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Shadow & Claw: The First Half of 'The Book of the New Sun', by Gene Wolfe
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The Book of the New Sun is unanimously acclaimed as Gene Wolfe's most remarkable work, hailed as "a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis" by Publishers Weekly, and "one of the most ambitious works of speculative fiction in the twentieth century" by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Shadow & Claw brings together the first two books of the tetralogy in one volume:
The Shadow of the Torturer is the tale of young Severian, an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession -- showing mercy toward his victim.
Ursula K. Le Guin said, "Magic stuff . . . a masterpiece . . . the best science fiction I've read in years!"
The Claw of the Conciliator continues the saga of Severian, banished from his home, as he undertakes a mythic quest to discover the awesome power of an ancient relic, and learn the truth about his hidden destiny.
"Arguably the finest piece of literature American science fiction has yet produced [is] the four-volume Book of the New Sun."--Chicago Sun-Times
"The Book of the New Sun establishes his preeminence, pure and simple. . . . The Book of the New Sun contains elements of Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness and Wagnerian mythology. Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within . . . once into it, there is no stopping."--The New York Times Book Review
- Sales Rank: #28269 in Books
- Brand: Wolfe, Gene
- Published on: 1994-10-15
- Released on: 1994-10-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.34" h x 1.14" w x 5.73" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 416 pages
Amazon.com Review
One of the most acclaimed "science fantasies" ever, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is a long, magical novel in four volumes. Shadow & Claw contains the first two: The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, which respectively won the World Fantasy and Nebula Awards.
This is the first-person narrative of Severian, a lowly apprentice torturer blessed and cursed with a photographic memory, whose travels lead him through the marvels of far-future Urth, and who--as revealed near the beginning--eventually becomes his land's sole ruler or Autarch. On the surface it's a colorful story with all the classic ingredients: growing up, adventure, sex, betrayal, murder, exile, battle, monsters, and mysteries to be solved. (Only well into book 2 do we realize what saved Severian's life in chapter 1.) For lovers of literary allusions, they are plenty here: a Dickensian cemetery scene, a torture-engine from Kafka, a wonderful library out of Borges, and familiar fables changed by eons of retelling. Wolfe evokes a chilly sense of time's vastness, with an age-old, much-restored painting of a golden-visored "knight," really an astronaut standing on the moon, and an ancient citadel of metal towers, actually grounded spacecraft. Even the sun is senile and dying, and so Urth needs a new sun.
The Book of the New Sun is almost heartbreakingly good, full of riches and subtleties that improve with each rereading. It is Gene Wolfe's masterpiece. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk
Review
“The Book of the New Sun establishes [Wolfe's] pre-eminence, pure and simple....The Book of the New Sun contains elements of Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness and Wagnerian mythology. Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within...once into it, there is no stopping.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“Magic stuff...a masterpiece...the best science fiction I've read in years!” ―Ursula K. Le Guin
“Arguably the best piece of literature American science fiction has yet produced.” ―Chicago Sun-Times
About the Author
Gene Wolfe has been called "the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced" by The Washington Post. A former engineer, he has written numerous books and won a variety of awards for his SF writing. He lives with his wife Rosemary in Barrington, Illinois.
Most helpful customer reviews
410 of 436 people found the following review helpful.
Outstanding, but not an unqualified recommendation...
