Who can I recommend this book to? It may be the best sci-fi epic of them all, but I wonder how many genre fiction fans are ready for the arcane symbols and narrative obstacles Gene Wolfe throws in their path. I am more inclined to recommend it to philosophers and theologians, but they will certainly reject any book filled with monsters, time warps, and extraterrestrials. Probably the most suitable place for The Book of the New Sun is on a reading list for an Ivy League grad student in literature, but we’re more likely to experience the coming of a new sun than the arrival of that unlikely event.
Help me! What do I do with this book? I love it and want to spread the word. But I fear I am that sower in the parable casting seed on rocky places and scorched earth.
Well, in fact, it’s not really a book, despite the title. But maybe an out-and-out deception on the title page is the best way to start this odd epic, offering a taste of the many misleading ‘facts’ and clues to come. The Book of the New Sun is actually a tetralogy, a collection of four novels, later capped by a coda— The Urth of the New Sun , a fifth book in the series published by Gene Wolfe several years later—and two later multi-volume works set in the same universe.
The Book of the New Sun , for its part, is all one story, except for the fact that it isn’t. If you read this work long enough, you find it collapsing on you. Things you took for granted, even the foundational ingredients of the tale, no longer offer a steady support. Even our main protagonist Severian, who narrates the entire tale, may not be the same individual at the end of the book as he was at the beginning.
But I’m jumping ahead (like Severian himself). At first glance, nothing seems simpler than the story Gene Wolfe serves up for us. It follows all the familiar ingredients of the fantasy epic. A hero goes on a vision quest, and encounters villains and engages in battles, finds time for romantic dalliances with fair ladies, and gets crowned as ruler in the final pages.
The clichés here are so overwhelming and obvious, that you might start wondering why so many literary stars have praised this work. Neil Gaiman has claimed he was even intimidated by Wolfe’s use of “science fiction to illuminate ideas and people and to stretch my mind in ways it had never been stretched before.” Ursula K. Le Guin called Wolfe "our Melville." and c ritic Michael Dirda ranked The Book of the New Sun as “the greatest fantasy novel written by an American." In other words, he is setting Wolfe up as the cross-Atlantic rival of J.R.R. Tolkien .
Commentators have made much of Gene Wolfe’s Catholic faith, and in fact this whole tetralogy sometimes captures the ambiance of a medieval saint’s life or parable. But as soon as you try to pin down the meanings, it gets tricky, very tricky. I’d like to see our hero Severian as a Christ figure, and he does have a strange talent for healing the sick. But how do reconcile this with his official vocation? Severian is a torturer, a journeyman member of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence, that professional guild devoted to punishment and execution. (The words used throughout this book are part of the misdirection: Severian himself will refer to torture techniques as “excruciations” and beheadings as “decollations.” Do we infer from these that they are legitimate trade practices and not brutality under another label? Here, as elsewhere in this book, the reader is forced to decide such matters.)
Severian has violated the rules of his guild. He had an affair with Thecla, a discredited member of the ruling family now held as prisoner, and then helped her commit suicide to avoid torture. He is expelled from the guild, and sent to a distant city where he will serve as a lowly provincial enforcer. Along the way, he comes into possession of a sacred relic, the claw of the conciliator—which might just be an ornate gem setting, but seems to have miraculous powers when wielded by our hero.
This seems straightforward, but nothing in this work is ever what it seems. In fact, Wolfe readers still can’t seem to agree, even after years of scrutiny and commentary on this work, on whether Severian is a truth-teller or unreliable narrator. And Wolfe proceeds to add several layers of difficulty for his readers. Every page has its pitfalls.
The most obvious problem for the reader is Wolfe’s vocabulary. His word choice is both eccentric and formidable. No genre author I’ve encountered uses more unconventional terminology (with the possible exception of autodidact Clark Ashton Smith , who learned to be a horror writer by reading the dictionary front to back). Wolfe uses odd words, archaic words, invented words, perversely obscure words. Every few sentences you run into something like abacination, lamia, cerbotana, indanthrene, clepsydra, petasoses, catachtonian, chatoyant, vivimancer, lipsanotheca, estoc, antepilani, ophicleide, scopolagna, merychip, and trilhoen. You can consult a dictionary, but many of these cuties aren’t even too funky for Funk & Wagnalls.
If you persist with this story—and many give up long before finishing The Book of the New Sun —you will soon discover you need a guide. But good luck finding one. I am told that Peter Wolfe’s Shadows of the New Sun is helpful to read, but it’s out of print and the cheapest hardcover edition on the web is currently priced at $2,889.95. I got most benefit from Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle , a reference work by Michael Andre-Driussi. But even the guides can’t guarantee you success. They are like those legendary Sherpa mountaineers who aid the foolhardy visitors who try to scale Mount Everest. They might bring you to the peak, or simply leave you gasping for air far below the summit.
The next layer of difficult is the deliberate absence of clarifying details. A tower in the city center might have originally been a spaceship, but the reader will need to make that leap of imagination. A story of a boat trip might really be the tale of a space voyage. Even trickier: the adversaries in the overarching conflict, those essential heroes and villains that give momentum to every sci-fi and fantasy epic, might actually be working on the same side. At one juncture, we learn that key combatants are wearing masks to hide their hideous faces; but then we later find that the ugliness is itself a second mask, disguising a beautiful visage underneath all the layers of deception. That’s a kind of metaphor for the entire work.
But the biggest challenge here is the final layer of symbolism. Make no mistake, almost everything in this work, even small incidents, begs for a philosophical or metaphysical interpretation. I have devised my own theory of these books, and if it is correct, they address profound issues on the nature of evil, the path of atonement, and the legitimacy of power. But in almost every instance, the web of symbols here is open-ended, inviting discourse rather than closing it off.
Are genre audiences ready for this? My instinct is to deny it. Everything we are told about marketing popular culture suggests that there is no mainstream audience for a sci-fi epic of this sort. Yet The Book of the New Sun has found a sizable following and these readers are devoted to Wolfe’s epic. In one survey of readers, this tetralogy even finished in the top spot in a poll of all time favorites. I am amazed, albeit pleased by this turn events. Maybe miracles are possible, and not only for Severian the torturer. Who knows? Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before those Ivy League Phd types even start to notice.
Ted Gioia is the author of eleven books, including the forthcoming Music: A Subversive History (Basic Books).
The Most Mysterious Sci-Fi Epic: A Look Back at Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun