Volume Two: Sword and Citadel (Millennium, 2000)

Reviewed by Peter Wright

Long before its inclusion on Millennium’s SF Masterworks list, Gene Wolfe’s densely allusive four volume The Book of the New Sun (The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), The Sword of the Lictor (1981) and The Citadel of the Autarch (1983)) was acclaimed as one of science fiction’s ‘masterpieces’. Universally praised, each volume won at least one of sf’s most coveted awards: The Shadow of the Torturer took the Howard Memorial Award and the World Fantasy Award in 1981, and the British Science Fiction Award in 1982; The Claw of the Conciliator brought Wolfe his second Nebula Award in 1981, whilst Locus honoured the novel with its Best Fantasy Novel Award in 1982; The Sword of the Lictor received the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1983; and The Citadel of the Autarch took the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1984.

Critics and reviewers were unrestrained. The Book of the New Sun was applauded in a variety of periodicals ranging from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine to The Library Journal and The New York Times. In short, it became a publishing event, the repercussions of which were felt in fanzines, journals and mainstream publications alike. It was acclaimed widely for its imaginative fertility, its formidable characterisation, its controlled and meticulous style, and the craftsmanship of its construction. Colin Greenland, reviewing The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator for Foundation provides a somewhat restrained endorsement when he considers the texts as ‘the next classic sf sequence, on a par with Earthsea, the Titus Groan Books or even…the Foundation Trilogy.’ ¹ However, embedded within this, and more extravagant praise, was a burgeoning paradox. On the one hand, critics like Michael Bishop were lauding The Shadow of the Torturer for being:

an immediately accessible book for anyone with moderate intelligence and the ability to read. (Certainly it does not present some of the problems of interpretation that The Fifth Head of Cerberus has posed for wary and unwary alike.) ²

Conversely, Algis Budrys was expressing a growing scepticism as the tetralogy saw print. Whilst recognising that the publication of The Book of the New Sun was a ‘seminal event’ in the history of science fiction, Budrys gave voice to his growing suspicion that the narrative might not be as straightforward as it first appeared:

I am in the presence of a practitioner whose moves I cannot follow; I see only the same illusions that are seen by those outside the guild [of writers]. I know the cards are up the sleeves somewhere, but there are clearly extra arms to this person. ³

The image of Wolfe as illusionist and card-sharp is accurate and one which critics would adopt as they began to share Budrys’ sense of deception. Colin Greenland, in his tellingly entitled article, ‘Wolfe in Sheep’s Clothing’, observes:

Wolfe is subtle as well as bold, lavish with sly puzzles, mysteries and revelations that have had more than one reader waking up in the middle of the night saying, ‘My God, it can’t be!’ But it is. Second and third readings are indicated. ⁴

The feeling of having been duped by Wolfe led Baird Searles to suggest the origin of this critical discomfort and pose a provocative question:

The Book of the New Sun is too complex a work to evaluate on one reading. It will undoubtedly be considered a landmark in the field, one that perhaps marks the turning point of science fiction from content to style, from matter to manner. Mannered it certainly is, and stylish; [but] under all that glittering edifice of surprising words and more surprising events and characters, is there a story or a concept of any stature? ⁵

Twenty years after the publication of The Shadow of the Torturer and four years after completing a Ph.D. that attempted to answer Searles’ question, the reprinting of The Book of the New Sun provides me with an opportunity for a retrospective view. Indeed, everything about the new SF Masterwork’s edition invites retrospection, from the Jim Burns cover of Shadow and Claw – itself a homage to Bruce Pennington’s evocative, eroded image on the first UK edition – to the very term ‘Masterwork’ that appears several times on the jacket. Whilst the SF Masterworks imprint is just that, an imprint packaged to sell books under a grandiose banner, there is a strong case to be made for considering The Book of the New Sun as a ‘masterwork’.

Although Searles prophesied that The Book of the New Sun was ‘certainly the sort of novel that will provide a field day for critics, essayists, people who make lists, analysers, and academics’, his prophecy has gone largely unfulfilled, with the notable exception of Michael Andre-Driussi’s commendable Lexicon Urthus (1994). ⁶ Consequently, any claims made for viewing Wolfe’s tetralogy as a masterpiece are somewhat flimsy and subjective. Rather than engaging with the text to any meaningful degree, critics have tended to extol The Book of the New Sun for its fluidity of style, the conception of its enigmatic, alien Earth, and the depth of its characterisation. This conventional, narrow and unimaginative approach was unsatisfactory in 1983 and will remain so until readers take up the gauntlet Wolfe throws at their feet.

Clearly, it is impossible to provide satisfactory justification for considering The Book of the New Sun a ‘masterwork’ in the space of a short review or to anticipate Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and the Reader, my own study of Wolfe’s fiction to be published by Liverpool University Press in 2001. However, it is possible to suggest criteria that would enable critics to qualify Wolfe’s beguiling, manipulative text as a ‘masterwork’ – if they are prepared to face the intellectual challenge.

On a first, superficial reading, there is little to distinguish Wolfe’s tetralogy from many other sf and fantasy novels, with the exception of the aforementioned xenography, or world building, the credible characters and the polished, literate style. The plot itself is apparently unremarkable. Set on the ancient world of Urth, under the roseate glow of a dying sun, The Book of the New Sun is the memoir of Severian, an apprentice torturer exiled from his guild for showing mercy to a condemned ‘client’ with whom he had fallen in love. Leaving the sprawling and manifestly ancient city of Nessus, Severian begins his phantasmagoric journey north to Thrax, the City of Windowless Rooms, where he is to act as Lictor to the Archon. Once in Thrax, he refuses to murder a faithless wife for the Archon and must flee ever northwards. Eventually, he finds himself on battlefields scarred by the constant war between Severian’s Commonwealth and the armies of the northern continent, Ascia. It is here that he encounters the Autarch, ruler of the Commonwealth, who nominates Severian as his successor. The Citadel of the Autarch concludes with Severian awaiting judgement on the world of Yesod, where the Hierogrammates will assess his worthiness as the epitome of Urth. If he succeeds in his trial, Urth will receive a new sun; if he fails, he will be emasculated and condemn his world to entropic dissolution. Wolfe picks up the story at this point in the sequel to the tetralogy, The Urth of the New Sun (1987).

