‘The Book of the New Sun’: Last Two Novels

In my review of the first two books in the ‘Book of the New Sun’ tetralogy by Gene Wolfe I wrote that they were books written beautifully but without much substance. Overall, I can tell the same about, like, three-fourth of the cycle? Because in the third book, almost nothing happens, except that Severian, our Brooding Executioner, meets random women and has random sex with them again. In the fourth book, there’s no random sex, and there is, at last, action. There are interesting answers for nagging questions concerning this Dying Earth-like universe. And the characters become more complex. Hello, the last book is good not only in style, but in other aspects as well. Nevertheless, it has made me realise that the series as a whole has problems, and that these problems have been emblematic to the genre not so long ago. Let’s begin, then, with what disappointed me,

As I’ve mentioned in my review of the first two novels, Severian lives in Latin America in a very distant future. You don’t get many hints that it is that continent, except for descriptions of jungles and pampas and… ignoring Indigenous Americans. We are eons into the future, millions of years, maybe, and yet the social stratification remains the same in this universe. Aristocrats are white, people living in Nessus, the capital, are mostly white, and people of colour live mostly in the countryside and the jungle, and are described as ‘autochthons’ if not ‘savages’. It’s so wrong on so many levels, and this fatalistic image of a stratified future (even after countless years and star-travels) is just sad. Indigenous people have been being erased, and Gene Wolfe’s series adds to this image. Of course, if he’d driven inspirations from the real history of Latin America, he might have created a society which was, at least, more mixed, especially that the very concept of whiteness in LatAm has been more ambiguous than the American/European concept of it; if it ever was about having all your ancestors white, it was so only in the ‘casta’ and ‘limpieza de sangre’ theory.

Another question is that it’s been claimed that Wolfe’s tetralogy was inspired by Catholicism, his religion, and that Severian is intended to be a Jesus-like figure. Honestly? I can see, for example, why the medieval novels of Sigrid Undset are considered ‘Catholic’ fiction, but I can’t see any reason for that in Wolfe’s the New Sun sequence. I see that the Recociliator and the New Sun narrative are metaphors for Jesus and salvation (?), but beside that, I don’t see many religious references there. Seriously, if you don’t mind characters for whom religion is important, and if you like such tropes in fiction, you’d better read Undset (or even ‘The Lord of the Rings’).

My third big problem? In this series, you have to wait so much. Wait for any plot beside wandering here and there, wait for an interstellar conflict (literally) to unravel. You also have to wait long for women who aren’t love interests or sexual partners of the protagonist, who actually do something and influence the world around them somehow. You have to wait so long for interesting concepts being shown and explained, for important discussions about power, gender, and time. I am glad that we get some of these more nuanced tropes at last, but guess what? We get them only in the last novel. The ugly truth is that if the first three novels had been compressed, it wouldn’t have changed the overall plot much. And while I like slow-paced stories and long descriptions of customs, thoughts, and emotions, Severian’s story is a case when it didn’t work as it should. It works better for narrations about daily events, for narrations which are simply about someone’s life rather than about an epic conflict at the end of times.

However, Wolfe’s style still surpasses most fantasy and science fiction novels, and one shouldn’t even compare his clear, descriptive prose with your standard Purple Prose in Present Tense of so many popular fantasy books nowadays. It is outstanding. For th sheer clearness of his style, I can see why he is considered a speculative fiction classic. Still, I expected something more from his famous book series, something executed in a better way, with more complex characters. Well, I have to go back to ‘Viriconium’ and Le Guin’s novels, apparently.