The Shadow of the Torturer
by Gene Wolfe
1980, reprinted 1994
The Shadow of the Torturer is the first book of a quartet, known as The Book of the New Sun, which is considered to be Gene Wolfe's masterpiece. The series is a science fantasy story, set so far in the future that the sun is dying, or at least aging to become less and less hospitable to human life. One time marker, offered late in this book, put these events at least 30 thousand years in our future.
The series is narrated by Severian, who is writing it down at the end of his life. At the time of he's writing this, Sevarian has become the Autarch of the whole planet, now known as Urth. At the time depicted in the book, he's a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood. An orphan, raised by and apprentice to the Torturer's Guild in the city of Nessus. If I understand correctly, his parents must've been among the Guild's victims. Nessus is an enormous city on a southern continent, built near the coast along a great river that runs north to south, and that's south of the world's greatest rainforest ... so possibly far-future Buenos Aires.
Severian claims to have a perfect memory, although there's some reason to not take him entirely at his word on that. At several points he fails to recognize someone he's seen before until after it's too late for the recognition to do him any good. Once, when he brings someone a food tray, and that person asks him what's for dinner, Severian can't answer, because he can't see the tray sitting behind her, and can't remember what's on it. He doesn't point this discrepancy out himself, but I noticed it, and it sort of made me wonder whether his memory has limits he's not aware of, or if it's something he somehow acquires later on in his life.
Wolfe does a few things that make this a challenging, but hopefully rewarding read. One is simply to not have any character point out certain features of the tale. No one says the old name of the city, for example. And based on its description, I'm pretty sure the tower the Torturer's Guild occupies is a space shuttle, but no one says anything to hint at that. Another is the pseudo-archaic diction of the book. Rather than invent a lot of neologisms, Wolfe draws on older words, or at least older word-stems, and invests them with new meaning. The diction of the narration is formal and strange too. Not stilted, exactly, but also not conversational. There are also a number of incidents in the text whose full meaning is unclear at the time, and whose true importance is revealed only later in the book. (And, I presume in some cases, later in the series.)
There are also a couple things Wolfe does to help the reader out. While some features of the future world pass unremarked, others are pointed out and explained. When young Severian sees a portrait that sounds like a photo of an astronaut on the moon, the curator cleaning the old image confirms this interpretation to the boy. When Severian is tricked the most badly, and fails to heed or understand a timely warning note, others help him to explicitly figure things out, though belatedly, after he's already barely survived.
And in a couple situations with the most potential to be ambiguous or confusing, the most straightforward explanation is the correct one. At a lake where preserved dead bodies are sunk in mud, we meet an old man who's spent decades trying to find his wife's bog-mummy. When a mysterious, mud-covered young woman with amnesia swims to the surface later, we may not know how or why one of the dead bodies has come back to life, but yes, that is what's happened, and yes, it is that poor old guy's wife. When Severian sleeps next to a giant and dreams of even larger alien giants who now live in Urth's oceans, we may not know the mechanism by which this information is transferred, but yes, these aliens now do live here underwater; yes, that's why Severian saw a giant woman's face when he nearly drowned as a child; and yes, the giant Baldanders is a member of this same alien species, just young and small enough that he can still survive on land. These situations are strange, and there's not initially enough information to understand them fully, but Wolfe is careful not to mislead us, and to provide a few extra, supernatural guideposts.
I really do like Wolfe's writing. Here's Severian in chapter 1 espousing one of the central tenets of sociology, for example: "Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things far weaker than our words for them." There's not some profound aside like that on every page, probably not in every chapter, but amid the narrative, Wolfe manages to leave us with a few observations about life and human nature of the sort that book lovers occasionally get as tattoos.
Severian's story seems like a dark reflection of the classic hero's journey, where every step comes out wrong. (Or perhaps, each step is doubled, with one version inverted and the other more traditional?) Rather than reluctantly but voluntarily leaving home because he's called away by a problem in the broader world, Severian is thrown out of the Torturer's Guild in disgrace for showing someone mercy. His punishment is to become an executioner. Instead of meeting a wise mentor or a friendly sidekick, he's targeted, first by the suspicious-seeming impresario of a traveling show, and then by a femme fatale. He gets a special, named sword, but Terminus Est is a tool, an executioner's beheading blade.
Although he doesn't admit it, Sevarian is naive and repeatedly finds himself trapped in situations he doesn't understand, doesn't even recognize as being dangerous until it's almost too late to escape. Wolfe's high diction and learned prose hides a lost teenager, playing at adulthood too soon in a cruel society, without understanding the rules or the stakes, with his life hanging in the balance.
