One of the most acclaimed "science fantasies" ever, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is a long, magical novel in four volumes. Shadow & Claw contains the first two: The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, which respectively won the World Fantasy and Nebula Awards.
This is the first-person narrative of Severian, a lowly apprentice torturer blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through the marvels of far-future Urth, and who--as revealed near the beginning--eventually becomes his land's sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it's a colorful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex, betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters, and mysteries to be solved. (Only well into book 2 do we realize what saved Severian's life in chapter 1.) For lovers of literary allusions, they are plenty here: a Dickensian cemetery scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges, and familiar fables changed by eons of retelling. Wolfe evokes a chilly sense of time's vastness, with an age-old, much-restored painting of a golden-visored "knight," really an astronaut standing on the moon, and an ancient citadel of metal towers, actually grounded spacecraft. Even the sun is senile and dying, and so Urth needs a new sun.
The Book of the New Sun is almost heartbreakingly good, full of riches and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece.
Original title: The Book of the New Sun, Vols. I & II
Author: Gene Wolfe
Series: The Book of the New Sun
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Orb Books
Media type: Paperback
Pages: 416 pp
ISBN-13: 978-0312890179
Followed by: Sword and Citadel
Publication date: 1983
Reader Review
I've read some of the reader reviews of "Shadow and Claw" and come to the conclusion that the book needs an introduction. Many of the negative reviews, I think, come from readers who weren't familiar with Gene Wolfe's writing style, which is understandable. So let me say for Wolfe that you cannot by any means read "The Book of the New Sun" the way you would ordinarily read a book. This mostly stems from the fact that the book is supposed to be an autobiography, and the writer, Severian, really can't be trusted to describe things accurately. A pretty good example would be the first woman Severian becomes interested in, Agia. He tells us that she was the most unattractive woman he has ever been attracted to. Fine, but the way that he becomes somewhat obsessed with her at a glance would suggest otherwise, and the way she treats him would account for his recalling her as being ugly. This is a minor example, to be sure, because it is a matter of Severian's perspective. There were other times in the book that I got the impression that Severian was telling flat-out lies. It's confusing, but it makes the book extremely interesting to read, simply because you are able to figure out much of what actually happened. Another thing to keep in mind, as somebody said in a quote on Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," (I forget who, and don't really care to find out, mostly because I'm lazy) is that Wolfe is "a master of the casual revelation." Which is to say that Severian will out of nowhere mention some vital piece of information, apparently assuming that we already knew about it. And we probably would know were we from his world, as he assumes we are. The only other thing to be aware of is the vocabulary, which thankfully is not nearly as difficult as people have described it. By and large, you won't have to look up the words being used simply because while you may not what an individual word means, you can infer it's meaning from the sentence it is used in. I started out looking up words constantly, and found that they mostly meant what I had already assumed they did. This is not to say that you shouldn't have a dictionary on hand, but looking up every word used that you don't know would be excessive. If all this sounds intimidating, I highly recommend that you read "Cerberus" which will give you a better handle on Wolfe's style. It's great book, and a good place to start if you are unfamiliar with Gene Wolfe. (If you do take my advice, it would be good to note that Severian's writing style is most similar to the first novella in "Cerberus.") The main thing I want to be clear on is that you shouldn't start reading this book expecting another "Lord of the Rings." While it can be argued that the "New Sun" series is of a similar calibur in terms of greatness, these are entirely different books. "LOTR" is an entertaining story, and you don't have to read into it at all. Everything you need to know is right there on the pages. The "New Sun" series is a bit more literary (Which sounds like a cultural elitist term, but I can't think of another one. Rest assured, I don't mean to belittle "LOTR" in any way, shape or form). If you're reading purely for an entertaining story, you would probably do well to look elsewhere.
- by Sean Hanley
Like thousands of teenagers, I came of age with *The Lord of the Rings*. The rather ugly Bakshi movie was the first one I went to see without my parents, and the novel was virtually the first one I ever read that was not a children's book, except for Jules Verne's *Mysterious Island*. Just like many Tolkien fans, I became a lifelong devotee of the fantasy genre, and explored the more promising of the other Middle-Earths, from Lankhmar to the Dark Shore, Lyonesse, Majipoor, Amber, Earthsea and the world of the Hyborean Age.
But of all the fantasy series I ever read, the only that ever compared to Tolkien's masterpiece in my opinion was Gene Wolfe's *New Urth* tetralogy. The others were fun, imaginative, full of action and adventure, but they either failed to maintain throughout the literary and spiritual power I had found in *The Lord of the Rings* or to equal the richness of its world-building.
