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language: English
country: USA
year: 1980
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
series: The Book of the New Sun, #1
dates read: 15.11.24-20.11.24
Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book of the Book of the New Sun, is a fascinating, though flawed, novel. it has been on my agenda for a long time, and on a whim I decided it was finally time to pick it up. on the one hand, I have emerged from it regretting the fact that I haven’t yet read Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, which I feel would have been a useful reference point; on the other hand, having read Delany’s Return to Nevèrÿon, McCaffrey’s Pern, several of Vance’s Dying Earth books, and of course The Locked Tomb was, I think, more than adequate preparation.
the writing is much like Delany’s, especially in Return to Nevèrÿon: an excruciatingly precise portrait of a temporally distant social and political world — though in this case the temporal distance is a far future where, in classic sci-fi fashion, the sun is fading away (rather than expanding to engulf the Earth, as will eventually happen in reality). there are vague myths and memories of our present — in the clumsiest of these, Severian sees what seems to be a picture of the Apollo moon landing — and of a still-distant past where interstellar travel was common, but these are treated as largely distant and irrelevant, at least until the age of the “new sun” which some characters believe is coming. the protagonist, Severian, is an apprentice and then journeyman in the guild of torturers, where he was raised since the time of his earliest memories. the novel is presented as, in effect, Severian’s memoir, telling of his transgression against the guild and ambiguous exile therefrom.
much of the novel feels like, on the one hand, a retreading of Delany’s “The Tale of Gorgik” in Tales of Nevèrÿon (the Autarch must be praised with every reference, just like the Empress Ynelgo, whose reign is bountiful and beneficent) and, on the other, a prelude to “The Mummer’s Tale” in Flight from Nevèrÿon. I take this to suggest that Wolfe was probably, on some level, thinking about Trouble on Triton, which is extremely interested in performance and especially the theater and, secondarily, in the navigation of urban space. about half of the novel is occupied by Severian’s journey into exile — not, however, with his journey to the northern town of Thrax, where he is to serve as municipal carnifex (in this case encompassing the roles of both executioner and torturer), but rather his tortuous journey across the sprawling City Imperishable of Nessus. this brings him into contact with actors and nuns, a man seeking the maybe-corpse of his long-lost wife, and would-be assassins. it is as meandering and pensive as Delany and, like Delany, full of characters from all walks of life reflecting on philosophical problems. in perhaps the most striking moment — as a Literature Person — Severian compares his current task, writing this memoir, with the work of a carnifex. the novel as a successful public execution.
its main flaw, I would say, is its gender politics. on the one hand, some of this I think is a reflection more of Wolfe’s intentional world-building choices: I don’t think Severian’s attitudes towards women — the patriarchal values he is taught by the men around him — probably align with Wolfe’s. nonetheless, the obvious dichotomy between Agia the femme fatale and Dorcas the poor little ingénue betrays — at best — a laziness in terms of the way Wolfe was thinking about gender within the setting and — at worst — simply a tediously ordinary misogyny.
the use of Zanja — an outsider to Shaftal — as the main POV character means that we experience the secondary world through her double vision, seeing Shaftal both as distinct from our primary world and from Zanja’s points of reference among the Ashawala’i. while this aspect of the world-building is much less central to the novel (and series) than it is to Delany’s Stars in My Pocke Like Grains of Sand, I nonetheless think it compares favorably to Delany in its thoroughgoing attention to the implications of its world-building decisions about Shaftali, Sainnite, and Ashawala’i society.
I admit that about three-quarters of the way through I found myself wishing we could just get Severian out of the city and move on with it, but it picked up again, and overall I’m satisfied with the pacing and Wolfe’s decision to linger on the journey out of Nessus.
the highlight of the novel is its detailed attention to setting and especially Wolfe’s intensive use of archaisms like “carnifex” as well as classical neologisms to emphasize the distance between the reader and the setting. this is an interesting contrast with Delany, who purposefully exploits readers’ expectations of a “generic” pseudo-bronze age setting in Return to Nevèrÿon, and it serves to defamiliarize a setting that draws on many of the common trappings of pseudomedievalist fantasy (or science-fantasy, in this case) monarchies. the unfamiliar language is a pointed reminder that we are in an unfamiliar world, in an unfamiliar time — it is, like Delany, a consciously difficult novel, and I’m looking forward to reading The Claw of the Conciliator.
moods: dark, grimy, mysterious, reflective