The series is narrated by Severian, who is writing it down at the end of his life. At the time of he's writing this, Sevarian has become the Autarch of the whole planet, now known as Urth. At the time depicted in the book, he's a teenage boy on the cusp of manhood. An orphan, raised by and apprentice to the Torturer's Guild in the city of Nessus. If I understand correctly, his parents must've been among the Guild's victims. Nessus is an enormous city on a southern continent, built near the coast along a great river that runs north to south, and that's south of the world's greatest rainforest ... so possibly far-future Buenos Aires.
Severian claims to have a perfect memory, although there's some reason to not take him entirely at his word on that. At several points he fails to recognize someone he's seen before until after it's too late for the recognition to do him any good. Once, when he brings someone a food tray, and that person asks him what's for dinner, Severian can't answer, because he can't see the tray sitting behind her, and can't remember what's on it. He doesn't point this discrepancy out himself, but I noticed it, and it sort of made me wonder whether his memory has limits he's not aware of, or if it's something he somehow acquires later on in his life.
Wolfe does a few things that make this a challenging, but hopefully rewarding read. One is simply to not have any character point out certain features of the tale. No one says the old name of the city, for example. And based on its description, I'm pretty sure the tower the Torturer's Guild occupies is a space shuttle, but no one says anything to hint at that. Another is the pseudo-archaic diction of the book. Rather than invent a lot of neologisms, Wolfe draws on older words, or at least older word-stems, and invests them with new meaning. The diction of the narration is formal and strange too. Not stilted, exactly, but also not conversational. There are also a number of incidents in the text whose full meaning is unclear at the time, and whose true importance is revealed only later in the book. (And, I presume in some cases, later in the series.)
There are also a couple things Wolfe does to help the reader out. While some features of the future world pass unremarked, others are pointed out and explained. When young Severian sees a portrait that sounds like a photo of an astronaut on the moon, the curator cleaning the old image confirms this interpretation to the boy. When Severian is tricked the most badly, and fails to heed or understand a timely warning note, others help him to explicitly figure things out, though belatedly, after he's already barely survived.
And in a couple situations with the most potential to be ambiguous or confusing, the most straightforward explanation is the correct one. At a lake where preserved dead bodies are sunk in mud, we meet an old man who's spent decades trying to find his wife's bog-mummy. When a mysterious, mud-covered young woman with amnesia swims to the surface later, we may not know how or why one of the dead bodies has come back to life, but yes, that is what's happened, and yes, it is that poor old guy's wife. When Severian sleeps next to a giant and dreams of even larger alien giants who now live in Urth's oceans, we may not know the mechanism by which this information is transferred, but yes, these aliens now do live here underwater; yes, that's why Severian saw a giant woman's face when he nearly drowned as a child; and yes, the giant Baldanders is a member of this same alien species, just young and small enough that he can still survive on land. These situations are strange, and there's not initially enough information to understand them fully, but Wolfe is careful not to mislead us, and to provide a few extra, supernatural guideposts.
I really do like Wolfe's writing. Here's Severian in chapter 1 espousing one of the central tenets of sociology, for example: "Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things far weaker than our words for them." There's not some profound aside like that on every page, probably not in every chapter, but amid the narrative, Wolfe manages to leave us with a few observations about life and human nature of the sort that book lovers occasionally get as tattoos.
Severian's story seems like a dark reflection of the classic hero's journey, where every step comes out wrong. (Or perhaps, each step is doubled, with one version inverted and the other more traditional?) Rather than reluctantly but voluntarily leaving home because he's called away by a problem in the broader world, Severian is thrown out of the Torturer's Guild in disgrace for showing someone mercy. His punishment is to become an executioner. Instead of meeting a wise mentor or a friendly sidekick, he's targeted, first by the suspicious-seeming impresario of a traveling show, and then by a femme fatale. He gets a special, named sword, but Terminus Est is a tool, an executioner's beheading blade.
Although he doesn't admit it, Sevarian is naive and repeatedly finds himself trapped in situations he doesn't understand, doesn't even recognize as being dangerous until it's almost too late to escape. Wolfe's high diction and learned prose hides a lost teenager, playing at adulthood too soon in a cruel society, without understanding the rules or the stakes, with his life hanging in the balance.
The Shadow of the Torturer contains a complete chapter in Severian's life, but it's clearly not a stand-alone novel. The book literally ends with him crossing through the gate out of the city of Nessus on his way to the hinterlands town where he's been assigned to work, and I know that the next book will start with him emerging from the gate into the world beyond the city. I'll be reading the next in the series later this year.
I look forward eagerly to the next installments.
ReplyDeleteThank you! I hadn't realized how many people I know have already read this until now.
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