I've been re-reading the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant recently. If you haven't read them, and are in the mood for Fantasy with a difference, then I'd recommend them. In many ways, the trilogy leans heavily on Tolkein's middle earth. Indeed, you might go as far as to suggest that Stephen Donaldson, the author, pretty much transplanted many of the elements of the Lord of the Rings to his own setting. But that would be less than half the story, and it's the unsaid half that makes these books worth reading. Specifically, it's Thomas Covenant. He's a man from our own world who, after being diagnosed with leprosy, is pretty much shunned by everyone he knows, including wife and child. For one reason or another he ends up on this strange alternate reality complete with wizards, demonic enemies, and even an all-powerful magic ring. But, crucially, he refuses to believe that any of it is real.
He's an infuriating, difficult to like main character that is still utterly compelling. Donaldson uses him to throw into razor-sharp relief much of what we assume to be true about heroic fantasy literature and indeed, the natures of power and duty themselves.
When I first read them, in my late teens, I thought both the main character and the tone to be interesting but ultimately too irritating to be worth the effort expended. I did manage all three books, however, which speaks volumes (no pun intended) about Donaldson's ability to engage even unwilling readers. Now, at the somewhat riper age of too-damn-close-to-forty, the books have taken on a rather different hue entirely.
There's a certain inevitability, I guess, to the fact that as we get older we become less certain of the morality of things which had once seemed perfectly clear. Covenant's constant railings against the price exacted by fundamental belief in a course of action, even against evil, strike a chord in times when the country is embroiled in a difficult foreign occupation of a divided and unhappy land.
Today, as perhaps always, fundamentalist beliefs hover like thunderheads on the horizon in all directions and hurl hailstorms of unwilling or unwitting peoples against their supposed foes. Last night I watched an interview with a retired army colonel baying for the blood of the people of Felujah as though barbed wire and tanks will, in the words of Tennyson, "make mild a rugged people." Maybe he doesn't watch the news much, but Israel has been trying that for a while now, and I don't imagine we'll have any greater success.
Moral ambiguity feels more and more to me like a old wound, like scar tissue that I'm forced to accommodate. It's too easy, especially for me, to want to hold up a shining light of principle and expect the world to be illuminated by it. It seems, I fear, that the darker corners of this world are capable of swallowing any light. Solutions, real solutions that actually make the world a better place, require us to hold tight to the principles we must, and to accept much that we would rather not. There are no easy answers because there are no easy questions. And even knowing what is right, sometimes makes me wonder if it's worth the cost. If we start shelling houses, building walls, and choking off drinking water to a town in a country we're supposed to be saving, I think it's time we went home. Nothing is worth becoming like that.