Comprising of the novels (or parts): The Shadow of the Torturer ·
The Claw of the Conciliator · The Sword of the Lictor ·
The Citadel of the Autarch
I’m re-reading these for the first time since my teens - I believe I
read them through a couple of times then. Since then I’ve followed
Wolfe’s career and read The Wizard King, and I still harbor fond
memories of the New Sun series. It made a big impression on me.
Re-reading them now, I’m struck at their relative short length. At the
time I read them, the fad for multi-volume fat fantasy series was
still in the future. It could be that the many digressions,
philosophical asides, and stories-within-the-story felt much longer
when I was younger, and I just wanted to get to the action. Now
however I find them much more engaging.
This action is pretty straight-forward. It’s essentially a picaresque,
with our hero (despite his profession, he’s clearly a hero and not an
anti-hero) moving through different settings, meeting, separating and
re-uniting with different people, and basically sleeping with every
woman he meets, which is frankly rather weird and somehow in variance
with the character as presented.
Where the work excels is in the use of language. Wolfe famously used
obscure and archaic terms for all sorts of items (and in the first
book’s afterword it’s coyly suggested this is because he’s trying to
“translate” a future language) and this lends a real charm to what’s
essentially far-future SF.
The following long passage from the start of Shadow illustrates this
well. Severian is talking about one of the two masters of his guild.
[Master] Gurloes was one of the most complex men I have known,
because he was a complex man trying to be simple. Not a simple, but
a complex man’s idea of simplicity.
Just as a courtier forms himself into something brilliant and
involved, midway between a dancing master and a diplomacist, with a
touch of assassin if needed, so Master Gurloes had shaped himself to
be the dull creature a pursuivant or bailiff expected to see when he
summoned the head of our guild, and that is the only thing a real
torturer cannot be. The strain showed; though every part of Gurloes
was as it should have been, none of the parts fit. […] Sometimes
he went to the top of our tower, above the guns, and waited there
talking to himself, peering through glass said to be harder than
flint for the first beams [of the rising Sun]. He was the only one in our
guild—Master Palaemon not excepted—who was unafraid of the
energies there and the unseen mouths that spoke sometimes to human
beings and sometimes to other mouths in other towers and
keeps. […] His eyes were refulgent, brighter than any woman’s. He
mispronounced quite common words: urticate, salpinx, bordereau. I
cannot well tell you how bad he looked when I returned to the
Citadel recently, how bad he looks now.
The Urth of the New Sun
This sequel is a mess. Wolfe fell into the trap of trying to “explain” all the fascinating background stuff in the first novels, and the result is a sprawling, time-jumping jumble that introduces extraneous concepts for no very good reason. For superfans only.
