Gene Wolfe Ends the Book of the New Sun

The Book of the New Sun, Vol. 4: The Citadel of the Autarch – Gene Wolfe (1982)

            It is complete.  My tour through the mind of Gene Wolfe, and Urth, the world his protagonist Severian inhabits, has run its course.  I am not the same person that began this journey.  Neither is Severian.  In fact, neither is anyone or anything.  Permanence is an illusion.  Change is the only true constant of our existence.  Change is so constant and so pervasive that we flow through countless cycles unnoticed as we toil in our second-to-second existence.  The theme of change, or wholesale and wide-ranging change, and the ways that change can actually bring about order and stability, are at the core of the Book of the New Sun.

            The genius of Gene Wolfe helps facilitate this through his use of a narrator whose memory, he claims, is eidetic.  This narrator, Severian, is the writer of the tale, and also the hero.  Through the course of 4 novels, he tells his own story as he progresses from a know-nothing young apprentice, to a full Master Torturer, then into a world-weary traveler, and finally to his ultimate destiny as a leader of men.  While Severian may indeed possess an eidetic memory he does make mistakes and omissions in the telling of his tale, and later admits them to us, the reader.  If this did not complicate the story somewhat, the fact that Severian ends up absorbing the consciousness of various people throughout the tale increases his inner confusion, for he cannot tell whether the memory he experiences is his own, or one of the people whose memories he carries within him. 

            This is a neat literary trick to show how humans actually think.  We assume we are ONE BEING, but we have two brains.  We have multiple personas.  We all have multiple “selves” we carry within us.  The 6 year old me is still in there somewhere, as is the angry 19 year old me, and the depressed 30 year old me.  Not only that, but by virtue of their constant presence and nurturing, I carry my father and my mother and their voices within me as well.  Change does not erase.  It aggregates.  The same is true of our narrator, Severian, and every one of us.

            (I began this journey through Urth at the behest of a pal from the Sonic Youth Gossip Forum.  His screen name is Severian, and he has championed these books to me for EVER.  I first posted my review of Volume 1, The Shadow of the Torturer, on April 4, 2016.  It took me a couple of years to get back to the Book of the New Sun, and Severian let me know of his displeasure.  Now I have read the final three volumes, one a month, for the past three months and I am all Wolfe’d out!  What a story!  WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!!! )

            When I last visited Urth, Severian had become embroiled with people who showed him the true age and mystery of his world.  Urth is very very old.  So very old.  Not only is Urth old, but the universe itself is exceedingly ancient.  The mores and dogmas that hold this society together are a bizarre combination of their access to high technology with no awareness of the science that makes the tech function, and of the descent of humanity into a strict feudal system, similar in rigidity to the old Hindu caste system.  In a world like this, the powerful are like gods, like magicians, and the regular people are solely there to feed the mill of life.  No questions are asked, and everyone knows their place.  Into this world, a young torturer’s apprentice is thrust, forcing him to question everything he has been learned, and yet reinforcing everything he has been taught.  It is as complex as real life.  Each human is doing their best to survive with what means they have at hand.  Life is too hard to worry about the big picture, or the bigger issues.

            In this type of world, war is constant.  Pain is constant.  Death is so pervasive that an entire Guild of Torturers exists to dole out punishments and executions.  Everywhere Severian travels death shadows him, or has been there before.  What is shown in this last volume is that Severian, a personification of death, grows to understand that absolute rule means that everyone is short-changed.  As he progresses through his final understanding, Severian realizes that the biggest change he will bring about will be to re-craft the rules of the world that made him who he is, to create a better world for all. 

            As with all fiction I review here at RXTT’s Intellectual Journey, I do not want to give away too much of the story.  That is the single greatest joy of fiction, the way the story is revealed to the reader, and I hope you get to experience the sublime literary and imaginative joys that gene Wolfe has crafted into The Book of The New Sun for yourself.

Gene Wolfe can't stop messing with my mind, Vol. 3

The Book of the New Sun, Vol. 3: The Sword of the Lictor – Gene Wolfe (1981)

     My real-life “Severian”, as opposed to the person narrating the Book of the New Sun, would be so happy.  This guy has been hassling me (kindly) for a while now to finish reading the Book of the New Sun, and I put it off due to my mind being pulled to other topics and books.  However, having picked up and read the 2^nd volume of Gene Wolfe’s masterful tetralogy, I found myself unable to pull away from the ancient world of Urth, and the lives of the people that Severian runs into and becomes part of as he sets off toward his destiny.  I had to pick up the 3^rd volume, and start in on it as soon as I had finished The Claw of the Conciliator.