Throughout Severian’s journey, there are moments of creative brilliance: Severian’s unwitting ‘resurrection’ of Dorcas at the Lake of Birds; his bizarre duel with Agilus; the chilling execution of Morwenna; his incarceration in the House Absolute; Dr. Talos’ allegorical and metafictive play, ‘Eschatology and Genesis’; Severian’s encounter with the alzabo and, later, with Typhon, the two-headed tyrant whose legacy is felt again in The Book of the Long Sun; the apocalyptic battle between the Commonwealth and Ascia; the final meeting between Severian and the Autarch; and the revelations provided by the aquastor of Master Malrubius that recontextualise the entire narrative.

Each of these encounters provides the reader with an indication of the story that can be reconstructed from the plot. Reconciling plot with story, perceiving the text not as the religious document it purports to be but as the product of a manipulated individual caught in the Hierogrammates’ evolutionary machinations (something made explicit in The Urth of the New Sun) is the first step towards understanding Wolfe’s strategies and purpose. The gulf between plot and story, between the apparent and the real, alerts the reader to the fact that Wolfe is playing a complex and contrived textual game that facilitates a number of methods of interpretation.

Coming to understand The Book of the New Sun is like learning the rules of a game. If the reader succeeds in perceiving the rules of Wolfe’s literary game, achieves the reconciliation of plot with story, then the experience of reading becomes an educational one. By stimulating the reader to reject primary assumptions and existing preconceptions, Wolfe not only lifts the reader onto a level of alertness that allows for his most subtle effects, but also reveals to the more cautious reader how they ascribe meaning to a text. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental factor in any claim that The Book of the New Sun is a ‘masterwork’: it encourages the growth of the reader towards what Jonathan Culler terms ‘literary competence’.⁷ In short, Wolfe organises the text to be understood only by those readers willing to question their own literary assumptions, pause, reflect, and reread.

The literary game Wolfe constructs is most notable in terms of textual structure. Wolfe’s presentation of his rational sf novel as a non-rational fantasy, together with his subversion of the Campbellian heroic cycle, provide an insight not only into the possibilities of the genre but also into how habitual modes of reading inform and construct the reader’s reception of a text. Of course, there are a number of novels that achieve this synthesis and/or recontextualisation, which alone is insufficient to distinguish The Book of the New Sun. However, for Wolfe, the recontextualisation is little more than a starting point for his wider concerns. He is not necessarily preoccupied with demonstrating how proficient he is as a writer. Rather, by effectively concealing his narratological sleight of hand and constructing a puzzle for his reader, Wolfe attempts to alert that reader to the level of perception required. Hence, The Book of the New Sun does not invite the reader to marvel at how clever Wolfe can be, but to marvel at his or her own intelligence in perceiving one facet of the elaborate textual game the author plays. In this sense, Wolfe’s tetralogy is a masterwork in that it can be read as a paraliterary fantasy but demands to be read as a comment upon, and a reaction to, such narratives. In effect, it is a coolly intellectual denunciation of passive reading practices, a clarion call to readers dulled by formula fiction.

Similarly, Wolfe’s deployment of a first person narrator and the autobiographical form confronts the reader with familiar paradigms that oppose the reader’s reception of the subtle subversions Wolfe works on their conventions. As other critics have noted, without realising the implications of their observations, Severian is one of the most detailed and complex characterisations found in contemporary literature. He is also the principal means by which Wolfe distracts the reader from apprehending the story of his text. Despite appearances to the contrary, Severian is an unreliable narrator – and not only because he tells lies detectable by the cautious reader. Ironically, Severian is unreliable because of the very characteristic that makes him appear wholly reliable: his eidetic memory. Although Wolfe provides indicators of Severian’s fallibility, it is his status as a mnemonist that marks Severian as someone who cannot be trusted. As a mnemonist, he is characterised by a passive-receptive attitude that precludes organised striving, by limitations of intellect concealed behind his capacity for thought and imagination, and by his tendency to be a dreamer whose fantasies constitute another world through which he transforms his everyday experiences. Even the concealment of the story driving the plot of The Book of the New Sun is explicable in terms of Severian’s characterisation, given that mnemonists have a tendency to remember a wealth of detail (plot) which scatters meaning (story). Wolfe provides clues to Severian’s ‘inconscience’ – to borrow a term from Henry James – on a number of occasions, provoking the reader to see beyond the masquerade to what lies beneath. In this way, Wolfe not only asks his reader to question the narrator’s reception and interpretation of events, but their own reception and interpretation of the text.

Whilst the reader is attempting to decode what is actually occurring in The Book of the New Sun, Wolfe elaborates his textual games-playing by introducing significant levels unfamiliar diction, designed to ‘convey the flavour of an odd place at an odd time.’ ⁸ This apparently innocuous comment obfuscates the fact that despite the conceptual, allusive and thematic functions served by words like ‘peltast’, ‘optimates’, ‘carnifex’ and so forth, Wolfe is deliberately opening his text to post-structuralist analyses. In his appendix to The Shadow of the Torturer, Wolfe invests his diction with an enforced polysemy when he explains that the obscure nouns found in his ‘translation’ of The Book of the New Sun are ‘intended to be suggestive rather than definitive’. ⁹

In this appendix, which, in a typical inversion, reads more like an introduction, Wolfe destabilises the status of his language; previously concrete nouns have their unequivocal meanings subverted by his ‘translation’; they become indeterminate ‘substitutions’. Accordingly, by destabilising the meaning of his signifiers, Wolfe ensures that his narrative can be perceived as a writerly text in the Barthesian sense of containing indeterminacy of meaning.¹⁰ Thus, The Book of the New Sun may appeal to a post-structuralist reading as it marks a shift from meaning to staging, from the signified to the signifier. It fractures the relationship between the stable sign and the unified subject. Equally, the text’s obscure diction invites any deconstruction-orientated approach by showing a limitlessness of linguistic play, a dérive or drift of meaning. Equally, reader response critics can invoke Wolfgang Iser’s gap theory to discuss the ‘spots’ of indeterminism created by Wolfe’s indeterminate nouns.¹¹ These critical approaches, all of which were prevalent before and during the publication of The Book of the New Sun, are a part of Wolfe’s intellectual gamesmanship. The reader should not be fooled, however. As Severian states early in the narrative, ‘rational people know that things act of themselves or not at all’,¹² that is, they act in context, in harmony with their own nature, regardless of their name or terminology. Ironically, then, The Book of the New Sun can be claimed as a ‘masterwork’ because it both acknowledges and denies the validity of critical theory. Whilst it permits, and even invites, post-structuralist or deconstructivist approaches, which would provide one form of insight into the text, it undermines the potential of such analyses by indicating the contextualising story that reveals how ‘things act of themselves.’ Theoretical approaches, Wolfe seems to be suggesting, will generate interpretations, but a more holistic understanding will only follow from personal and untheorised reflection.

