The Flame Is Green

The Flame Is Green by RA Lafferty, 245 pages

In the middle of the nineteenth century, poor Irish fisherman Dana Coscuin is drafted into a revolution.  Not the revolution of the radicals who are really superficial, not the revolution of liberals who are really quite close-minded, not the red revolution which claims to be new but is as old as Adam, but the green revolution, which is older still and yet ever new.   Although he only knows one song, Dana sings his way into a company of fighters who dance across Europe, from the Carlist hills to 1848 Paris to partitioned Poland, wrestling with principalities and powers as well as flesh and blood.

The Flame Is Green is set in a reenchanted world.  The characters consistently intuit future events, although not always accurately, and perform feats that are physically impossible or seemingly inexplicable.  Everything is connected, and even the greatest surprises are accepted graciously.  The novel will not be to everyone's taste, but no one will mistake it for anything else.

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.

Past Master

Past Master by RA Lafferty, 191 pages

In the 26th century, the golden world of Astrobe is in crisis - but a strange sort of crisis which no one seems to understand.  Ever increasing numbers of citizens are abandoning well-regulated lives of luxury and ease in the glittering cities for brief, miserable lives of toil and tears in the slums of Cathead.  To save their utopia, the secret clique which imagines it really rules Astrobe turns to the man who wrote the book on utopia, sending a renegade pilot back in time to bring forward St Thomas More to be the next World President, the new King, the Past Master.

Lafferty writes with a New Wave style that throws off ideas liberally, but rarely stops to examine them or fit them into a consistent framework.  Here as elsewhere, this produces a certain sense of disorientation, a sort of fictional culture shock which, in this case, fits the plot, but may not be to the liking of all readers.  Despite being a short science fiction novel, Past Master is an epic story, and surprisingly deep.