By Sean Hanley
I've read some of the reader reviews of "Shadow and Claw" and come to the conclusion that the book needs an introduction. Many of the negative reviews, I think, come from readers who weren't familiar with Gene Wolfe's writing style, which is understandable. So let me say for Wolfe that you cannot by any means read "The Book of the New Sun" the way you would ordinarily read a book. This mostly stems from the fact that the book is supposed to be an autobiography, and the writer, Severian, really can't be trusted to describe things accurately. A pretty good example would be the first woman Severian becomes interested in, Agia. He tells us that she was the most unattractive woman he has ever been attracted to. Fine, but the way that he becomes somewhat obsessed with her at a glance would suggest otherwise, and the way she treats him would account for his recalling her as being ugly. This is a minor example, to be sure, because it is a matter of Severian's perspective. There were other times in the book that I got the impression that Severian was telling flat-out lies. It's confusing, but it makes the book extremely interesting to read, simply because you are able to figure out much of what actually happened. Another thing to keep in mind, as somebody said in a quote on Wolfe's "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," (I forget who, and don't really care to find out, mostly because I'm lazy) is that Wolfe is "a master of the casual revelation." Which is to say that Severian will out of nowhere mention some vital piece of information, apparently assuming that we already knew about it. And we probably would know were we from his world, as he assumes we are. The only other thing to be aware of is the vocabulary, which thankfully is not nearly as difficult as people have described it. By and large, you won't have to look up the words being used simply because while you may not what an individual word means, you can infer it's meaning from the sentence it is used in. I started out looking up words constantly, and found that they mostly meant what I had already assumed they did. This is not to say that you shouldn't have a dictionary on hand, but looking up every word used that you don't know would be excessive. If all this sounds intimidating, I highly recommend that you read "Cerberus" which will give you a better handle on Wolfe's style. It's great book, and a good place to start if you are unfamiliar with Gene Wolfe. (If you do take my advice, it would be good to note that Severian's writing style is most similar to the first novella in "Cerberus.") The main thing I want to be clear on is that you shouldn't start reading this book expecting another "Lord of the Rings." While it can be argued that the "New Sun" series is of a similar calibur in terms of greatness, these are entirely different books. "LOTR" is an entertaining story, and you don't have to read into it at all. Everything you need to know is right there on the pages. The "New Sun" series is a bit more literary (Which sounds like a cultural elitist term, but I can't think of another one. Rest assured, I don't mean to belittle "LOTR" in any way, shape or form). If you're reading purely for an entertaining story, you would probably do well to look elsewhere.
78 of 81 people found the following review helpful.
Unreliable Narration makes for Difficult Reading
By john lollard
My goal is to explain how the book works so that potential readers can better decide if it'd be a book they'd enjoy or not. This review is for people who have not bought or read the book and are considering doing so, and hopefully will be helpful to them. I'm not trying to criticize the author or fans of his work or change any minds.
If, reading this review, you think the book sounds like your cup of tea, then great! I'm glad to have helped you in that regard. If you already read it and dislike my disparaging of it, surely you'll at least admit my descriptions are factually accurate.
There are no spoilers below.
According to the appendix of the first book, the author considers this book a translation of a manuscript written in a language that will not exist until far in the future. As such, the author had to make "translation decisions" about certain words used in the "original manuscript" that do not exist in English; for many of these, he chose to use archaic and latinate words that are not in common use. Due to this, most reviewers describe the language as rich and florid, or heavy-handed and pretentious; really, it's fairly formal standard American English, at about what you'd find in a textbook, but with occasional vocabulary words from Shakespeare thrown in. I actually really enjoyed the prose, and gave it an extra star for the quality of it. If you know what these words mean, or -what is more likely- if you look them up, then it's not that difficult to read. At least, not in a mechanical sense.
However, this book is hard to read in several other senses.
The book is supposed to be a sort of memoir written by the main character, Severian, in first person. Part of the appeal of the book is supposed to be that Severian is an unreliable narrator, and yet he insists, over and over, that he has an eidetic memory. There are flat-out contradictions in the text, and this can lead to confusion and re-reads. Further, this book is not supposed to be a story, but something like a journal.
Because of this convention, the storytelling is disjointed, chaotic, and confusing. It reads a though you were listening to someone describe a dream, as they leave parts out or suddenly shove parts in. The narrator goes from crazy scene to crazy scene with almost no motivation, and recalls detailed events that have no apparent significance in the plot (or whatever passes for one in the series) while skipping over details that are essential but are assumed to be understood by a reader of the far future (but definitely not by present readers). It is obviously not a result of "bad" writing but of "good writing (i.e. Wolfe did this on purpose and did it well), but for many it may make for "bad" reading. You will have to read a given chapter several times to figure out what is going on, and sometimes, upon understanding, you'll realize that actually the whole chapter was meaningless and only included because Severian wanted to tell you about it.
