The Shadow of the Torturer (Book of the New Sun, Vol. 1) (original 1980; edition 1984)

This is the first volume of The Book of the New Sun, which is, to my mind, the greatest multi-book fantasy series ever written. Ever since Tolkien, writers have been inspired to carry out similar lengthy quest stories. Except where Tolkien began with the end in mind, and told a story with structure, most subsequent fantasy authors, after realizing their sales potential, put aside finite dreams and spin out never-ending stories, each new volume diminishing the seeming potential of their series. Gene Wolfe's tale, though long like Tolkien's, has structure and an ending.

The protagonist of this magnum opus is Severian, who begins as an apprentice in the Torturer's Guild and ends as Autarch (Emperor) of his far future realm, which is hinted to be the continent of South America. I'm not giving anything away by telling you he becomes Autarch. Severian lets you know this in the first few pages.

Severian is quickly cut loose from his guild and becomes a wanderer. His story is told in the first person, but be aware that he's an unreliable narrator. Severian's world is full of tale-tellers, who stop and tell stories within the main story, that tend to presage Severian's future and illuminate the past.

The books in this series are like the Botanical Gardens Severian enters in the first book. Seemingly finite from the outside, inside, they are infinite. Each room contains a world. Wolfe crafts the kind of world that you'll return to in your mind when you close the book. You'll likely inhabit this world in your dreams. ( )

With the plethora of praise this series has garnered I dove in with great anticipation. I found it rather undeserving. Between the archaic language and rambling (at times ridiculous) plot it seemed nothing more than pretentious. I don't thing I can work up enough enthusiasm to trudge through the next installment. ( )

When I was researching acclaimed fantasy series towards the end of 2011, trying to get back into the genre, two names came up more than anything else: A Song of Ice And Fire, and The Book of the New Sun. With the TV series spurring its popularity, last year was clearly the time to read A Song of Ice And Fire, and I’m glad I devoted much of my reading time in 2012 to digesting George R.R. Martin’s five-book epic. Now, though, I look forward to reading Gene Wolfe’s much more manageable four-book series. (Actually, having just finished The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book of the series, I must warn that it doesn’t even attempt to reach any kind of conclusion, and I’m glad that I have The Claw of the Conciliator on hand so I can continue immediately).

Wolfe’s series is very different from Martin’s. A Game of Thrones is set in a largely traditional fantasy world, and achieved prominence through Martin’s inversion of genre tropes. The Shadow of the Torturer is set in the real world, in the far future, after who knows how many civilisations have risen and fallen. (It’s not really relevant, given that apparently no remnants of modern civilisation remain, but from the vague details dropped here and there I suspect it takes place somewhere in Argentina.) It’s therefore technically science fiction, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call it fantasy, given its diction and tone. Unusually for a fantasy novel, it’s narrated in first person, by Severian, a young apprentice at the guild of torturers in the city of Nessus.

The first half of the novel plays out extremely well, detailing Severian’s life in the guild and the circumstances leading up to his departure. The second half of the novel, covering what happens to him after he leaves, is unfortunately not as enjoyable. Severian has a destination and a purpose in mind, but is led about at the whim of strangers and keeps encountering people and places which have a bizarre episodic nature to them. There’s a lot of apparently irrelevant scenes and deus ex machina, only some of which are resolved by the end of the novel. The Shadow of the Torturer is, however, clearly the first book in a larger work, and hopefully the future books will improve on this.

Wolfe’s writing style – or Severian’s writing style, rather – is very different from the bog standard fantasy prose one finds elsewhere. This is clearly “literary” fantasy, which means that it’s often bogged down with philosphical meandering and dream sequences that probably have a deep symbolic meaning I couldn’t be bothered ferreting out. On the plus side, however, it also makes Severian’s future one of the more interesting fictional worlds I’ve read about, purely because of the way Wolfe uses his first-person narrator to carefully drop intriguing details. Early in the novel, for example, Severian is describing the Citadel at the centre of the city, a massive and ancient structure where he and many other guild members reside, and casually mentions that “the examination room was the propulsion chamber of the original structure.” Equally fascinating are the references to “the pale cacogens who sometimes visit Urth from the farther stars.” Then there is the concept within the series’ title itself, The Book of the New Sun – it becomes apparent, again not through explicit statements but rather mentioned in passing, that the sun is dimming and dying; Severian mentions a structure reaching up into the visible stars during a scene that takes place at midday, and characters seem to hold some prophesised, possibly religious belief that a “New Sun” will one day come (to the best of my recollection, this is only mentioned twice).

