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.

Shadow and Claw

Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe, 413 pages

Shadow and Claw is an omnibus edition collecting the first two volumes of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series - The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator.  They are ostensibly manuscripts from the far future authored by one Severian, a journeyman of the Torturers' Guild disgraced after allowing a victim to kill herself before the prescribed torture was complete.  Exiled into a world he knows hardly better than we do, Severian comes into the possession of a gem called "The Claw of the Conciliator" with miraculous but unpredictable powers, which may or may not be tied to the fading of the Old Sun and the prophesied coming of the New.

Not only does Wolfe manage to create memorable characters, he creates characters who are capable of surprising the reader without seeming to be cheating.  Indeed, throughout the entire book Wolfe seems to be playing an elaborate game with the expectations of his readers.  The Book of the New Sun can be read and enjoyed as a combination of science fiction and fantasy in the tradition of Jack Vance, but it also contains an invitation to put together the pieces of a larger puzzle, the pieces of which have the ambiguous borders of memories, dreams, and symbols.

The Land Across

The Land Across by Gene Wolfe, 286 pages

 

As our narrator, a travel writer, is exploring a fictional Eastern European country, he is arrested and his passport taken.  He is imprisoned at the home of a local man, required to spend his nights there but free to wander during the day, much to the displeasure of his host and the pleasure of his host's seductive wife.  In short order, he encounters treasure hunters, a revolutionary group, the secret police, an occult conspiracy, and a man in black who may or may not be Dracula.

 

Although Wolfe is best known as a science fiction and fantasy author (Book of the New Sun), this comic thriller showcases his versatility as the protagonist blunders through a strange land of restless souls and murderous disembodied hands.  Alternately hilarious, confusing, and creepy, this book is certainly never boring.