Also, characters seem to merge and switch at times, because Severian recalls things improperly. Further, the personalities of characters are merely the narrator's emotional projection of them. Many negative reviewers complain of the "flat" characters; this is true. It's true "on purpose" because A) the main character is telling this as a later reflection and thus does not grow through the story and B) the supporting characters are only elements of Severian's memories... but it's still true that the characters are flat. They're *interesting* characters, but given no depth besides how they interact with Severian.
As many have said, the story is mostly plotless. Or, really, there is a very simple plot ("man leaves home") and then reams of description are glommed on to it. If anything, the plot is an excuse to cause the narrator to view the various things in Urth that the author wants to showcase. I really can't pretend that there's anything more to it than that. You will find yourself, midway through the first book, realizing that you have no idea why Severian is doing any of the things that he's doing. Why is he in this building? Why is he talking to these people? Why are these people even here? Why is he describing all of this scenery? Why is he recalling this memory?
I don't know how to put this tersely, besides to reiterate the dream-like quality of it. Nothing in the books is solid or well-placed. Nothing is real, nor has it any quality of realness. People, places, and memories are essentially floating about in a narrative aether. The narrator points to one of these denizens of the dreamworld, seemingly at random, and describes it in colorful prose before turning his attention to some other element drifting in this noetic sea. Experiences wash over the reader, the sights and sounds and smells, and then more and different experiences, then still more, unconnected and unexplained, right to the last sentence of the book.
Other negative reviewers have mentioned the chauvinism of the story. As with a lot of the other negative comments, it makes sense for this to be present, as the narrator is a man from far in the future and not from modern Western society, therefore he has different cultural and social norms from us; after all why wouldn't he? But, still, women in the story are treated pretty terribly, and seem perfectly content with this terrible treatment. Women tend to respond to their ill-handling by offering their assailant sex. I think it makes sense strictly speaking for what the book is, and I don't think it says anything about the author so much as it does the narrator, but it may be particularly infuriating for some readers.
There are a lot of fantastical elements in the story, that sadly are never explained, while mundane details are given pages of description. The world of the book is complicated and detailed and very intriguing, but the narrator tends to assume a knowledge of its workings on the part of the reader; you have to figure it out as it goes on. This is pretty common in fantasy actually, and wouldn't be so bad, except for the other problems with the narration makes it nearly impossible to really piece things together correctly. This was kind of frustrating; Wolfe clearly devoted a lot of mental energy to thinking out the world of Urth, and it is a fascinating place, but sadly does not come together in a satisfactory way.
After finishing both books in this volume, I have come to the conclusion that I don't care about the characters. I can't sympathize with Severian at all, because Severian has no emotional depth; he's a distant voice relating events. After finishing both books, I have also come to the conclusion that I have no idea what this book is about. I could relate the events to you, but the central fault of this book is that the events lack motivation. I would almost like to keep reading in order to understand what the heck was going on for the past 400 pages, but I've also come to the conclusion that nothing was going on besides sloppy narration (not necessarily sloppy writing).
In short, the author went with an inventive approach; he claims to merely be the "translator" of the work and that Severian is the "real" author, transcribing his memoirs of how he came to where he is by the end of the series. This necessarily lead to a lot of errors in continuity, plot, description, motivation, etc. I think those elements have a reason for existing that is not bad writing, and are rather a sign of good wriitng. It's "supposed" to be that way. However, those elements make this very difficult to follow, and while they may be suggestive of deeper brilliance of the author, do not necessarily make for an interesting or enjoyable read.
If you can accept this story-telling convention for what it is and read the book through that lens, then you may enjoy this series. Otherwise, this may not be the book for you.
213 of 234 people found the following review helpful.
