The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe

Shadow & Claw: the first half of The Book of the New Sun
The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator
by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe is one of those writers that though I've long been dimly aware of him, my curiosity about him was particularly stirred up by the denizens of /r/printSF, where he has a particularly vocal and adoring group of fans. His work is famously inscrutable; the introduction to this book (by Ada Palmer of the inscrutable Terra Ignota) says that there are science fiction books that are confusing to the inexperienced reader sf—and as those books are to easier books, so is The Book of the New Sun to those books. That is to say, there are some science fiction books you can only read once you have learned how to read science fiction, and Gene Wolfe you can only read once you have learned how to read Gene Wolfe. So I was pleased when I was gifted the new "Tor Essentials" editions of The Book of the New Sun, and I recently read the first one, which collects the first two books, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator.

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 1980-81
Acquired: May 2022
Read: July 2023

Book of the New Sun is about a member of the guild of torturers, Severian; Shadow of the Torturer covers his adolescence in the guild, and then the beginning of his exile, when he is en route to take up a post as executioner at a distant city. At first I was wondering if the inscrutability of the book was somewhat exaggerated; sure, you have to read carefully, but that's because Wolfe has dense, rich prose, and a tendency to jump around a bit chronologically (at first; it soon settles down). The world itself is a little obscure, but I had my theories. I enjoyed these early parts a lot—a richly described world in both the macro and micro senses. The dense, traditional, circumscribed world Severian moves through is fascinating and interesting. Additionally, I always like coming-of-age stuff, and this is a good example of it.

Once Severian leaves, though, the book gets weird. It actually reminds me of medieval quest narratives, or rather my most recent example of one (it has been a long time since I was in grad school, after all), the film adaptation of The Green Knight: bizarre, weird things keep happening... that are presented so matter-of-factly and received so matter-of-factly that they thus become even weirder and bizarre. Severian is recruited into a troupe of players, and one feels that this is going to be some kind of picaresque, but then he's challenged to a duel, and now he's in a botanical garden where people live, and then he's on a carriage that accidentally smashes through a group of nuns, and then when you think the story has forgotten all about that theatrical troupe, they somehow catch up to him and they're all performing a play together!

So it's less difficult in the sense that you don't know what's happening, and more difficult in the sense that the logic underpinning the story and world doesn't seem to be the logic of story and world we know here in the twentieth/twenty-first century. Like I said, it feels like a medieval text, in that it sort of comes across as something assembled retroactively from a bunch of disparate texts about Severian: why would the theatrical troupe reappear so much later? Well, because some later scribes stuck an unrelated story about Severian's duel into the middle of the text! So captivating, but if at the end of the book you wanted me to tell you what was actually going on, I'm not sure I could have done it.

I think Shadow of the Torturer balanced on just the right side of the weirdness, and had the opening segment to keep it grounded; the story's continuation in Claw of the Conciliator was more confusing to me, more piecemeal, too disorienting. Though I liked a lot of individual incidents, there were many aspects of the story I didn't follow at all, and ultimately I struggled through this in a way I hadn't with Shadow.

Still, they say you don't read Book of the New Sun, only reread it, so I am in for the long haul I guess. There are four books, plus a coda, and they are all part of the twelve-book "Solar Cycle" so it could be quite a long haul if I am willing! In the short term, though, I think I will certainly finish out The Book of the New Sun.