The Book of the New Sun Vol. 1 by Gene Wolfe

Genre is a dangerous thing. It should just be a label booksellers stick on their shelves. If you want to read something, it really shouldn’t matter what anyone else calls it, it should only matter if it floats your boat. Of course, that’s not exactly how it works. Some fans cling defiantly to a genre because the rest of the world seems to read that label and turn their nose up. Other fans are proud to hop between a few labels. While some are staunchly anti-genre, unless that genre has something worthy about it. You know, the type - the award chasers. The worthy readers.

There are definitely some genres and styles of writing that I have missed out on until recently. The first couple of Anita Brookner novels I read left me a little breathless and ashamed that I’d not tried them before. Meanwhile, I know a few people who keep meaning to pick Terry Pratchett’s back catalogue but aren’t entirely sure where to start or if they can get past the fact that Terry gives all of his wizards pointy hats.

Fantasy has been one I’ve struggled with myself. Not the Pratchett end of the spectrum. No, I can take my witches and Morris dancers if they come with a heavy seasoning of satire. It’s the straighter fantasy, for want of a better term, where I can get a little lost. The high end of fantasy. It can all read like Tolkien cosplay to me. But, at the same time, I know I can sit and happily watch a fantasy movie without cringing if it’s done well.

Recently, I went to see the new Dungeons and Dragons movie. I’m not the world’s biggest D and D fan. I play occasionally in a game a friend runs, but I don’t collect the rulebooks. My house is not in risk of a dice related avalanche. I like the world my friend created. I like thinking around a problem. One time I missed a couple of games and found out my team had gone to a place called something like The Temple of Oblivion. Only in D and D, I remember thinking.

The movie is fine. It’s funny. It’s fairly pacey. It’s also, and this is where it loses me a little, desperate not to appear too serious. It’s not a spoof, but it’s also not risking losing its audience by keeping a straight face. In that way, it’s borrowing heavily from the tone of Marvel movies. It’s that same sort of script which looks sideways at the audience, locks eyes with the reluctant date or parent and says, ‘we know you don’t really want to be here but, don’t worry, we think some of this is a little crazy too’.

Coming out of that movie, I realised that I missed the more earnest approach to fantasy movies. Even something as camp as Flash Gordon rarely lets a character wink at the audience. Whilst movies like Krull or Hawk the Slayer or even The Dark Crystal never flinch from what they’re creating. And, in my opinion, they’re better for it.

It was thinking like this which drove me to find a fantasy series and give it a try. I can’t tell you exactly what drew me to Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun. I didn’t start looking up lists of fantasy epics. I know I started from a place of loving Stephen King’s The Dark Tower and remembering how much fun I’d had reading the first four Song of Ice and Fire novels by George R.R. Martin.

Somewhere, in looking up those books online and seeing what other readers had enjoyed, I first stumbled across references to Wolfe’s travelling torturer Severian. Something in the way people talked about these four books appealed to me. Although a lot of people, even fans of the series, did warn any prospective newcomer that they weren’t easy reads. A few of reviews and articles made it very clear that you need to re-read Wolfe’s saga a few times to really see what he’d been building around you. That definitely intrigued me.

Now, having read SF Masterworks first volume of the series (which collects the first two novels, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator), I can see exactly what they meant. Wolfe doesn’t take it easy on the reader. I’m glad in some respects that last year I read Russell Hoban’s stunning Riddley Walker and also Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake, both of which are written in fictionalised languages and don’t offer you exact translations. To be fair to Wolfe, his prose isn’t quite so set on leaving you questioning every other word for the first twenty or so pages (Kingsnorth in particular had me scratching my head for a while, until I realised one word I’d kept seeing meant hawk).

Even with the tangled language, however, I found these two books strangely addictive. I’d only intended to read the first one, only as I got to the end, I found I just wanted to take a quick peak to see where the second one picked up. It wasn’t long before I was deep into The Claw of Conciliator and knew I had no plans of stopping.

The story set down in the pages of the two novels is not exactly what I’d think of as a standard fantasy saga. Yes, Severian is living in a fantastical world, and yes he has to go on a journey, but no one is burning any rings in volcanoes here. No one is going to wizard school, either. There are some deeply troubling moments for our disenfranchised torturer. He makes a few decisions which leave your skin crawling, especially when he seems to see no real problem in them. Although the fact that Severian is a flawed character, surrounded by blinkered believers, con artists and killers, makes sure you never know exactly where you’re going or who you can trust. Instead, on top of the weirdness of his world and his path through it, you have the moral ambiguity of a young man who is trying to do the right thing in the face of shifting, uneasy forces, and not always capable of making the right call.

Wolfe has set the books in a doomed future version of what appears to be our world, only almost any trace of us is long gone. There are hints of people leaving the world and coming back. There are rumours of aliens, and there is godlike leader in control of Severian’s Urth who felt worryingly reminiscent to Frank Herbert’s God Emperor of Dune. There is also a bizarre, almost dreamlike quality to the things Severian sees as his life is forced to adapt and change to the path he takes, carrying his lethal sword Terminus Est. There are reoccurring characters, whispers of a long forgotten mythology. There are giants and river creatures. Mutated ape people in caves. Witches hiding in the ruins of cities. Duels using bizarre, poisoned flowers that grow in a garden that appears to have borrowed from a Robert Aickman story. There are echoes of strange encounters with all sorts of people, and there are also moments of true torture and betrayal.

I went into The Shadow of the Torturer not knowing too much about where it went, so I really don’t want to say too much about the plot. Without a doubt, one of the things that kept me engrossed was the realistic, unflinching pace of Wolfe’s prose. The character is telling us their story as what feels like part of a journal, a tome setting out his tale, so you know that it leads to somewhere beyond where you first find the orphan training to be a torturer for his guild. You get little hints of where he is going to end up, but Wolfe never gives away too much.

If I’m being honest, something in that delivery of such a uniquely paced story in this sort of vibrant fantasy world reminded me a little of what Vince Gilligan built with Breaking Bad. That sense of you know the tropes that led you here, but you don’t necessarily know where this version of them is going to lead you.

One thing I will say, which quickly had me turning to read the start of the second novel, is Wolfe’s author’s note at the end of the first book. First of all, the very end of Severian’s narration for each novel stops the story quite abruptly and says you may not want to read any further, and he wouldn’t blame you, which I loved. Then Wolfe apologises if his translation of this future text isn’t quite clear, only he doesn’t know exactly what all the words refer to in the story.

That sort of device reminded me of reading Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, except this isn’t just excerpts. Wolfe claims he’s somehow translating an entire account of Severian’s story from a future document. It’s just another layer of strange to add on top of the swirling, mind bending journey you find waiting for you within The Book of the New Sun.

So, yes, I am glad that I decided to try and engage with something stored under the fantasy label that was outside of my comfortable zone. Although I’m not entirely sure that I settled on something you’d class as your standard high fantasy. This feels like something very different, and if you’re in the mood for a strange, otherworldly trip through a doomed future with a torturer and a revolving cast of outsiders, witches, rebels, and theatrical players (let alone a feast that allows you to share the memories of the dead), then I’d say you are in for a treat.