Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'
by Gene Wolfe
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Book Summary Information
Author: Gene WolfeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1994-10-15
ISBN: 0312890176
Number of pages: 416
Publisher: Orb Books
Book Reviews of Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'
Book Review: A big, weird, puzzling but enthralling masterpiece.
Summary: 5 Stars
Gene Wolfe is a prolific, critically-acclaimed, award-winning SF writer, who is sadly not nearly as well-known as he deserves to be. One reason why might be that the casual reader selecting "The Book of the New Sun" thinking it will be a conventional sword-and-sorcery epic (a misconception heightened by the cheesy cover art on so many editions) is dismayed to find it is, like the Autarch's Botanical Gardens, far more complex and mysterious than expected.
I just finished reading all four volumes of "The Book of the New Sun" -- be forewarned, the individual books are NOT stand-alone novels. You have to read all four of them -- and then, you need to re-read them a few times. A lot of a-ha! moments occur on the second (and third, and fourth) reading. The clues are all there but most are mentioned so casually it's easy to miss a lot on the first time around.
Trying to summarize the plot makes it sound superficially like a conventional sword & sorcery fantasy, which it most definitely is not. Our hero, young Severian of the Guild of Torturers (aka "The Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence"), shows mercy to a prisoner and is exiled in disgrace to serve as the Lictor (warden) of a prison in a faraway city. He sets out, with his extremely large and lethal sword "Terminus Est", and along the way meets various fantastical creatures (undines, a giant, strange beasts, sorcerers, aliens, etc.) and other wandering travelers, most of whom are not what they seem. He joins a traveling theater troupe performing some very bizarre plays, and joins an insurgent movement with strange culinary rituals. Eventually, after many bizarre adventures, he realizes his destiny.
Wolfe takes this cliched material and turns it into something altogether indescribable. Severian narrates the tale; he claims to have a perfect memory for everything that has ever happened to him, but careful readers will note that either his memory is not quite so perfect as it seems, or else he sometimes lies, or perhaps something else altogether...
The author's prose is rich and dense, seasoned with unfamiliar (though real) words like fuligin, destriers, armigers, etc. and meant to be read slowly and savored like a complex wine. This is not a quick read for the beach, and it improves upon repetition. I had no trouble inferring from the context what the obscure terms meant (example: "destrier" is something like a horse, but not exactly a horse) and the vocabulary added to the sense of strange familiarity, but some readers may wish to keep a dictionary close at hand. Readers with a bit of Latin and familiarity with Greek and Norse mythology will be rewarded with numerous "a-ha!" moments. But if you are merely seeking a page-turning adventure, you will find this a difficult and frustrating read.
Some reviewers (especially women) have complained that Severian is singularly unlikable character; I could not disagree more. I found him to be very compelling (and I'm a woman).
It is true that his narration is very calm and unemotional, as befits his training as a torturer. Torturers take great pride in performing the court-ordered sentences of "excruciation" and/or execution perfectly, neither more nor less than the courts order, and they take a very detached, clinical view of their "Art." They derive no joy or pleasure from inflicting pain but only the satisfaction of performing it as efficiently as possible (though Severian does admit to enjoying the crowds' enthusiasm for his skill at a public execution). They view their function as essential to maintaining law and order, and are deeply contemptuous of amateurs' attempts at inflicting pain and death.
So, yes, Severian does have a jaded view towards death and suffering, and no, he's not very much in touch with his feelings. However, he has an innate kindness and gentleness which he exhibits on numerous occasions (twice with the result of him losing the only job he knows how to do). He also is, under his tightly controlled shell, almost pathetically needy for love and affection, having lost his mother at a very early age and then being cast out of the Guild, who comprise the only family and friends he has ever known. He seems on the surface to be an incorrigible womanizer, but that is a result of his frequent confusion of love with sex. He doesn't view his various partners as conquests, rather, he is fully convinced that he is in love with each of them. This has disastrous results for long-term relationships, of course; which fact he is very slow in realizing.
