Yes, of course he is. The title is intended to be rhetorical, in this case. But it’s the result of what I’ve asked myself: would I think this as good writing if I didn’t have a giant bias and prejudice, knowing how highly regarded Gene Wolfe is? He is one of those great writers who aren’t simply considered great fantasy writers, but great writers without any other specifics. One of the giants.
Yet, if I do a little shift and try to approach the book without any precondition, as a blank state, the result I get can be quite unexpected.
My problem is mostly with how other readers speak about these books. But then I only read the first two a while ago, then re-read pieces of them here and there, but didn’t finish the series yet (meaning the Book of the New Sun, specifically). I know there should be a type of “Fight Club effect” where something happens at the end so that if you were to start a re-read from the beginning, it would like going through enlightenment, and have a whole new experience. Again, I haven’t read the other two books, so I cannot know, but I’m here feeling at least somewhat skeptical, because what I’m observing, and have observed, doesn’t seem to have that much potential of getting upended. But skepticism obviously isn’t a proof.
Reading is still its own experience. No matter a possible, later revelation, the book is read right here, right now, page by page. For me reading this book, rereading it now, is ALL about reputation. The last few chapters, if I try observing them without bias, have been a total mess. The book is so episodic to be simply “random.” Scenes seems to work more like dreams, being one thing one moment, then warping into a whole different context, with a very tenuous link keeping things coherent. Severian is off to see the world, walks through a city, enters a shop and falls in love with a woman who happens to be there. Spends a few pages explaining how this falling in love has absolutely no explanation, the description of the woman not even flattering. It’s some kind of mystical love, unyielding but completely abstract. Characters are so apathetic to be fascinating like the hypnotized actors in the early Herzog movies. They are moved, rather than moving themselves, as if following some radio instructions that are transmitted right into their brains, but completely unseen and unknown from the outside. Then Severian walks off with this newfound party group, boards a carriage but the driver is mad so they end up in a race and they crash and destroy some kind of church. Where some nuns walk in, completely unphazed, speaking in riddles, stripping naked the woman next to Severian only to walk off again, declaiming some random foreshadowing. After having destroyed the church, with no other consequence, Severian and the woman exit and look around.
It’s literally a dreamworld. Every scene is meaningful in some opaque symbolic way, but makes zero sense at a basic rational level. It’s all coated in religious mysticism, but since everything is so warped, it’s like trying to decode some alien dream, where you have no means to connect symbol and meaning. And Wolfe gets a pass because it’s “weird” fiction. The dying earth genre where meaning itself, like the essence of culture, has been lost and forgotten. And so you only have pieces left, that maybe have great meaning, but whoever was able to extract that meaning has died ages ago.
This is a tiny excerpt, nothing meaningful in any way, but while reading it I simply though: this is poorly written (and of course it cannot be true). And so decided to write this that you’re reading.
The sunlight was blinding; it seemed as if we had stepped from twilight into full day. Golden particles of straw swam in the crisp air about us.
“That’s better,” Agia said. “Wait a moment now and let me get my bearings. I think the Adamnian Steps will be to our right. Our driver wouldn’t have gone down them – or perhaps he would, the fellow was mad – but they should take us to the landing by the shortest route. Give me your arm again, Severian. My leg’s not quite recovered.”
We were walking on grass now, and I saw that the tentcathedral had been pitched on a champian surrounded by semi-fortified houses; its insubstantial belfries looked down upon their parapets. A wide, paved street bordered the open lawn, and when we reached it I asked again who the Pelerines were.
“The sunlight was blinding; it seemed as if we had stepped from twilight into full day.” This line is just that, repetition. It’s not especially bad, it’s just plain and maybe you’d expect something, as the beginning of a chapter. Wolfe loving his semicolons (parentheses too). It makes sense, they were inside some kind of church, so you expect some diffused, low lights, and since I think it’s still morning you expect them coming out would indeed look like they transitioned between twilight and day. But then: “Golden particles of straw swam in the crisp air about us.” Particles of straw, so you mean them being similar to dust motes, more visible maybe, but they crashed and where inside a little while, whatever “debris” wouldn’t simply stay in the air, and instead what can possibly stay in the air would be really small, really light. So… when you come from a gloomy place into “blinding sunlight” it would mean that brightness is greatly enhanced. That you have to strain to keep your eyes open, until they get used to that brightness. How would you notice some floating straw particles suspended in the air? Usually dust motes are completely invisible unless there’s a very specific contrast, but you aren’t going to see them in a bright place, even worse when the scene is so bright to have blinded you.
“That’s better,” Agia said. “Wait a moment now and let me get my bearings. I think the Adamnian Steps will be to our right. Our driver wouldn’t have gone down them – or perhaps he would, the fellow was mad – but they should take us to the landing by the shortest route. Give me your arm again, Severian. My leg’s not quite recovered.” So they walk out as if this “Agia” hadn’t been just stripped naked by some creepy cultists, turn the page, new chapter, everything already forgotten, and you get the character in all its precise characterization: a robotic voice, starting a whole monologue. “The fellow was mad”, oh yes, sure, just mention it casually, it’s completely pointless anyway, lost in the past. Severian, help me walking, my leg isn’t operating correctly, must be some crossed wires. This is some 100 pages into the book and dialogue has never shown any emotion. Just prompts of automatons barely aware of each other. They could as well be speaking at walls.