Similar observations could be made regarding Wolfe’s deployment of metafictional devices. Not content with changing generic codes, subverting literary conventions, employing an unreliable narrator, and exploiting the deflective effect of the unfamiliar, Wolfe manipulates traditional metafictional strategies. These devices are used to create a confusing series of connections between the text and its hermeneutic circle, between the action of its heavily intertextual hypodiegetic tales and that of the main narrative. Critics have largely overlooked the metafictional aspects of the text and the purpose they serve. This oversight, which would have exposed the text’s self-reflexive preoccupation with itself, arises from the fact that Wolfe and his commentators, including John Clute and Joan Gordon, have their creative and analytical powers concentrated in opposite directions. Where Wolfe turns his attention inward to fabricate a lengthy and involved puzzle for his reader, his critics have peered outwards from the text, searching for a point where The Book of the New Sun correlates with life itself. Accordingly, they have failed to appreciate that the metaphorical significance of the text (its examination of faith and deception) is sustained and deepened by the game Wolfe initiates with the reader. It is only by observing how s/he has been deceived and cajoled that the reader comes to appreciate more fully Wolfe’s vision of humanity as a helplessly subjective species attendant to the whim of manipulatory forces. This observation is encouraged by the self-conscious stress on deception, artifice and artificiality that permeates the text and which emblematises Wolfe’s textual game with the reader.

It could be argued that The Book of the New Sun is science fiction’s Ulysses. Like James Joyce, Wolfe has ‘put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep professors busy for centuries over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.’ ¹³ However, to do so would be to deny Wolfe’s determination to wed the reading process with his particular conception of existence through his games playing. From his other fiction, it apparent that Wolfe perceives the world as an ambiguous round of perceptions and misperceptions in which the individual struggles, and ultimately fails, to apprehend the precise nature of existence. The senses form a barrier to understanding; the memory an unreliable recording device to which the individual must return for clues to the conundrum of life; the world a system of manipulation where in people must live as best they can according to their physical, psychological and social restrictions.

Whilst it could be argued that the literary importance of Wolfe’s fiction derives from the thematic integrity by which this vision is conveyed, it is, perhaps, more pertinent to argue that the real strength of his work arises from his ability to make the reader experience this conception of existence during the reading process. Accordingly, throughout The Book of the New Sun, habitual modes of reading become metaphors for systems of manipulation and deception; unreliable narrators emphasise the reader’s own subjectivity; and unfamiliar diction calls into question the accuracy with which we can perceive the actuality of ‘the real’.

Like the constriction in an hourglass, The Book of the New Sun marks the point at which, and from which, Wolfe’s themes, techniques and preoccupations converge and diverge. To understand it is to understand Wolfe’s oeuvre entire. Yet, it is much more than that. The Book of the New Sun reminds us of our potential and our vulnerability as readers and, in so doing, it reminds us of our potential and vulnerability as individuals. Through each reading of the text we learn not only what it is to read, perceptively and critically, but also what it is to live, perceptively and critically, in the world. Every reading is, then, an individual resurrection. For that reason, if for no other, Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun deserves to be hailed as a masterwork and not just a masterwork of science fiction but a considerable achievement within twentieth century fiction itself.

* * * * *

Footnotes

1. Colin Greenland, review of The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, Foundation, 24 (1982), 82-85 (p. 85).

2. Michael Bishop, ‘Pitching Pennies Against the Starboard Bulkhead: Gene Wolfe as Hero’, Thrust: Science Fiction in Review, Fall 1980, pp. 10-12 (p. 12).

3. Algis Budrys, review of The Claw of the Conciliator, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1980, p. 49.

4. Colin Greenland, ‘Wolfe in Sheep’s Clothing’, City Limits, 21-27 October 1983, p. 17.

5. Baird Searles, review of The Citadel of the Autarch, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, May 1983, p. 167.

6. Ibid.

7. Jonathan Culler, ‘Literary Competence’ in Reader Response Criticism from Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. by Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 101-117.

8. Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (New York: Tor, 1992) p. 236.

9. Gene Wolfe, The Shadow of the Torturer (London: Arrow, 1981), p. 302.

10. Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’ in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. by Joshué V. Harari (New York: Cornell University Press, 1979), pp. 73-81.

11. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, trans. by The Johns Hopkins University Press (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 24.

12. Ibid., p. 17.

13. James Joyce, cited in Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 64.

]]> http://www.ultan.org.uk/review-botns/feed/ 3 http://www.ultan.org.uk/review-fifth-head-of-cerberus/ http://www.ultan.org.uk/review-fifth-head-of-cerberus/#comments Tue, 28 Aug 2001 22:38:47 +0000 Jonathan http://www.ultan.org.uk/?p=75 Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (Millennium, 1999)

reviewed by Robert Borski

“When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were tired or not.” So begins, with its Proustian echo, the titular novella of Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, first published in 1972. Since then, of course, author Wolfe has scribed a number of additional masterpieces, and his reputation as sf’s most accomplished writer seems guaranteed for some time to come, but it was in Fifth Head (after a rather unremarkable tyro novel) that Wolfe first consolidated his literary bones and astonished readers with a novel that is not only boldly and complexly different, but resonant with many of the themes and preoccupations that would later come to dominate his work. It was and remains a must read and should rank high on everyone’s favourite Top Ten list of genre classics; it also has everything it needs to commend itself to lovers of fine literature in general–so don’t be afraid to recommend it to your non-genre friends.

Taking place on the sister worlds of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, Fifth Head consists of three semi-linked novellas–besides the opening piece, there is the oddly-titled “‘A Story,’ by John V. Marsch” and the closing “V.R.T.” Characters met in the first novella reappear in the third, while the fictional constructs encountered in the second–an extended faux fable about what life might have been like for the native Annese (or abos) before their world becomes colonised by the space-faring French–have real-life counterparts in the pieces that bookend it. This interrelatedness, in fact, epitomises much of Fifth Head‘s unique structure; it’s tripartite to be sure, but holistically so, being, as the book’s various narrative, tonal and thematic skeins wind in and out and back amongst themselves, recursive to the nth degree, like a specular Moebius strip. And if this isn’t challenging enough, while the story-telling thrust in the first two novellas is relatively straight-forward, “V.R.T” is told anachronically, with the reader left to piece everything together from a fragmentary, disjointed narrative, with at least one startling paradigm shift not everyone catches on his or her first time through. And so: for the intrepid reader willing to pursue something more substantial than “sci-fi” lite (and I assume that’s why you’ve come to Ultan’s Library), Fifth Head offers much pleasure.