Severian shows a strange mix of complete naivety about the world in general juxtaposed with his completely blase attitude regarding death, pain and violence. On several occasions, he uses his knowledge of inflicting pain to defend himself and his companions, yet he relates the incidents so calmly and dispassionately that it is almost comical, in a blackly humorous way. At one point he is captured by a foe who attempts to unnerve him with thoughts of his upcoming fate: "[She] spat in my face as she described the torments she had contrived for me when I was strong enough to endure them. When she finished, I told her quite truthfully that I had spent most of my life assisting at operations more terrible, and advised her to obtain trained assistance, at which she went away." I can just picture Sev saying this in complete seriousness, and being baffled as to why his captor seem annoyed by his eminently sensible advice.
The books are filled with wonderful details about "Urth," which seems to be Earth in the far, far distant future. The Sun is dying, and civilization is decaying, knowledge and technology are being forgotten and mankind plunged back into a quasi-medieval society -- though some technology seems to have survived, but since energy resources are depleted there is no way to power most of it. Severian is well-schooled in the science of torture, and he also is quite adept as a healer (is is disgraceful for a "client" to die inadvertently as a result of excruciation, so the torturers are well-versed in first aid). He's rather woefully ignorant about fields outside his area of special expertise, and he assumes that the reader is familiar with his world so he doesn't bother to explain most of it. Careful readers will chuckle upon realizing what the Towers of the Citadel really are; and upon learning about the ruling Autarch's highly-advanced device to wake him in the morning.
Severian can be a bit obtuse at times; he tends to not notice the forest for the trees, so to speak. He relates a scene in fantastic detail, but often fails to make connections that on a second reading are quite obvious. He is also often oblivious to others' motivations and emotions, probably due to his training as a torturer where empathy would be a professional liability. He doesn't (usually) outright lie, but he tends to leave out things that he'd prefer not to admit, and then slips up later and contradict himself. As he gains more perspective (he quite literally sees things from others' views by the end), things can get even more confusing.
Wolfe is a wonderfully inventive writer, and I particularly enjoyed how he turns so many fantasy/SF/literary cliches on their heads. The mad scientist and "his" giant, the cyborg, the femme fatale, the boy-from-humble-origins-who-becomes-King, even the "Deus ex machina" all are there, but not in the way you'd expect.
(**Possible Spoilers**)
One can come up with many theories as to the underlying themes. Is Severian a Christ-figure who can raise the dead and turn water into wine? Or is he merely a wayfaring stranger, navigating through a broken world and trying to rise above his fallen tendencies? Is God (the "Pancreator") guiding his destiny, or is it all something that aliens are controlling? Did Severian truly experience all of his "memories," or is he, as he suspects on more than one occasion, actually insane?
Summary of Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun'
The Book of the New Sun is unanimously acclaimed as Gene Wolfe's most remarkable work, hailed as "a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis" by Publishers Weekly, and "one of the most ambitious works of speculative fiction in the twentieth century" by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Shadow & Claw brings together the first two books of the tetralogy in one volume:
The Shadow of the Torturer is the tale of young Severian, an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession -- showing mercy toward his victim.
Ursula K. Le Guin said, "Magic stuff . . . a masterpiece . . . the best science fiction I've read in years!"
The Claw of the Conciliator continues the saga of Severian, banished from his home, as he undertakes a mythic quest to discover the awesome power of an ancient relic, and learn the truth about his hidden destiny.
"Arguably the finest piece of literature American science fiction has yet produced [is] the four-volume Book of the New Sun."--Chicago Sun-Times
"The Book of the New Sun establishes his preeminence, pure and simple. . . . The Book of the New Sun contains elements of Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness and Wagnerian mythology. Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within . . . once into it, there is no stopping."--The New York Times Book Review
The Shadow of the Torturer is the tale of young Severian, an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession -- showing mercy toward his victim.
Ursula K. Le Guin said, "Magic stuff . . . a masterpiece . . . the best science fiction I've read in years!"
The Claw of the Conciliator continues the saga of Severian, banished from his home, as he undertakes a mythic quest to discover the awesome power of an ancient relic, and learn the truth about his hidden destiny.
"Arguably the finest piece of literature American science fiction has yet produced [is] the four-volume Book of the New Sun."--Chicago Sun-Times
"The Book of the New Sun establishes his preeminence, pure and simple. . . . The Book of the New Sun contains elements of Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness and Wagnerian mythology. Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within . . . once into it, there is no stopping."--The New York Times Book Review
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. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk
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