“We were walking on grass now, and I saw that the tent-cathedral had been pitched on a champian surrounded by semi-fortified houses;” This is obviously Wolfe again. What the fuck is a “tent-cathedral”, what a “champian”, but especially, what would even “semi-fortified houses” look like? Because “house” here is meaningless as a word. Houses can have any shape and styles, across the world what is considered a normal “house” never looks quite alike. In a description I’m meant to somewhat visualize the scene, and here Wolfe has a world that is “weird” by definition, it has no style because it’s like a collapse of culture, in the future where everything is an amalgam, a blob, in language as well. I’m probably even lucky because being of a latin language origin, these weird words he uses should be likely more familiar to me than they can be to a random english reader. So at least for me they can carry some borrowed meaning. Yet, if you can’t find any root to these words, they can be evocative in their eerie way, but they are also completely meaningless. They don’t carry anything. It’s as if you’re reading a sequences of this is “weird”, then there’s that “weird” and over there more “weird”. If you cannot attach any nuance to every different world, then every of those words becomes a placeholder for nothing. Maybe imagination-filled holes, but still holes without meaning.
“A wide, paved street bordered the open lawn, and when we reached it I asked again who the Pelerines were.” What’s wrong with this, you certainly are asking. Yeah, it’s all perfectly fine. They came out of the church, Agia asked Severian to help her walk since she’s limping and he didn’t notice, so deeply in love with her he was. Have you seen any concern dawning on his face? Didn’t they quite get both killed just five minutes ago? So they walk, until Severian inexplicably wakes up from his slumber…
“Who the fuck are the Pele(g)rines?” Yes, indeed.
Gene Wolfe had a time-traveling machine in his possession and The Book of the New Sun was written by ChatGPT.
2 Comments
As a fan of Wolfe in general and this book (books?) in particular, I enjoyed this post, which is paying the text a great compliment by going into it as deeply as you do here. Your frustration with the text, and your feeling that the whole thing is weirdly disconnected is a common reaction for a first-time reader, and one I shared for much of my first readthrough. So a couple of points that I think will help you adjust your expectations if you decide to continue:
First, the reading experience. Gene Wolfe is not a writer to let his prose flow over you. I’m going to spoil something you haven’t gotten to yet: at the end of Shadow of the Torturer, he puts “A Note on the Translation” explaining that his text is a translation from an unknown language that has words that don’t perfectly correspond to anything in English, and where this is the case he has replaced it with archaic or foreign words. Those words? You’re supposed to look them up. “Champian,” which by the way is an archaic form of “champaine,” which in Middle English refers to a broad, open field. As far as I can tell this can only be found in the Oxford English Dictionary. You’re expected to find it.
Note that Wolfe doesn’t even alert you to this choice until you have finished the first novella. Note too that he wrote it nearly 2 decades before the existence of widely-available internet. His books are not “weird fiction” so much as they are “difficult fiction”–stuff like James Joyce, or David Foster Wallace, or Pale Fire, that Nabokov novel where Nabokov writes a poem and attributes it a character and writes a fake introduction and footnotes attributed to another character, and you slowly come to understand the “story” by twigging onto how and why the editor is willfully misinterpreting the poem. Maybe you don’t want a reading experience like that, in which case it might be better to find a different book. The reading process is supposed to be laborious and frequently interrupted, which makes it not so big a deal that the narrative is drained of emotion: imagine trying to sustain an emotional register while you’re doing a Google search for “pelagic argosy,” let alone trying to look it up in your library’s physical copy of the OED.
Speaking of which, the second thing to keep in mind is that everything you read is modulated through the experience of Severian, and the first thing we learn about Severian is that he has been raised, possibly from birth, to be a torturer. And what characteristic would it be useful for a torturer to have? My first thought is, an emotional disconnect from the suffering of the people around him. He has been raised from his earliest memories to inflict great pain and harm to people without paying any more attention to their reaction than is necessary to ensure they stay alive. Any feelings of emotion, let alone empathy, at the sight of others enduring pain have either been fully suppressed, or were never made part of his consciousness to begin with. Just because he doesn’t remark on Agia’s emotions after being stripped naked doesn’t mean they aren’t there, just that they don’t register as significant to him. He may not even be aware of them, because distress following an invasive and humiliating experience is exactly the sort of thing he would have been brought up to ignore, and this accounts for the seeming “blankness” of the scenes he perceives.
Severian is also a trickier narrator than he seems. He lies, and later, when he says something that contradicts something he says earlier, he almost never mentions the discrepancy. He takes actions without explaining the emotions or thought process that went into them, possibly because, in being unable to empathize with others’ emotions, he is somewhat cut off from the full experience of his own as well. You haven’t encountered much of this, so I will be vague, but roughly 3/4 of the way through the novella you’re reading, he casually tosses off, in a subordinate clause, a revelation about the ultimate destination of the story that most fantasy novels would save for the final chapters. It’s possible to read right past it without realizing what it means. But if you do realize it, you also realize, okay, the novel’s not about whether that happens–and then you have to figure out what the novel is about instead.
I would personally say the writing is good, if not quite on par with any of the authors I mentioned in comparison. It’s good because it performs the function it needs to perform for the story to work the way it’s intended to. It’s totally fine not to like that type of reading experience, and to instead turn to the many, many books that will not ask the same things of you. But if you’re at least open to it, I would encourage you to continue a little further down the road.
Maybe it’s slightly opaque in the way I write, but I DID read the books. This is a re-read and not even the first. But I ONLY read the first two in the New Sun series. I think you can find, deeper in this blog, the more naive “reviews” I wrote at the time.
So I’m aware of the notes at the end, and I’m generally aware of Wolfe. I read stuff on the internet a lot more than I read the books themselves, and that’s why I have a much wider knowledge, even of things I’ve never actually read.
I even have the Lexicon Urthus book, that I used at times as reference (though I wanted more on the weird time travel device that is described at some point as some game of mirrors, and that book gave away nothing more).
This I wrote is not my reading experience, it was just an ironical jab and a very narrow perspective on this tiny excerpt. Nothing more.