of white gold that they’re aware of in the land. This white gold should be able to kill the big bad of the land. But unfortunately, Thomas Covenant doesn’t believe it. One of the first scenes is him sexually assaulting the first woman he meets. And this was a big selling franchise, it went on to sell millions, and was a big deal in the 1980s… People like to imagine that anything in the past wasn’t as right-on, but the 1980s seemed to me like a very heavily feminist time, at least in my world. People were talking about feminism all the time, and talking about consent in ways that we seem to imagine we’ve only just come up with. So it seems very odd to me, at that time, that this decision was taken, or was allowed as a piece of publishing; and also that it was possible to read it, and then still somehow not be completely turned off by the text. And it doesn’t get any better. I mean, there’s less sexual assault in it going forward, but his attitude to the world is, “You’re all insane. This isn’t even real. It doesn’t matter what happens here. You can all die. Why don’t you just all die and let the world die. And when it comes to the time in which I have to save it, I’m not going to do anything.” So the end of the first book is him meeting Lord Foul, who’s the kind of Sauron character, and just refusing to do anything. That model of the hero, I thought, was interesting. It stuck with me, despite the fact that you just don’t like him – and to a certain extent, don’t like the books because of that. But there was the original trilogy, then another trilogy, and then I think five extra books that got published, and I read them all , despite the fact that I really didn’t like lots of them. I think that’s something inherent in fantasy in general, that you like to reach the end of things. But it’s also something inherent, I think, in reality: that people aren’t likable. I mean, I’m sure you and everybody reading this are very likable people, but in general, humanity is a pretty terrible burden on the world and on each other. And I think that now, we’re desperate to represent to ourselves these utopian, positive characters within dystopias, and it causes a problem somewhere. It causes a problem in our ability to be truly radical about the things that are going wrong, and particularly for our ability to see that we are the thing that is going wrong. I think it’s the same thing, to a certain extent. It’s our refusal to deal with other people’s reals, right? Because we’re so certain of ours. That’s what happens in Lord Foul’s Bane: he goes in so certain that his real world is real, that this other world can’t be real. And I think it’s that certainty that leads to the kind of ethical problems that we’re seeing enacted across the board – and not just in writing, obviously, but in terms of our ability to carpet bomb various areas or to do things that seem to have a Machiavellian justification, “because eventually there will be peace” or whatever it happens to be. Or just in our everyday lives, our unwillingness to listen to each other, because we’re so certain that the things that we think are really true, and that therefore anything against that is incorrect. I think that way unethical behaviours lie, regardless of where you set up, regardless of whether you’re a liberal or a conservative. I think that certainty, particularly of your own ethical position and other people’s failures, is just a mistake. Let’s pull the rug out from under all of this. Then, when there isn’t any certainty about anything, then we see what we are, and where we are."