Our narrator, Severian, has experienced and grown much since we first met him as an Apprentice to the Guild of Torturers.  He has become a Master Torturer, and his services have been put to use as he travels through Urth.  He has glimpsed through the myths and tales of his world, and begun to see the truths underlying everything he thought he knew.  Urth is a very, very old place, seemingly a far-future Earth, one in which, as Severian finds out, humanity left for the stars and returned from the stars a long time ago.  Much of humanity exists in a feudal system, with a few ruling groups and most of the masses just working hard at staying fed and alive.

Gene Wolfe is such a clever writer.  His narrator claims to have an eidetic memory of sorts, being able to recall any and all events that have occurred in his life, but this is not exactly true.  He doubts his memory at times, due partly to the fact that his mind has “absorbed” the mind of an aristocratic Lady named Thecla, which causes him to recall memories that are not his own.  To add another level to this, Gene Wolfe writes this tale as if it were his translation of an ancient text recounted by Severian himself.  This allows Wolfe to keep the reader on edge, wondering what new revelation is to come next, and whether it will even be recognized as that.  As Severian works to unlock this puzzle he experiences the disjointed state that comes from the knowledge that every new revelation actually leads to more confusion, much like reality. 

Most science fiction/fantasy books do not work this way.  As their protagonists progress in their stories the world around them becomes clearer, and their knowledge of it more secure, leading to a great apex where the truths of that fictional world are revealed to the characters and the reader.  I am unaware of where Gene Wolfe is taking this tale, but that makes for a more thrilling ride!  The real world, the world we all live in, is exceedingly complex, and the more you seek the more complexity you find.  It is true, as the wise man is claimed to have said, that the more you learn the more you realize you know nothing. 

We are victims of our personal reality tunnels, and seeking any answers will always lead you to more questions.  In this sense, consciousness and reality appear to be fractal systems.  Maybe Gene Wolfe was somehow innately aware of this, even before Chaos Theory and fractal geometry were studied and understood as they are today.  The best writers and artists are the ones that can pull truths from our collective experience and share it with the rest of us, sometimes encapsulating past experiences in novel ways, and at other times seemingly predicting the future state of humanity as they gather from the clues all around us.  Gene Wolfe was a master at both of these, and it is what makes the Book of the New Sun such gripping reading.  One more to go…

(This book can be read here: THE SWORD OF THE LICTOR )

Gene Wolfe continues to blow my mind, Vol. 2.

Shadow & Claw, Vol. 2: The Claw of the Conciliator – Gene Wolfe (1981)

            After a hiatus of quite a few months, in which I have occupied my mind with books on gender-disparity and anthropology, the horrors of Soviet-era gulags, early science fiction, modern science fiction, and Joan Didion’s exploration of her grief following her husband’s sudden death, among other books, I turned my attention to the second volume of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun tetra-logy, The Claw of the Conciliator.

            Gene Wolfe passed away in the time between my reading of The Shadow of the Torturer, and picking up this second volume. He was 87 years old.  In doing some research about his life I read that he was a fellow alumni of the University of Houston.  He earned his degree in Industrial Engineering, whereas I earned mine in Studio Art-Painting.  He received acclaim for his speculative fiction works at a late age, and was very highly thought of as a writer of wonderful prose by his fellow authors.  Gene Wolfe stated in a letter that his definition of a great story was a story, “…that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure.”  These words describe quite well my favorite novels and stories.

            The Claw of the Conciliator continues the story of Severian, a Guild Torturer traveling through a deep-future Earth, or “Urth” as it is called in the books.  Severian is the narrator/writer of this story, which Gene Wolfe states in a meta-narrative way is actually a found history that Wolfe is “translating” for us readers.  Layered storytelling such as this is something that requires a “cultivated reader,” as Gene Wolfe states in the above quote.  These novels are not for people who are new to literature, or to the depths of the English language itself. 