Interestingly enough, however different Tolkien's and Wolfe's epics might be, they share two profound similarities. First, both were written by Catholics and infused with their author's faith. With Tolkien, all the trappings of religion are evacuated from the world itself while the story is saturated with religious symbolism. With Wolfe, on the contrary, Christianity is still very present but transformed, as if through layers and layers of rewriting, into a distant shadow of itself. There is only one God, Pancreator or Panjudicator ; an almost legendary «Conciliator» walked the earth eons ago and is still venerated by the order of the Pelerines ; and priests, rituals, sacred items and guilds abound, as in the Golden Age of Christianity.
The other similarity between the two sagas is the spiritual nature of their ultimate magical item. In *The Lord of the Rings*, the object is the ring itself, each successive use of which is a step on the path to damnation - conferring power on Earth in exchange for another fraction of the user's soul, as witnessed in the various states of spiritual decrepitude of those who have succumbed to the temptation. In *The Book of the New Sun*, the most powerful item is the Claw of the Conciliator - «the most valuable relic in existence», a gem that «performs miraculous cures... forgives injuries, raises the dead, draws new races of beings from the soil, purifies lust and so on. All the things [the Conciliator] is supposed to have done himself.»
In other words, Tolkien's ring is the Devil ; Wolfe's Claw is God : an interesting symmetry.
The texture of the two worlds, however, is very different. Middle Earth seems to be set in a distant past, barely threatened by the first premises of industrialization. Urth on the other hand is our own world millenia hence, a decaying planet waiting for a promised rebirth, frozen in some static medieval social order, incapable of producing any complex artefact except by magic, and borrowing fragments of more advanced technologies from its own past or from the mysterious hierodules, elusive offworlders who only have transactions with selected individuals on Urth and seem to be guiding the world's destiny in some occult fashion.
Tolkien was obviously not Wolfe's major influence. The world Severian, his first-person narrator, so entrancingly describes seems to be a mixture of Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Peake's Gormenghast, a labyrinthine urban world rather than an enchanted primeval setting, filled with Lovecraftian horrors and filtered through the literary sensibilities of an admirer of Jorge Luis Borges.
So if you know that you will not recapture the wonder of *The Lord of the Rings* by reading any of its countless rehashes, and are seeking for an original voice of comparable eloquence, the *New Sun* cycle is for you : open the gate to the necropolis, unsheathe *Terminus Est* and come drink the analeptic alzabo.
*Shadow and Claw* brings together in one volume the first two novels in the series, *The Shadow of the Torturer* and *The Claw of the Conciliator*. It is followed by *Sword and Citadel*, the conclusion of the original series, initially published in two volumes, and *Urth of the New Sun*, which I have not read yet. Wolfe further expanded the saga with the books of the Long Sun and Short Sun, comprising seven volumes so far. And readers who have fallen in love with his universe will also be interested in *The Castle of the Otter* (1983), a collection of essays he wrote on the *New Sun* cycle ; *Lexicon Urthus*, a New Sun encyclopedia ; and GURPS New Sun, the role playing game based on the series.
- by Jean-Francois Virey
"Here I pause. If you wish to walk no farther with me, reader, I cannot blame you. It is no easy road."
So go the extremely memorable ending lines of both books contained in this one volume.
It seems to me that this is one of those books that people are either going to love or hate.
WHAT'S TO LOVE ABOUT IT:
The storyline is extremely refreshing--when was the last time you read a story from the torturer's point of view?
The books do indeed feel like you're reading literature and not something fluffy.
The characters are very interesting--not just the main character, Severian, but the supporting characters as well, like Agia, Jolenta, Jonas, Dr. Talos, Thecla and a handful of others.
The chapters are extremely short--usually about 5-6 pages long--which make for a quick read--although not always an easy one.
The plot in general is very different from your typical "formula fantasy".
WHAT MIGHT TURN YOU OFF: As I mentioned before, this book is like literature. If fantasy were more popular in the late 1800s/early 1900s, it would read somewhat similar to this. The pages probably won't be flying like that page-turner you took to the beach last summer.
There are lots of real words that are so seldom used as to falsely lead one to believe that they are fantasy words (e.g. Sabretache, which is actually a little pouch). The writing is not florid however.
However, there are also made-up words, usually for units of time and currency, and although there is an appendix, it is inconveniently at the back of the book.
Gene Wolfe's writing style can take some getting used to. There were a few times I had a hard time visualizing what was going on and had to reread a paragraph or page to figure things out.
OVERALL:
If you're up for a challenge, then I'd definitely give this series a try. If I had to rate the books individually, the first book I'd give 4/5 and the second I'd give 3.5/5. The first book is more linear and makes for an easier read, while the second is more complex and unconventional.
- by EMAN NEP
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