The Book of the New Sun
by Gene Wolfe
(includes The Shadow of the Torturer, 1980; The Claw of the Conciliator, 1981; The Sword of the Lictor, 1981; and The Citadel of the Autarch, 1982)

A thousand ages in thy sight
    Are like an evening gone;
Short as the watch that ends the night
    Before the rising sun.
        --epigraph to The Shadow of the Torturer

As I get older, I find it becomes increasingly difficult to find books that suck me in and hold me in a spell for their entirety, books that I find myself wanting to reread over and over, give to friends, and talk about to everyone I see.  I don't know if it's because I'm becoming more jaded and less easily impressed, or if I've simply read most of the good stuff already.  And frankly, I don't know which explanation bothers me more.  Fortunately, there are still books that can awaken that wonderful emotion; I recently finished Gene Wolfe's four-part The Book of the New Sun and found I loved it more than almost anything I've read in the past two or three years.

You don't know it, but Gene Wolfe has touched your life, too.  As an engineer for Procter & Gamble in the 1970s, he was responsible for inventing and building the machine that makes Pringles potato chips.  Thankfully, he didn't while away his entire life inventing junk food.  He's one of those writers that has always had more critical acclaim than popular success; he's been called the best living science fiction writer, and yet most sf readers I talk to furrow their brows quizzically when asked if they've read him.  This is a crime: The Book of the New Sun is simply brilliant, and mere hyperbole falls flat when trying to describe how well-written and powerful the book is.  If I'd read it as a child, I think it would be my favorite; as it is, it's muscled its way onto--as Rob from High Fidelity would put it--my "all-time desert island top five."  Of course, I don't know if I could have actually finished it as a child: it also happens to be one of the two or three most difficult books I've ever read, right behind Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  A sample of Wolfe's writing style:
 

"The tale I read to little Severian said that the universe was but a long word of the Increate's.  We, then, are the syllables of that word.  But the speaking of any word is futile unless there are other words, words that are not spoken.  If a beast has but one cry, the cry tells nothing; and even the wind has a multitude of voices, so that those who sit indoors may hear it and know if the weather is tumultuous or mild.  The powers we call dark seem to me to be the words the Increate did not speak, if the Increate exists at all; and these words must be maintained in a quasi-existence, if the other word, the word spoken, is to be distinguished.  What is not said can be important--but what is said is more important. ... And if the seekers after dark things find them, may not the seekers after bright find them as well?  And are they not more apt to hand their wisdom on?"

A plot summary can't really do justice to the almost fractal complexity of the book or the magnificent leaps and flourishes of Wolfe's incredible writing.  On the surface, the novel appears to be a Gothic fantasy adventure: it takes the form of a memoir written by Severian, a young apprentice in the ancient and holy Guild of Torturers, and relates his strange boyhood in the continent-sized city of Nessus on the decaying, feudal world of "Urth."  When the adolescent Severian falls in love with one of his guild's female victims--euphemistically called "clients"--and commits the unpardonable sin of showing mercy to her, he is unceremoniously exiled by the Torturers and forced to take the position of lictor (executioner) in the distant city of Thrax.  On his long and difficult journey, the young naif has a series of increasingly surreal adventures and meets a gallery of bizarre characters, quickly learning that the outside world of Urth is both dark--the sun is slowly going out--and dangerous, full of madness and random violence.  Among other picaresque happenings, the young man acquires an archenemy, joins an acting troupe (the first three acts of their play are present in their entirety in the middle part of The Claw of the Conciliator), adopts a son, fights a duel, and gets drafted into the army.  Then, purely by accident, Severian stumbles across a glowing gem known as the Claw of the Conciliator, the millennia-old relic of a messianic prophet called the Conciliator who promised to bring the world a New Sun.  And when Severian discovers that the gem can heal the sick and even raise the dead, he undertakes an epic quest to return the Claw to its rightful owner.
 
But as I said, the book operates on many levels, and one of the earliest and most important revelations is that The Book of the New Sun is not, in fact, fantasy at all: it is pure science fiction.  The world of Urth is in fact our Earth, a million years hence; the Guild of Torturers' "tower" is in fact the rusted, upright hulk of a gigantic spaceship; the rainbow-colored sand on the beach is actually the ground-up glass and concrete of our cities; and the mountains have been carved into the likenesses of famous Autarchs, or rulers, of the past.  This is just the easy stuff; Wolfe deploys a regiment of sophisticated literary sleights-of-hand to conceal much of what's really going on.  One of his best techniques is the use of real, albeit very old, English, Greek, and Latinate words to create a feeling of age and ornateness.  (Do you know what color fuligin is, or what cacogens, chiliads, or hipparchs are?  Are you familiar with the tradition of monomachy?)  Wolfe also plays games with the narration: unlike most first-person novels, where the narrator is telling us the story from some vague timeless limbo, Severian is composing The Book of the New Sun at a very specific place and time beyond the events in the main body of the story, and from clues and comments dropped into the text it becomes possible for the reader to puzzle out his ultimate fate. 
Gene Wolfe 

As I said before, it's hard to describe how powerful this book is.  Like all epics, it gets its strength from the combination of Grand Guignol gestures and the accumulation of small, telling details over a great span of pages, combined with sharply-drawn characters and an evocative setting that seems taken unscathed from the landscape of human dreams.  Near the beginning of The Shadow of the Torturer, young Severian meets the wizened caretaker of Urth's ancient library, who tells Severian the story of The Book of Gold, hidden somewhere in the library, which is the most wonderful book ever written to those who read it.  But The Book of Gold can only be read once; afterwards it disappears, never to be seen again, and the reader is compelled to become a librarian himself in the vague hope of finding it again some day.  This, explains the caretaker, is how the librarians recruit new members.  In one of his essays, Wolfe expresses the hope that The Book of the New Sun will be The Book of Gold to some of its readers.  In my case, it arrived a little too late, but its impact on my thinking has already been considerable, and I'm sure that there are quite a few lucky souls out there for whom Wolfe's ambition has proved to be correct.  In the meantime, I urge everyone reading this to go out, get yourselves some Pringles and curl up with a copy of The Shadow of the Torturer.  You'll thank me.

12 June 2000