Looking a little bit more now at the various novellas: while “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” opens up the book, much of it actually takes place after events in both “A Story” and “V.R.T.” Like Proust’s Marcel, “Fifth Head’s” first-person narrator is actually reflecting upon his life and its vicissitudes, describing from the perspective of an adult what it’s been like for him to have grown up at 666 Saltimbanque St., in Port Mimizon of the planet Sainte Croix. And so we’re introduced via flashback to the narrator’s half-brother David, their robotic tutor Mr. Million (who is also their grandfather), the scientist/brothelmaster Maitre (who is their father) and crippled Aunt Jeannine, who is also a respected anthropologist named Aubrey Veil. Maitre soon enough emerges as the novella’s most sinister figure, retrieving and subjecting his young son to disorienting sessions of drugs and hypnosis, and it’s also he who provides our narrator with the only name he’s identified by in the book: Number Five (though both his first and last name are eminently decodeable). In the course of Maitre’s investigations, Number Five’s sense of reality becomes more and more skewed, but eventually we learn that he is a clone of Maitre, who is seeking to determine why his once-so-promising-family has failed to rise socially and intellectually among the elite of Sainte Croix (indeed, it now seems to have entered a Buddenbrooks -like decline). How Number Five exacts his revenge upon Maitre for his stolen childhood you must read for yourself, but know that it does not occur before we meet Terran scientist Dr. John Marsch, who comes to the bordello hoping to discuss Veil’s Hypothesis with its originator (Aunt Jeannine’s contention is that the shape-changing abos of Sainte Anne have killed and replaced the original French colonists). Know also that the last sentence of the novella is as chilling as any written in all of science fiction and effectively encapsulates the mindset of all incipient tyrannical figures, from petty to broad-scale.

If called anything else, “‘A Story,’ by John V. Marsch” would still be an intricate and deft piece of fiction, but it is the inferences in the title that give Fifth Head‘s second novella its soupçon of delicity as well as its pivotal link to the rest of the novel. We’ve met John Marsch by now, of course, and know who he is (or think so), and later, in “V.R.T”, it’s implied that “‘A Story’” has been written while the good doctor has been incarcerated on Sainte Croix. Thus his expertise about the self-described Free People seems plausible, he being, after all, an anthropologist who has made it his life’s mission to learn everything he can about the native Annese. And so we marvel at his depiction of abo folkways and meet the thirteen-year old John Sandwalker, who is about to undertake a walkabout that will bring him into contact with many strange figures (significantly, all three novellas feature young men on the cusp of manhood, making Fifth Head very much a rite of passage novel). Among these are the shadow children, cannibalistic pygmies that keep to the dark and whose names differ according to how many their group numbers, as well as the Old One, who may be their mind-generated, consensual spokesgeist. But encountered too is his own natural clone (twinship being another of Fifth Head‘s leitmotifs), John Eastwind, who has been washed away in a river shortly after childbirth and adopted by a rival tribe, and it is during their fratricidal re-encounter that the skies open up and the first French landing party touches down on Sainte Anne. The stage is now set for their swift decimation by the technologically superior Terrans, and by the time of Number Five several centuries later it’s even argued that the abos have been entirely wiped out.

Only in “V.R.T.” do we learn differently. The story, however, is anything but straightforward. This is because “V.R.T.” is told in mosaic fashion. Framing everything is the present-time narrative, wherein an unnamed junior military officer is seeking to adjudicate the case of John V. Marsch, who has been arrested as a possible murder suspect, but is also suspected of being a spy (there has been a war between Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix, which the latter has won, and tensions remain high). Much of what the officer examines takes the form of extracts. Among the materials he samples during the long night that encompasses his task are taped interviews by various interrogators of Marsch, the field journal made by Marsch as he journeys through the Annese outback with a young man who claims to be half-human and half-abo, and Marsch’s prison diary, written as he awaits his still-to-be-determined fate. Little is told chronologically, and often mundanities from the present-time narrative intrude, but we learn in short enough time how graduate student Marsch has come to Sainte Anne hoping to achieve his doctorate in anthropology by studying the allegedly extinct abos. Marsch conducts his own series of interviews with older people who claim to have seen living abos, and in the course of so doing meets a local con artist named Trenchard, who brags of fathering a child on an Annese woman–the very same V.R.T. of the title–with whom he soon sets off into the Annese outback in search of abo sacred places. I will not disclose the crucial events that happen here, saying only that the Dr. Marsch we meet earlier in the opening novella eventually returns to civilisation, achieves his doctorate, goes to Sainte Croix, where he mingles with the inhabitants of 666 Saltimbanque, only to wind up running afoul of the law and being arrested. As for his final disposition within the military justice system–well, let us just say that it’s apposite, if for all the wrong reasons. And so the novel ends, but not without a repeated image from the first few pages, implying its cyclity of events–which is more than germane to a big chunk of Fifth Head‘s thematic crux.

But like most Wolfe novels, this signals not so much the end of events, but the rebeginning, because now you’re free to go back and attempt to solve many of the encrypted puzzles GW has buried within the narrative. What, for example, is Number Five’s real name? Can we decode what the R in V.R.T means? (The V and the T are easily solved.) And who is the unnamed junior officer who decides John Marsch’s fate, and the lady in pink, and Number Five’s sister? I will always contend that for a novel whose central theme involves the search for identity, no one is quite who or what he/she seems. In other words beware of early conclusions, and keep in mind that on occasion even mythical three-headed dogs may bark at shadows–especially in this much-treasured early and seminal work by Gene Wolfe.

reviewed by Michael Andre-Driussi

Here is a brand new collection of fifteen stories. Originally published in magazines, theme anthologies, and a program guide, they offer a wide variety of styles and modes for your reading and re-reading pleasures. Since this is a review, I’m going to fly through the list of stories so you can see what is there, learn what you remember, and wonder at what you are missing.

“Bluesberry Jam” (1996) is set in a permanent traffic jam, where a talented young street musician wanders away from the family car, in search of love and music. (Reminds me of Delany, especially the young musician heroes of The Einstein Intersection and Nova.) What begins as a straight “Orpheus” quest becomes caught up in the nature of two different types of musician: the self-taught, intuitive kind, who make up new songs in and of the present; and the highly polished “schooled” type, who perform the old hits from distant times and lands, with no personal input beyond the performance. And then it becomes something else again.

“One-Two-Three For Me” (1996) is a ghost story at an archaeological dig in the distant future.

“Counting Cats in Zanzibar” (1996) has a woman with seven pseudonyms being pursued by her past: the robots she helped create. (New Wave-ish, as if Ballard did a downbeat version of Asimov’s robopsychologist heroine Susan Calvin: something we might call “Eurydice in the Robot Kingdom”?)