Whereas many speculative fiction/fantasy novels seek to immerse you in a new world, very few actually do so without using the standard tropes and markers of our current existence.  This helps ground the reader, keeping them feeling as if they understand what is happening, simply because it seems familiar in some way, but it is a detriment when one is trying to create an otherworldly universe to set your stories in.  Gene Wolfe’s writing does not suffer from this, as every aspect of his tales, from the characters to the setting to the myths and legends that inform his work are deeply thought out and carefully self-consistent within themselves.  This is the hardest fiction to read quickly, or superficially.  It requires attentive reading, or what Gene Wolfe described above as a cultivated reader, someone who has read many of the seminal touchstones of human literature, and therefore brings within them the tools to fully grasp the story presented in these books.  I can understand why so many contemporary authors saw the greatness in Gene Wolfe right away.

I do not like to give away plot details of the fiction books I read, as finding out these things is part of the joy of reading them.  I will tell you that the Severian in volume 2 is a wiser, more tempered person than he was in the first novel, having experience so much in the interim.  He is beginning to untangle what are thousands of years’ worth of ritual and dogma associated with the world of Urth and its societal structures as he heads further away from home on his new assignment.  Severian is slowly perceiving a world, in fact a Universe, far bigger and more complex than he could ever have imagined.  His awareness increases our awareness, giving us a glimpse of what may come next.

A few days before finishing this novel I received in the mail the 3^rd volume of the Book of the New Sun, The Sword of the Lictor (1st edition hardback baby!).  One of my Sonic Life peeps, named “Severian” after the main character of these novels, has been on my butt to read these novels and finish up the Book of the New Sun ever since he introduced me to these books.  Thy will be done Severian…

(This book can be read here: THE CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR )

Part of my Mind will always be lost in this book's pages

Shadow & Claw, Vol. 1: The Shadow of the Torturer – Gene Wolfe (1980)

            There are writers whose names float around in my consciousness, having heard of them from other readers, or from various book reviews or articles I read.  The name Gene Wolfe was one such name.  I knew him to be a writer of fantasy/science fiction, and that he had a very loyal following of readers who found him to be a master storyteller.  He has never been a “best-seller” but his works always attract a devoted readership.  When my man Severian, from the Sonic Youth Gossip Forum, suggested I read the 4 volume series Shadow & Claw, and when I realized it was by that same Gene Wolfe whose works I had yet to read, I hit the library and checked out the first two volumes.  Upon opening up the book I was surprised to read that the main character, the “Torturer” in the title, was a young man named Severian!  Ha!  I now knew where my online friend had unearthed his bizarre forum handle!  Since my real-life Severian had already led me to read the great and bizarre Area X: The Southern Reach Trilogy by Jeff Vandermeer, I felt that I would enjoy The Shadow of the Torturer.  What I did not foresee is the extent that Gene Wolfe’s writing would slink into my brain, occupying my non-reading time with thoughts about the odd book I was reading.

            This book begins the story of the torturer Severian by introducing him as our narrator, describing events in his past to us, and gradually exposing us to this ancient, mysterious world in which Severian lives.  He is a young man, near to adulthood, who since his birth has been trained as a torturer’s apprentice.  The world of this story reflects a rigorous caste and guild system that helps hold together this society, but whose specific meanings and symbolism have been lost to the passage of time.  It is an ancient civilization, one that has merged its technology and advanced knowledge with feudalism and brutal enforcement of the rules.  Most live their lives in deep superstition, and fear of others.  People stay to their own kind, and in their own guilds.  In fact, whole generations die within the walls of their respective guilds, sometimes never stepping foot outside into the giant, nearly incomprehensible city outside.  In fact, this first volume is strictly the tale of Severian as he seeks to leave the giant city, ending as he enters the gates leading outside.

           There is a lot of amazing imagery in this book, and part of the joy of it is losing oneself in the world that Gene Wolfe has created.  He does it so subtly, yet so completely, that it feels almost too real, as if the real world around you is fake and the story in the pages is the reality.  This is what the very best of genre fiction does.  It takes the reader’s mind and sends it hurtling through a wholly fabricated world, a world created by the writer’s words and the reader’s imagination.  The best writers build such amazing worlds that people return to them again and again.  Frank Hebert did it with the Dune books.  Robert E. Howard did it with the Conan stories.  While Dune was a messianic tale of galactic intrigue, and the Conan tales were the start of the swashbuckling Sword & Fantasy genre, Gene Wolfe’s Shadow & Claw seems to be headed in a completely different direction, although I will have to read the next three volumes to truly understand.  Right now, I have come to know Severian, his life, the world he lives in, and his training, but have yet to see where he is destined to be, although countless hints and possibilities come to mind.  I am very excited to see where this story goes!

(This book is available for purchase here: AMAZON )