One of the great literary achievements of fantasy
By Jean-Francois Virey
Like thousands of teenagers, I came of age with *The Lord of the Rings*. The rather ugly Bakshi movie was the first one I went to see without my parents, and the novel was virtually the first one I ever read that was not a children's book, except for Jules Verne's *Mysterious Island*. Just like many Tolkien fans, I became a lifelong devotee of the fantasy genre, and explored the more promising of the other Middle-Earths, from Lankhmar to the Dark Shore, Lyonesse, Majipoor, Amber, Earthsea and the world of the Hyborean Age.
But of all the fantasy series I ever read, the only that ever compared to Tolkien's masterpiece in my opinion was Gene Wolfe's *New Urth* tetralogy. The others were fun, imaginative, full of action and adventure, but they either failed to maintain throughout the literary and spiritual power I had found in *The Lord of the Rings* or to equal the richness of its world-building.
Interestingly enough, however different Tolkien's and Wolfe's epics might be, they share two profound similarities. First, both were written by Catholics and infused with their author's faith. With Tolkien, all the trappings of religion are evacuated from the world itself while the story is saturated with religious symbolism. With Wolfe, on the contrary, Christianity is still very present but transformed, as if through layers and layers of rewriting, into a distant shadow of itself. There is only one God, Pancreator or Panjudicator ; an almost legendary «Conciliator» walked the earth eons ago and is still venerated by the order of the Pelerines ; and priests, rituals, sacred items and guilds abound, as in the Golden Age of Christianity.
The other similarity between the two sagas is the spiritual nature of their ultimate magical item. In *The Lord of the Rings*, the object is the ring itself, each successive use of which is a step on the path to damnation - conferring power on Earth in exchange for another fraction of the user's soul, as witnessed in the various states of spiritual decrepitude of those who have succumbed to the temptation. In *The Book of the New Sun*, the most powerful item is the Claw of the Conciliator - «the most valuable relic in existence», a gem that «performs miraculous cures... forgives injuries, raises the dead, draws new races of beings from the soil, purifies lust and so on. All the things [the Conciliator] is supposed to have done himself.»
In other words, Tolkien's ring is the Devil ; Wolfe's Claw is God : an interesting symmetry.
The texture of the two worlds, however, is very different. Middle Earth seems to be set in a distant past, barely threatened by the first premises of industrialization. Urth on the other hand is our own world millenia hence, a decaying planet waiting for a promised rebirth, frozen in some static medieval social order, incapable of producing any complex artefact except by magic, and borrowing fragments of more advanced technologies from its own past or from the mysterious hierodules, elusive offworlders who only have transactions with selected individuals on Urth and seem to be guiding the world's destiny in some occult fashion.
Tolkien was obviously not Wolfe's major influence. The world Severian, his first-person narrator, so entrancingly describes seems to be a mixture of Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Peake's Gormenghast, a labyrinthine urban world rather than an enchanted primeval setting, filled with Lovecraftian horrors and filtered through the literary sensibilities of an admirer of Jorge Luis Borges.
So if you know that you will not recapture the wonder of *The Lord of the Rings* by reading any of its countless rehashes, and are seeking for an original voice of comparable eloquence, the *New Sun* cycle is for you : open the gate to the necropolis, unsheathe *Terminus Est* and come drink the analeptic alzabo.
*Shadow and Claw* brings together in one volume the first two novels in the series, *The Shadow of the Torturer* and *The Claw of the Conciliator*. It is followed by *Sword and Citadel*, the conclusion of the original series, initially published in two volumes, and *Urth of the New Sun*, which I have not read yet. Wolfe further expanded the saga with the books of the Long Sun and Short Sun, comprising seven volumes so far. And readers who have fallen in love with his universe will also be interested in *The Castle of the Otter* (1983), a collection of essays he wrote on the *New Sun* cycle ; *Lexicon Urthus*, a New Sun encyclopedia ; and GURPS New Sun, the role playing game based on the series.
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