“The Death of Koshchai the Deathless” (1995) is a tale of Old Russia, inspired by the tale of the same name told by Andrew Lang in The Red Fairy Book. A blend of (very funny) comical and horrific elements.

“No Planets Strike” (1997) is told by a donkey on an alien world inhabited by cruel, fairy-like beings. It could very well be set in Briah, the same universe as The Book of the (New/Long/Short) Sun . (The title is from “Hamlet.”)

“Bed And Breakfast” (1995) is about a man and a woman who meet at an inn close to hell. Almost hard-boiled, a sort of “supernatural realism” that reminds me of Chesterton and C.S. Lewis at their best.

“To the Seventh (1996) describes a chess game between God and the Devil, which translates into galactic warfare on the smaller scale. Space Opera.

“Queen of the Night” (1994) gives us a boy raised by ghouls until he comes to the attention of the Queen of the Night herself and trades one world for another. Erotic Horror.

“And When They Appear” (1993) is a very sobering Christmas story, with a boy in an automated house. (Makes me think again of Ballard: imagine Empire of the Sun crossed with Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” in The Martian Chronicles.)

“Flash Company” (1997) has a man being tutored in the ways of love by a haunted player piano.

“The Haunted Boardinghouse” (1990) is located in a neo-Victorian Illinois, a few centuries in the future. A young classics scholar is invited to be the new librarian at a school in a strange town that played a pivotal role in a war against Mexican invaders several generations before. (The building of the title is highly reminiscent of the house in John Crowley’s Little, Big, and the story begins as a low-tech world-renewed, the sort of agrarian arcadia beloved by both survivalists and ecotopians.)

“Useful Phrases” (1992) could fit in with Wolfe’s earlier Bibliomen, since it concerns a book dealer who becomes obsessed with a primer of an imaginary language and the world it seems to describe. Clearly related to Borges’s famed “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

“The Man in the Pepper Mill” (1996) has a boy exploring a magical world that intersects our own through the dollhouse of his dead sister. He is also trying to find a man to marry his mother and be his step-father.

“The Ziggurat” (1995): a mountain cabin, a messy divorce-in-progress, a suicidal engineer, the promise of child custody battles, a sudden snow storm, an alien invasion. A horror story.

“Ain’t You ‘Most Done?” (1996) features a successful businessman whose secret dream is to be a professional musician. He is caught in a traffic jam that seems to last forever . . .

Because the last story links directly back into the first story, I find myself pondering over how the other stories might connect to each other: Quixote Complex (“enamoured of other worlds found in books”) forms a link between “The Haunted Boardinghouse” and “Useful Phrases” (both also have foreign phrases as their keystones); the fates of the boys in “Queen of the Night” and “And When They Appear” might link the stories as being similar; the haunted artefacts of “One-Two-Three For Me” and “Flash Company” show them as contrasts. As far as themes go, the struggle between men and women in the name of love seems to be present in nearly all the stories. Couples in various permutations (pursuit, courtship, consummation, estrangement) dot the landscape rather like they do in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Many of the stories seem to have a reinvigorated “New Wave” aesthetic: I have mentioned Delany and Ballard (twice), but there are also three stories that seem linked to James Tiptree, Jr.: “Counting Cats in Zanzibar,” “The Ziggurat,” and “The Man in the Peppermill” (which mentions Tiptree directly). Technology is bad; a post-technological world is a pastoral utopia; stories are downbeat (situations go from bad to worse; problems can hardly be identified, let alone “solved”; characters suffer depression, suicidal impulses, paranoia, etc., and do not get better; etc.); sexual relations are free but pointless when not actually destructive.

Is this a collection of homages and near-pastiches? After all, in the past Gene Wolfe has given us such gems as “Our Neighbor by David Copperfield” (Dickens),”Remembrance to Come” and “Suzanne Delage” (Proust), “The Rubber Bend” and “Slaves of Silver” (Arthur Conan Doyle), among others. And in talking about Strange Travelers with other readers, a few people have mentioned that “One-Two-Three For Me” is very much like a classic horror story by M.R. James (“Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”).

This line of speculation (i.e., “is this story original or based on something else?”) of course links back to the two types of artist depicted in “Bluesberry Jam.” And where there is jam, we must have toast. So I propose this one: “To Gene Wolfe, for providing such a smorgasbord of food for thought. Cheers!”

(What? My editor gestures from down the table . . . I am far under word-count, he wants more . . . all this while he reads The Dying Earth for the first time! Well, that’s certainly important, better late than never. Toss back this glass of wine, pour myself another.)

Oo-kay. Now I will do a bit of work on one of the stories, “The Haunted Boardinghouse”–I will carve the roast, as it were.

As I mentioned before, the building seems inspired by John Crowley’s Little, Big, in which a rambling house with five faces serves as the axis for the family saga. Each face of Crowley’s house is done in a different architectural style (but he is a bit sneaky about revealing what the fifth one is; there’s a slight paradox involved) and there are hints in Little, Big that each face matches up to a different season (again, slightly odd since we moderns usually count four seasons).

Wolfe’s house has four faces, and we know what the styles are, and even most of the street names:

The haunting details about the boy who fell out the window, took years to die of the injuries sustained, and continues to climb out the window: this points to the timewarping nature of the architecture. It may also be that the boy in question is none other than Wade, the student who befriends Enan.

In addition, rather than being (possibly) related to seasons, each face seems linked to its appropriate timepoint in history: since the story clearly ends with Enan going off across time and space to save Rome from Hannibal, the Neo-classical face leads to there; and since we are told that Enan comes from a neo-Victorian world, then that is the face that leads to Elan’s world. Finally, the miraculous saving of Rome from Hannibal is matched by the saving of Granville from the Mexicans, thus the link to the Contemporary face is made plain. So these time-Travelers go to the lands they are most enamoured of, at the time when they are most needed.

But wait, I have only traced out three of the faces. Is the Tudor face another recruiting station, like the Neo-Victorian face, with no associated “miraculous” save from invasion? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t.

What makes me think of the defeat of the Spanish Armada (aside from another spoiled invasion that ranks up there with the Mongols failing to take Japan) is the fact that the Defense of Granville involved a lot of boats on the river (p. 214), and the big ships of the Armada were done in by a lot of smaller, more nimble craft.

A final Crowley note: the mystery of the two Mrs. Seelys has a slight parallel in Little, Big but a much more pronounced one in Crowley’s AEgypt books.

