panguitch's Full Review: Gene Wolfe - Shadow & Claw: The First Half of the ...
Gene Wolfe is one of the most critically acclaimed authors in the science fiction and fantasy fields. He's won a shelf full of awards, academicians study his work, and his peers revere him. Ursula K. Le Guin compares him to Melville. Michael Swanwick believes "Gene Wolfe is the greatest writer in the English language alive today."
But he doesn't sell many books.
The problem is not uncommon. Although I'm somewhat of a populist—I feel the idea that the common reader lacks appreciation for quality literature is too often an excuse made by overconfident devotees of academically domesticated authors for the poor performance of unquality literature—it is no shock that John Q. Public lacks the stamina Wolfe demands in The Book of the New Sun. After all, this is a book where the narrator purposefully edits out scenes of straightforward interest (i.e. executions) because he finds them mundane.
The Book of the New Sun is a tetralogy. The first two books, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, introduce the first-person protagonist, Severian, several women with whom he falls in love, often at little more than a glance, and a number of other figures, threatening, comic, and inscrutable.
Severian belongs to the Guild of Torturers, but the first we see of him is when he, on naive impulse, saves the life of a famous insurgent. Whereas we might expect the saved to owe a debt to the savior, Wolfe suggests that when a person saves another they become invested in that other, and are forever at their service. So it is with Severian, who now finds himself devoted to the rebel Vodalus.
This matter is kept private, and has little effect until much later. Instead it is when Severian, this time acting in his official office, extends mercy to a "client" of his guild that his world is disrupted. Banished, he must make his way north, through the vast, sordid, and bizarre city of Nessus, and past the Autarch's House Absolute to take up station as his guild's representative in a frontier town.
Mercy does not become a habit for Severian. He plies his trade as he travels, though rarely bothers to recount details. Torture and execution are ritualized and intriguing. The guildsmen relate to their clients with a kind of sympathy, exercising their duties with clinical professionalism, never exacting more or less than what the courts stipulate. This detachment, despite certain incidents of exception, is profound in Severian. Severe in his inexpressive narration, he recounts his travels with selectively dense detail. A most uncooperative narrator, he is reliable but stinting in passion, shocking purveyors of literary truisms by sometimes telling rather than showing.
The reader must hunt after Severian's inner self just as we must sift through the details he provides. Even the seemingly tangential, ridiculous, or prosaic may prove pivotal. The task is complicated by the diction, littered with oddities like simar, oubliette, Cumaean, alcalde, paphian, and a number of Latinish interlopations. This obscurity removes the book from us, and communicates the distance at which it transpires. The Book of the New Sun is a future fantasy, taking place as Earth's sun slowly dwindles. Future technology has come and gone, and Wolfe makes few attempts to explain it to us. For example, the characters do not ride horses, but the story calls the creatures they do ride horses for convenience. The effect is a curious blend of science fiction and fantasy, with prominent mystical overtones. Religious and literary allusions fly fast and furious. Thankfully they only evoke archetypes rather than work as a shorthand a la Eliot's "Waste Land."
This profusion of detail, of reference, and of thought threatens to baffle. Sometimes I feel like Wolfe is channeling Bulgakov or Kafka or the magical realists. Events often seem both coincidental and disjointed, their very absurdity freighted with meaning. A later fantasy novel, Robin Hobb's Assassin's Apprentice provides an interesting comparison. Hobb's story shares some aspects of tone, theme, structure and character, but its more conventional presentation makes it a very different kind of book. More accessible, more enjoyable, perhaps less profound, but certainly more affecting.
Still, Wolfe is rarely more inaccessible than his project requires, and in this shows himself superior to the gaggle of literary authors who never forget, and never let us forget, that they are literary, or whose work sometimes sounds like the banter of an insular clique. That arrogance never surfaces in Wolfe's stark monument. It is serious without being self-conscious, timeless instead of faddish.
It is not easy to read. Its readers are "put to the question" as surely as are clients of the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence. Severian asserts, "We believe that we invent symbols. The truth is that they invent us," and it may be that The Book of the New Sun, a singular invention, attains that mark of great literature—it reinvents us.
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