I’ve just gotten out of a week-long vacation (followed by a week-long illness), which is a great time to write a book review. While soaking up the sun on the beach or poolside, I had with me the second half of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, which is probably the most ridiculous beach read I could’ve brought, particularly because this guy was staring down any resort staff who approached me to offer a drink:
Toward the end of my time with Sword & Citadel, I also had a fever. The contents are more insane than the cover, which means I spent a week submerged in Wolfe’s immersive, desolate, bat shit world and only came out during a seven-hour delay for my flight home. I was reeling. Spending so long reading his intricate, dense prose meant I had a hard time constructing normal sentences for a bit (made worse because I’m learning French, which reads a lot like Wolfe’s prose).
I haven’t even started to talk about the story. Where do I even begin?
God’s horniest torturer is cast out of his guild and discovers a piece of Jesus Christ. On his way across the country to return the holy relic to its rightful owners, he gets tangled up in a rebellion, betrayals, and war, and he learns more about the nature of himself, his companions, and the dying world he lives on.
That summary undersells it, because I don’t want to give it away—and yet The Book of the New Sun feels impossible to spoil because there’s so much that’s so crazy, there will always be more surprises. Every single chapter had something nuts happening that kept me fascinated. Rereading it feels necessary (in fact, Severian, the narrator/protagonist, tells you to reread it at the end). I won’t even give away the main concept of the world, because realizing what it is was such a phenomenal feeling early on in the first book.
Wolfe’s work here is masterful. The book is, without a doubt, weird with how it approaches storytelling—the introduction in the second book even highlights this, and that it must be intentional because of how well-crafted the whole thing is. The women are depicted as slabs of meat for Severian to gnaw on, yet I can’t blame Wolfe for this when that’d usually put me off a story; we’re reading the account of a dude whose contact with women growing up was limited to torturing them or keeping them prisoner, and I get the sense many of the women Severian interacts with in the story have depth he cannot capture.
The book is a hard read on the prose-level. I consider myself pretty literate, and have maybe even strung a coherent sentence or two together in my time, but especially early on I had to pause and reread sections to grasp what, exactly, was going on. I’m still sure I missed a huge amount. People study this book and write theses on them; I’m nowhere near smart enough to tell you what’s going on in it. You may want to keep the WolfeWiki handy when trying to discern what the hell Severian is describing, and even then, half the entries are empty anyway.
The prose’s complexity makes the book that much more rewarding. It’s a puzzle as much as it is a story, and Wolfe builds up an incredible amount of atmosphere befitting a world as ancient and bizarre as his.
I’m going to be thinking about The Book of the New Sun for years. I loaned my brother the first half because I sold him on it saying much of what I did above, but once he’s done, I’m going to go in for a second read. I’m absolutely going to read Urth of the New Sun.
Obviously The Book of the New Sun is 5/5 stars. Heavily recommended if you’re an advanced reader, and if you’re comfortable with violence and other touchy subjects (our boy Severian’s a torturer, after all).
God damn, dude. I need to go lie down.