Heightening this technique is Wolfe’s brilliant use of language, which he discusses in a brief afterword, saying that he could have “saved [myself] a great deal of labour by having recourse to invented terms; in no case have I done so.” The Shadow of the Torturer is full of terms like peltast and fiacre and chatelaine, which have the effect of lending a foreign air, as the made-up words of a fantasy novel would, but which are perfectly real words (at least, most of them are – googling a few of them only turns up sites referencing the novel, whatever Wolfe claims, though perhaps they’re from another language.) And despite taking place in the real world, there’s still plenty of exotic fantasy, as the genetic engineering of some past civilisation has resulted in strange beasts and altered humans, and – as any science fiction reader knows – “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

The Shadow of the Torturer presents a fascinating fantasy/sci-fi world in an excellent style. Whether it tells a good story or not is a matter of taste. Personally, I found the second half a little too rambling, a little too aimless, a little too strange, and the authorial voice which works so well at creating a world often stumbled when it came to imparting a sense of urgency and presence in the narrative. Severian is writing about the events from some point in the future; although it wasn’t so much this narrative method as it was the sense that the plot was unfolding not in a natural manner, but rather by the iron fist of the author. (I’m actually quite interested to see how Wolfe employs Severian’s future vantage point in the future; at one point in this book, not even very far into it, he casually mentions that he is now “on the throne.”) I can’t say I found The Shadow of the Torturer easy to read, or that it was always enthralling, but I did find it refreshingly original and I definitely look forward to reading the rest of the series. ( )

As often happens with books I've had on my wishlist for a long while, expectations were factually correct and yet misleading. Also typical, the distortions concern the tone and tenor of the piece, rather than details of character or setting. Various reviews of both the series and Wolfe's writing style attuned me to the abundant allusions and symbolism, for the most part without knowing specifics beforehand.

The premise is the most successful: Severian's apprenticeship to the Torturer's guild and developments leading to his exile. Wolfe's world building is well done, he doles out details in pieces without contrived asides to the reader via dialogue between characters. Exposition more or less flows organically, so it's only after several references to the tower being metal, for instance, that it dawns this is a grounded spacecraft. The characters seem to know this, too, but it's so far removed from their commonplace as to be irrelevant to immediate concerns, leaving the tower simply part of the Citadel, if not of stone or brick. Other details reveal this is probably Earth in a far future, not merely an affectation for calling the place Urth.

The second half of the book is less engaging, with Severian making his way through Nessus (the city in which the Citadel sits) toward a remote outpost where he has been given an appointment as carnifax. The ambience changes from the decay of an urban colossus a la Peake, to a motley fantasy adventure closer to Philip Jose Farmer. The mixture of SF and Fantasy is here, too, and though it makes perfect sense given the premise, I realise I'd been anticipating (hoping for?) something closer to Leiber.

The sleight of hand in re: the plot (characters not being who they appear) suggests the same trickery may be afoot with respect to Severian himself, the unreliable narrator for which Wolfe receives so much attention, but also the SF aspect of the setting. That is, there are hints the old technology and cultural references eventually may turn out to be recognisably part of Earth and modern humanity, not merely a projected fiction that could just as well be an alien planet.

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Favourite theme: the parallels drawn between the Guild of Torturers and common social institutions, be they other guilds, or gender roles. Curious to see where this leads.

Read in an omnibus edition of the first two installments, I'll review each novel in a separate entry. ( )

Dull. Frankly disappointing for something that is supposed to be one of the classic's of the genre. It has it moments, but spends far too much time wandering around the point, showing off the landscape without any actual plot happening.

Severain is a boy growing up in the guild of torturers in a Citadel on part of a archaic planet that might have had an interetsing past. But we don't get to hear about it. It seems like it's a future centuries after humanity left Earth, but now long ost to the spacefaring technology and reverted back to standard fantasy style trappings. All of which is cometely irrelevant to the plot, such as it is, and the tiny hints fdropped here and there just confuse or tantalise the reader. There are various other guilds and a more elite upper class as well as a working class, but again explanations aren't forthcoming. Serverain eventually commits a gross breech of guild rules by killing someone and is exiled. He gets to explore the surrounding City in a longwinded way in the compnay of two women. None of them are interesting, and the reasons for his doing so are completely contrived. The City could have been interesting, but proves to be merely disjointed. Again contrvensions of physical laws are unexplained, not in a this is how my world works kind of way, but in a this is a weird thing I thought of so I stuffed it in here way. Which doesn't work.

The prose itself is intelligent and easily readable, despite the lathering of obscure words - some of which the author admists in the Afterword to having made up for no reason. But the characters are not interesting. Severain who could at the least have suffered some moral quams over his role of torturer or executioner, doesn't. Not even in it's my job style, he just doens't think of it, neither do his two companions.

There is a lot of potential here, and back when it was written maybe it could have been a significant milestone. But these days it is just labored, badly foreshadowed, contrived, unnecessarily convoluted adn dull. I put it odwn several times because looking at my phone was more interesting. AT times I skimmed through paragraghs of drivel, mostly Severain attemptin to describe the obvious, moaning, or pages of random dream sequences that bore no relation to anything at all.

Don't bother. I certainly shan't be reading the remaining 4 books! Gods another 4 whole books of this diatribe. Being tortured would be nicer. ( )