Anyway, one of the surprises of my reading of this story is this: just as Rome was nearly wiped out in relative infancy, yet then went on to undreamed of glory and accomplishment of the Roman Empire; (and perhaps England, too, narrowly missed being crushed and delivered the English Renaissance and its avatar William Shakespeare;) so has Granville been spared . . . strongly suggesting that all of America’s true greatness still lies before it in Enan’s non-technological, neo-Victorian period (rather than behind it, as we might expect in such a post-technological setting).

Okay, that’s it. I’m done, I’m outta here. Enjoy your meal!

On Blue’s Waters is a fine book. Beautifully written, it is by turns thrilling and amusing, moving and intriguing but, like much of Wolfe’s work, it defies easy classification.

The most commonly used description for Wolfe’s series novels is “science fantasy”. This can be a slippery and misleading category. Some science fantasy is really fantasy with an added but superficial dose of science fiction props and scenery. Some science fantasy is only superficially fantastic, and uses the furnishings of fantasy to contain or perhaps conceal a science fiction rationale. Obviously, there is something of this in Wolfe’s writings, most famously in the seemingly mediaeval towers of the citadel of Nessus in The Book of the New Sun, which turn out to be disused spaceships. But, like many of Wolfe’s best books, On Blue’s Waters is both science fiction and fantasy, and while it shows that there is a rational, scientific explanation for much that appears fantastic, it also dares to suggest that there may yet be room in such a rational world for wonder, marvel and the inexplicable.

For this is a book where the parts are all in perfect harmony, and which works marvellously both as science fiction and as a haunting fantasy. Indeed, it is also in part a horror story, and a work of philosophical speculation. But above all, it succeeds as literature.

What were the great themes that first drew me to science fiction when I was a child and which have kept me enthralled ever since? Spaceships, aliens and the colonisation of other planets. Wolfe gives us spacecraft, his hero searching for the city of Pajarocu, where there is claimed to be a working shuttle capable of returning to the generation starship the Whorl. And when we finally get into space, the journey is as dangerous and exciting as anything for which we might have hoped. There are aliens too, terrific aliens: the fearsome inhumi, inhabitants of Blue’s sister planet Green. As their name suggests, and like all really good aliens, the inhumi are indeed inhuman, as remote and strange as you could wish. And yet, as Horn gradually and reluctantly comes to know his adopted son, the inhumu Krait, we learn as he does that even the monstrous inhumi have their needs and their reasons. As for the colonisation of other worlds, then that is the very subject matter of the book, as Horn as his fellow settlers seek to establish life on the planet Blue and build a new civilisation there.

But this is a fantasy too, one that gives us a quest, a mermaid of a sort, dreams, ancient gods, death and rebirth, and even beasts that talk (Oreb) and crew boats (Babbie).

It is a fantasy tinged with horror, however, for the inhumu are vampires of the most bloodthirsty and voracious kind. We will encounter live inhumations and hideous disinterments when the people of Gaon seek to kill predatory inhumi by burying them in the ground, only for the narrator to dig them up again as he seeks to recruit a secret army to combat the forces of Han which are threatening his city.

Horn’s encounter with the “devil fish” in the shallow tarn on the weed island in the middle of the ocean is horror fiction of a very high order, strongly reminiscent of the writings of Frances Hope Hodgson, an author Wolfe clearly admires. This whole section could have come from The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’.

As for philosophical speculation, On Blue’s Waters is seriously concerned with such issues as the cultural transfer of concepts, the qualities of the ideal ruler, the possible efficacy of prayer, and, even more fundamentally, the existence of God.

Taking up where The Book of the Long Sun ended off, On Blue’s Waters is the first volume of a new three part work entitled The Book of the Short Sun. The former book told the story of the saintly Patera Silk, and was written, as we learnt at the end, by his pupil, Horn. The new book is about Horn himself, though the narrator, the Rajan of Gaon, appears to be at one and the same time both Silk and Horn. How this came to be is not yet clear. (Wolfe’s list of “Proper Names in the Text” refuses to call the Rajan of Gaon “Horn”, but simply describes him as “the narrator”.) The book consists of two main narrative threads. The first is the narrator’s account of how, many years previously, Horn left his home and family and set off to find and return with Silk, who remained on the vast, decaying starship the Whorl after Horn and his fellows left to set up colonies on the planet Blue. The second thread recounts the narrator’s own adventures as the ruler of the city of Gaon. The threads alternate, and neither unwinds in entirely chronological order.

For all his exquisite prose and expertise at world building and characterisation, Wolfe’s special gift is in the engraving of subtle mysteries into the texture of his narratives. Tales of adventure, excellent in themselves, are detailed, deepened, and sometimes even undercut, by several further layers of meaning and significance. The hero, who in many of Wolfe’s best works is also the narrator, may not himself apprehend all these hidden meanings. But an alert reader will see the clues, and in careful reading and rereading may catch glimpses of previously unsuspected depths, where truths and ironies glitter in complex profusion.

But, heresy though it may seem to some, Wolfe also has his shortcomings as an author. Most notably, he seems at times to struggle with the pace of his narratives. For example, while Nightside the Long Sun is gripping throughout, the later volumes of the otherwise excellent The Book of the Long Sun are all considerably slowed by long and not always entirely riveting accounts of journeys through the multitude of tunnels which permeate the hull of the Whorl. And then the second half of the last volume, Exodus from the Long Sun, suffers from the opposite problem. The scope of the story rapidly widens and the pace suddenly quickens, as if the author realised that he had too much to say and not enough time or space in which to say it. The ending is deeply moving, but still seems rushed, which is disappointing after such a detailed and intimate unfolding of the story up to that point.

There are no such problems with On Blue’s Waters. The mysteries are present in abundance, tantalisingly disclosing a dozen truths while concealing a hundred more, but the pace of the story is judged to perfection. The narrator is reflective and discursive, but his musings are intertwined with the twin narratives of Horn’s past and the narrator’s present, both of which are packed with so much incident and significance that the reader is swept along by the action. It is an extraordinarily accomplished performance, and one which has its own organic momentum, building to twin climaxes as both the timelines reach their respective crises in the final chapters of the book.

To digress onto this matter of structure and the pacing of the narrative: it has been observed before that Wolfe is at his best with either short fiction up to novelette or novella length, or very long, multi-volume novels.

Though not immediately germane to this review, it is perhaps relevant to note that The Fifth Head of Cerberus, probably Wolfe’s most successful single volume work, is in fact made up of three linked novellas. Wolfe gives a fascinating commentary on this type of literary construction in his essay “The Living Earth”, in which he discusses Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth, another novel made out of linked novellas.

