I love ‘Viriconium’. I love the Dying Earth genre. But reading the initial two parts of ‘The Book of the New Sun’, ‘The Shadow of the Torturer’ and ‘The Claw of the Reconciliator’ by Gene Wolfe made me aware that I might like more the aura than the actual content.
Robin Hobb is known for her lengthy and slow-paced novels about the brooding assassin, Fitz Farseer. Somehow, several years before her, Gene Wolfe managed to write relatively short but equally slow-paced novels about the equally brooding torturer called Severian. I don’t think that Hobb was inspired by him, lest plagiarized anything of his content. I think, though, that her Brooding Executioner and his story is simply a better stuff than Wolfe’s. Let me explain…
Just as at Hobb’s case, there is one thing Gene Wolfe should be undoubtedly praised for – his style. It is better than Frank Herbert’s, it is better than G.R.R. Martin’s; and these comparisons are on purpose, since the two authors I’ve mentioned are, after all, one of the most famous writers in science fiction and fantasy. And the way Wolfe writes is plainly out of their league. It’s lyrical, rich, elegiac even, it is thoughtful the way Hobb’s books are. I’m comparing these two because in speculative fiction, I’d say that the Farseer Trilogy and Wolfe’s sequence are the most similar ones, just as they are similar with that rueful sense of brooding. But… and there’ll be a lot of ‘buts’.
But Severian’s brooding grows boring and doesn’t add anything to the setting and the story. The setting; oh yes, it’s magnificent, it’s beautiful ruins of our world under a dimming red sun. The aura of sadness, of melancholy, of diminished hopes pervades every place in Wolfe’s novel. It reminds me of Viriconium, and I’d say that this sense of melancholy is one of those things which save the day in this story. Some other are vague mentions of the past and inventions one can interpret either as magic or science. I’ve seen it at John M. Harrison’s, I’ve seen it in many post-apo novels, but at Wolfe’s, it feels more vivid and gripping than in your average novel where the people of the gone ages are known as the Ancients/whatever variation of it.
However, there’s so much in these two novels the author could have used, and he didn’t.
Severian, supposedly, lives in a very-distant-future South America, which is quite apparent even from the extra material about the series from Wikipedia. But are there any references to South or Latin America? Nothing but a mention of a llanero costume Severian sees at one place. Which is so random and off, assuming that there’s nothing else actually Latin-American in the novels, and that the reader is informed that so much has been forgotten from the long past of the world. If there’s something the reader can identify, it’s more Latin and medieval-like than anything else. So, yes, as usual, even the end of our world must be, in a way, a Eurocentric ‘feudal future’.
Another disappointment to me is that Severian is, literally, the only well-drawn and complex character in the novel. Everybody else has their small parts of the plot, and everybody falls into some archetype/stereotype. Especially women. Of course, Severian has to fall in love with a prisoner. Of course, she must day. Of course, his guild makes him exiled. Of course, he wanders here and there, meeting several women, and each of them he desires, and each of them reminds him of his first, unfulfilled love. Guess what? I’m not even angry that female characters are so male-gazed and shallow in these novels. I’m only disappointed; because even in the 1980s they were speculative fiction authors who could do it better.
My last disappointment? The plot. Convinced that once, speculative fiction was more concise, more full of action, I was surprised reading these two novels. There wasn’t much action there, truth to be told. Not much of action, a lot of descriptions. Usually, I like this kind of stuff, but I need some hint, too, about what would happen. Here, there’s no hint. Sorry, but the futuristic/post-apo easter eggs can’t stand for a convincing, clear story. Two novels, and Severian merely reached Thrax, the city where he’d been appointed to go in the first novel. Astounding, isn’t it? We know that the world is dying, that people are waiting for the New Sun, and that Severian will be somebody special. That’s all. Again, Robin Hobb’s pace is also slow, but in her novels, we always get a clearly-drawn conflict. At Wolfe’s, everything is so vague that, actually, makes me curious what will happen next. Because I hope that something, at last, will happen. There is potential for a great narration here, and I’m optimistic enough to hope for a pay-off.
As you see, I don’t mean that these novels are utterly toxic or written poorly. There are things which I don’t like about them, or things which bored me, but if you admire someone’s writing style, and if you are waiting to learn to see what’s up next, then I think it means that the books were worth of being read.
Left Hand of Fiction 