Sword and Citadel

Sword and Citadel by Gene Wolfe, 411 pages

Sword and Citadel collects the third and fourth novels in Gene Wolfe's landmark The Book of the New Sun series, the centerpiece of his Solar Cycle.  The Sword of the Lictor finds Severian plying his trade as a Torturer in the cliff city of Thrax, his life stable again for the first time since leaving the Citadel.  Needless to say, this cannot and does not last, and events - and his own conscience - conspire to force Severian to become a fugitive.  The Citadel of the Autarch begins where The Sword of the Lictor ends, and carries Severian into new, unknown lands and dangers as well as back to more familiar but, as it turns out, equally mysterious territory.

For all the high concepts and plot twists, Sword and Citadel is fairly straightforward - neither novel has the hallucinatory, disorienting quality of The Claw of the Conciliator.  Old characters and settings return, often in surprising forms, but the revelations never seem forced or arbitrary.  No character, however, surprises as much as Severian himself.  The Book of the New Sun, taken as a whole, is a masterful performance of literary sleight of hand which subverts, inverts, possibly perverts but just as possibly converts readers' expectations.