Most centrally, how can the shorter forms (of story) be used as stepping-stones to the novel? One way, as we have seen, is through continuing characters… (who appear in several different stories within a collection). ‘Short’ stories can be made longer…by adding incident, so as to approach the length of a short novel incrementally – it may seem too simplistic to work, but it does – by, above all, laying story after story at the same time and in the same place. Did Vance…realise that the Dying Earth itself was to be his greatest character? (Jack Vance: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography, edited by Arthur Cunningham, British Library, 2000, p.96)

Wolfe’s long works are generally episodic in nature and, occasional problems of pacing aside, he has already shown that he can develop this form “by adding incident” quite brilliantly. Guided by, amongst other things, the Dickensian model of fictional autobiography, he sustains the reader’s interest in The Book of the New Sun throughout its entire length, skilfully moving his hero down the years and across the landscape, withdrawing characters from the narrative when they have become familiar and re-introducing them in settings that are fresh and unexpected, and even leaving himself room to include embedded, self-contained stories, the folklore tales of his far distant future, based though they often are on the distorted images of an unremembered past.

But in On Blue’s Waters, Wolfe adopts a far more complicated literary model. The narrator begins his story while he is himself only half way through his adventures. Far from home, a prisoner king in a foreign land, he still has much to do to survive, to bring justice and good governance to his people, to defeat their enemies, and to escape and, maybe, find his way back to his long lost home and family. Not only do his accounts of his recent exploits interrupt his attempt to tell the first part of the story, that concerning Horn’s departure from Lizard island and his long journey to Pajarocu, but his musings and comments on what he has written form yet a third strand to the novel. These comments include recollections of parts of the story not yet told, but which will presumably be recounted in the remaining two volumes, In Green’s Jungles and Return to the Whorl. The tone of the commentary, occasionally angry, is primarily wistful and nostalgic, and lends an extraordinarily elegiac air to the whole book. Most of all, the narrator, or that part of him which is still Horn, longs for the two women whom he has abandoned: his wife and childhood sweetheart Nettle, and the beautiful one-armed siren Seawrack.

Seawrack sings in my ears still, as she used to sing to me alone in the evenings on our sloop. Sometimes – often – I imagine that I am actually hearing her, her song and the lapping of the little waves. I would think that a memory so often repeated would lose its poignancy, but it is sharper at each return. When I first came here, I used to fall asleep listening to her; now her song keeps me from sleeping, calling to me.

Calling.

Seawrack, whom I abandoned exactly as I abandoned poor Babbie.

Seawrack

(On Blue’s Waters, chapter 6, “Seawrack”, p170)

Perhaps it is the cool detachment of the authorial voice he employs in many of his books, but while much has been written in praise of Wolfe’s ingenuity, relatively little has been said about his ability to depict and evoke emotion, which he can and does do extraordinarily well. I found many passages in On Blue’s Waters deeply moving.

The interruptive narrator is a literary device which goes back at least as far as Tristram Shandy. Wolfe’s use of it, if not entirely novel, is nevertheless both extremely skilful and highly effective. As we have seen, it allows him to maintain the pace of his story and to exercise a fine degree of control over its tone. We might also note that it even allows him room for the occasional embedded folktale, as in the legend of the pajarocu bird which Captain Wijzer recounts in chapter four.

But in that the narrator claims to have already died, and in that his identity seems to be in some way an amalgam of two different people, the very telling of the story casts a fascinating shadow of mystery and uncertainty over the whole of the book. What separates the two narrative threads is clearly more than simply the passage of time. One person seems to have become another. A narrative which appears at first to be a mechanism for conveying explanation becomes instead a source of paradox.

The structural harmony of On Blue’s Waters turns out to be the embodiment of mystery.

A last note on, and a final paradox from, the narrative structure of On Blue’s Waters: for all that the construction is intensely and successfully novelistic, and to that extent modern, it is also fundamentally classical and, specifically, epic in its design.

To backtrack, and enter a personal note to this review: the first book I ever read by Wolfe was The Shadow of the Torturer. I was completely bowled over by it, and, knowing nothing of the author, developed a number of theories about what sort of person might have written such a work.

I was immediately struck by the echoes of Great Expectations. This author could not only pastiche Dickens, he seemed to be able to write almost as well as him!

But the apparent familiarity with the Byzantine empire and the vague but constant evocations of late classical antiquity suggested to me that the author might be a classicist or historian of some sort, an impression that was reinforced by the cool clarity of the book’s tone. It reminded me of the better sort of English translation from golden age Latin.

I was suitably astonished, therefore, when I discovered that the author was in fact a process engineer by training, and the former editor of a technical journal in that field!

Now alerted to the reality of the situation, my further reading uncovered a rich seam of material in Wolfe’s fiction which clearly demonstrated a familiarity with and an interest in the details of that very discipline, process engineering. There is a haunted orange juice factory in Peace, and we get to learn quite a lot about how it works. There is a factory for making the robotic tanks known as talluses on the Whorl, and the reader of The Book of the Long Sun gets taken for a guided tour. The hero of On Blue’s Waters is a papermaker by trade, and Wolfe shows considerable interest in the details of both the papermaking process and Blue’s nascent bookbinding and publishing industry. We hear how Horn and Nettle chose Lizard island for their home because of the availability of water-power to work their paper mill and the existence of a good natural harbour into which they could float logs from the mainland. The narrator even tells us how he experimented to make ink, and speculates on the possibility of producing coloured inks.

(And is there a little autobiographical wordplay to be found in the fact that Horn and Nettle the book producers make their home on the Tor on Lizard, given that “Tor” is also the name of Wolfe’s publisher?)

All this wonderful, practical detail lends great solidity to Wolfe’s imagined worlds, but Wolfe, engineer though he is to his fingertips, really is also a fine classicist, even if not of the professional variety that I first imagined. In addition to the deeply impressive Soldier books, which are actually set in ancient Greece, there are classical references and influences throughout Wolfe’s fiction, from the titular hell-hound who presides over The Fifth Head of Cerberus to the legendarily curious female who lends her name to Pandora by Holly Hollander.

Others have already pointed to the influence of the Odyssey on On Blue’s Waters. Horn does indeed wander over the sea like Odysseus and longs to return, after his journeys, to the wife he left behind. His son Sinew is like Telemachus to the extent that he does set off in search of his missing father. Like Odysseus, Horn encounters a siren, though he disastrously fails to make sure he is tied to the mast when she starts to sing.

