The Case For The Prosecution: Angus
While arguably it might be said that Morn is the major character of the Gap series, Angus is clearly the character that holds Donaldson’s interest the most. This, it has to be said, is a bit of a worry. Donaldson’s work shows a fascination with sexual violence which is pretty damned disturbing. He says in the Afterword that he’s irrationally sure that his readers will recognise that he is in fact Angus thinly disguised: I’m not sure why he thinks this is irrational, as his emotional involvement with Angus’s character is as hard to miss as a Klingon in an embroidery shop.
Donaldson gets my respect for continuing with this line of stuff even when he felt it was opening his darker side up for general inspection: that can’t have been easy and shows a powerful and disconcerting honesty at work. I’m surprised, however, that he talks about finding, rather than inventing, Angus in a way that had never occurred before, as this thread’s been right through his work. One can hardly miss the fact that Thomas Covenant is a rapist, and it was with heavy-duty déjà vu that I read in a review of the Chronicles that many readers were unhappy at being manipulated by the author into accepting Covenant as a hero worthy of redemption.
In Mordant’s Need, there are of course some slimy scenes between Terisa and Eremis, but those don’t set off my warning klaxons in the same way: it’s pretty clear that Donaldson feels about Eremis the way he does about Nick (he certainly seems to have something against the sexually charismatic). The scenes, however, in which Castellan Lebbick alternately hits Terisa and kisses her leap off the page with a particularly concentrated intensity, the exact same quality of which, magnified geometrically, is present in The Real Story. (Donaldson’s "confession" in the Afterword came as quite a relief: when I first started reading The Real Story, with its peculiarly vivid and unpleasant scenes of Angus either raping Morn, anticipating raping Morn or recalling raping Morn, and recognised that same quality again, I had started to think that it was my own lurid imagination going into overdrive, so it was nice to know it wasn’t just my warped mind at work.)