Such divergences from the template are significant, because this is no slavish retelling of ancient story, but rather the classically influenced forging of an altogether new and modern myth. Wolfe follows Virgil’s precedent and feels free to dismantle and re-assemble the components of Homeric epic in order to create a truly modern version of the genre. Odysseus’ crew were turned into swine by Circe, but Horn’s most faithful crew member Babbie actually is a pig, or at least a hus, which is an awfully pig-like creature, for all its unaccountable multiplicity of limbs! (Later, we gather, Horn will meet and befriend a mercenary on the Whorl whose name is simply “Pig”.)

So it is presumably no casual accident that the narrative form of On Blue’s Waters is one which allows Wolfe to start his story “in medias res”, as Horace advised in the Ars Poetica. We do indeed start in the middle and go back to the beginning, and there are prophecies and forward references to indicate what is still to come.

It is traditional for an epic hero to seek prophetic guidance for his mission and, like Aeneas, Horn visits a sibyl. Maytera Marble, the “chem” or android sibyl we first met in The Book of the Long Sun, is herself an augur now, and searches a fish’s entrails in an effort to discern Horn’s fate.

The episode is perhaps more like Perseus’ visit to the Graeae than Aeneas’ visit to the sibyl. Maytera Marble is now blind, her electronic eyes having finally worn out. The graeae had only one tooth and one eye in common, which they shared between them. Maytera Marble has already fitted herself with the dead Maytera Rose’s processor, so that they to some extent now share memories and personalities. She failed to take Maytera Rose’s eyes, however. In another evocative inversion of the myth, instead of taking the Graeae’s eye in order to get them to prophesy, Horn accepts one of Maytera Marble’s robotic eyes from her, along with a commission to find a replacement for it if he can, should he ever succeed in returning to the Whorl.

Like the Aeneid, On Blue’s Waters is concerned with the migration of a people following war and destruction, and like Aeneas, Horn is committed to bringing his family’s gods from his old home to his new. As Aeneas meets Tiberinus, so he is also to encounter on Shadelow the tutelary deities of this new world of Blue, the mysterious Neighbours, Blue’s original inhabitants. Critically, he must and does achieve rapprochement with them, thereby smoothing the way for his fellow settlers.

As we have seen, structurally, On Blue’s Waters is a fundamentally mysterious book. But the story not only contains mysteries, it really is all about secrets. Horn is seeking the city of Pajarocu, a settlement whose location is deliberately kept secret by its inhabitants. He is going there in the hope of finding passage on a shuttle back to the Whorl, so that he can look for Silk. But when Horn consults Mucor as to Silk’s whereabouts, she reveals that Silk has asked her not to reveal his location. This, then, is a book in which the hero seeks a hidden man by way of a hidden city.

But while many questions remain unanswered (Is Blue Urth, or, at least, Ushas, and Green Lune? If Blue is Urth, is the tall Neighbour Horn meets the persisting spirit of the lofty Severian? Is the Land of Fires Tierra del Fuego? Is Pajarocu located on the site of Nessus? What does a leatherskin look like, with its three jaws? What is the secret of the inhumi that the dying Krait confided to Horn? And why do elephants in Gaon have more than one trunk?), Horn does eventually find the hidden city of Pajarocu, and there may yet be enough information in the book to answer, at least in part, the central riddle of the narrator’s identity.

We learn eventually in chapter fourteen (“Pajarocu!”) that Pajarocu is a sort of Platonic city, a schematic replica or shadow of the layout of the real Pajarocu on the Whorl. What its inhabitants have done “is to duplicate its plan to perfection – without duplicating, or attempting to duplicate, its substance at all.” (p348)

This doctrine of “ideas”, which ultimately derives from Plato and is most famously illustrated by the parable of the cave in his work The Republic, is announced by Wolfe as early as the opening of chapter two, where the narrator is describing some people’s “talent” of being able to do nothing.

Silk said once that we are like a man who can see only shadows, and thinks the shadow of an ox the ox and a man’s shadow the man. These people reverse that. They see the man, but see him as a shadow cast by the leaves of a bough stirred by the wind. Or at least they see him like that unless he shouts at them or strikes them. (p49)

Silk refers to the traditional Platonic notion that the phenomenal world is a sign and consequence of a higher reality which humans in their ignorrance can only dimly perceive. The narrator, however, inverts this concept and says that lazy people actually do perceive reality but are too indolent to realise it, thinking it merely a sign or a seeming unless “reality” in some way gets up and slaps them in the face and thereby draws their attention to itself. Somewhere behind the scenes, Wolfe seems to be suggesting the possibility that the reader has actually been shown all the answers to his or her questions, but has failed to appreciate the fact, mistaking answers for hints or clues. Duly chastened, this reviewer has to confess to his lack of perception, mesmerised as he is by the beauty of the play of shadows that flit so gorgeously across the surface of this text.

The people of New Viron recognise the need for a ruler to lead their town, and commission Horn to travel to the Whorl to find Patera Silk, the Calde of old Viron, so that he can become the Calde of New Viron too. Although we do not know the full circumstances, it is clear that Hari Mau and some other men from Gaon have also returned to the Whorl in search of Silk, so that they can install him as their Rajan. Mistaking Horn for Silk, they kidnap him, and return to Blue and make him their prince. But the real irony is not so much that Horn’s mission is frustrated by those carrying out an apparently identical mission on behalf of another settlement, so much as the fact that Horn has indeed become like Silk, and may even be Silk in some way which has not yet been fully explained.

It may be that the combination of his trials and adventures, combined with his abiding memory of Silk and strong desire to imitate him, have turned Horn into someone very like Silk. They have certainly turned him into a fine and honest ruler. The frame story of the narrator’s adventures as Rajan of Gaon leave us in no doubt that, while far from perfect, Horn-Silk is in fact a very good prince. He is honest and upholds the law in court without favour or prejudice, always doing his best to establish the facts of the cases brought before him. He works to strengthen the economy of Gaon, while at the same time creating work for the unemployed by engaging their labour to build the diversion of the river Nadi which will bypass the Lesser Cataracts downstream of Gaon, thereby opening access to the sea and greatly increasing trade on the river. We see Horn-Silk as an inspired leader during time of war, heartening his troops and devising clever stratagems by which to defeat a numerically superior enemy. Lastly, he is a ruler who is happy to abdicate his responsibilities once a suitable successor has arisen. He does not crave power for its own sake, but, on the contrary, yearns only to return to his wife Nettle and his old life at the paper mill on the island of Lizard.

Clearly, Horn, who has always striven to follow the example of his saintly friend and former school master, has in some measure succeeded. The exact means by which Silk and Horn have merged remains a mystery, but it is appropriate that, finally, their personalities should have achieved a measure of harmony