Book review: The Shadow of the Torturer

Thoughts on "The Shadow of the Torturer" (first half of the Book of the New Sun)

I'm reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series, widely hailed as Wolfe's best work. "A major work of twentieth-century American literature" and so on, as the NYT Book Review blurbed it on my copy. I've never read any Wolfe before, but was challenged by Mordicai's internet book club thing, in which he wanted to get as many people reading it this year as possible. Of course it took much longer to get around to reading this than I'd planned! But here are my thoughts on what I've read so far.

Before I discuss the book itself, quick background about myself as a reader of SF/fantasy. I approached this book looking for a good story, but also particularly curious about Gene Wolfe's treatment of women. I recall Mordicai talking up Wolfe's writing (in general, not from a feminist POV) around the same time that I was working my way through R. Scott Bakker's Prince of Nothing and Aspect-Emperor trilogies last year, on Kirk's recommendation. Bakker's writing is very compelling from a world-building perspective, but his treatment of women is just off-the-charts awful. I remember reading certain passages of Bakker and involuntarily squawking out loud in indignation to Kirk, about the further rapes and indignities perpetuated YET AGAIN on a female character, and he would say, "I know, I know!" And we would enjoy being outraged together. I was disgusted but the story was so intriguing that I couldn't put it down. Reading Bakker made me think more about the treatment of women in sf/fantasy novels, something I hadn't thought about in years, since I haven't read much of it since I was a teenager. Hopefully the fiction landscape has improved a bit since I was a kiddo, but I recall being intensely fond of a certain fantasy YA novel (wish I could now recall the title!) because it featured a female adventuring protagonist, with a sword and dragon-fighting and everything, and how disappointing it was that I didn't have any others like it. After a while you get sick of the virginal princess muse and the sexy vixen, and the many exhausted variations on those themes, all of which revolve around How Is This Person Useful To The Hero. You wish it was the girl, once in a while, who gets chosen by bloodline or prophecy for the epic destiny, and not just to bear someone's child, you know?

With that in mind, here's where Wolfe's story succeeds: the world he has built is fascinating, complete with plenty of linguistic fun and intricate visuals, and his narrator Severian, the journeyman torturer, is a very unique voice. However, I'll say that the story so far has drawn me in but not as deeply as I would like. The plot is largely a physical journey from point A to point B, with one lengthy detour. My complaint is that there was no real emotional journey that pulls you from A to B (although in Thecla's death there was a very emotional turning point immediately before he set out on his journey). During his detour, our narrator didn't seem to care about the end goal of his journey. It left me with many questions. As an editor, I would have sent Wolfe back to at least insert a passage or two referring to Severian's mental process on this. It was a gaping hole.

Lack of a clear connection with Severian's mental process might have something to do with his Asperger's (?) tendencies, since he forgets nothing but reveals selectively, but as a reader I kept questioning why the narrative was just moving from place to place -- eventually it seemed that Wolfe was more interested in his (beautiful, intriguing) set pieces (like the wonderful Botanic Gardens) than he was in investing his characters with desires. Again, this could be more about the narrator's particular personality (rather distanced from his own emotions), but I'm always a little skeptical when an author creates the perfect setting in which his weaknesses (as an author) are obscured. A great author can do this and make it invisible; I don't think Wolfe quite succeeded here. All action appeared externally motivated.

I'm also skeptical, as a feminist reader, when authors continually "just happen" to set their stories in quasi-medieval hierarchies in which women are subservient (if not outright chattel), and most of the action thus conveniently takes place in the male sphere. If harkening back to less enlightened times is a setting that "just happens" to appeal to some authors, you'd think you'd see others who "just happen" to write about gender equity. Not so. I was happiest with "Shadow of the Torturer" in the early chapters, when all we really heard about women was through oblique references to the Witches, who were unseen but respected. There we also met Severian's ethereal muse Thecla, who teaches him philosophy while she is imprisoned with the torturers. But the Witches and Thecla quickly recede in memory as the novel proceeds. While some of Severian's actions (we meet a prostitute in Chapter 9, whom he threatens verbally and then physically before they have sex) could be charitably read as consistent with the emotional distance of a torturer, after a while it wears thin.

We spend more time in this book with Agia and then Dorcas, who are conveniently, mysteriously, immediately sexually available to the narrator. Their dresses are always falling off or getting pulled off (not by Severian) even though, swear to god, he is not usually ogling them. It's mysterious! Naked ladies just keep happening! Except okay, maybe later he says he really was ogling them. Agia, who was first presented as an adventurous character, the witty streetwise shopkeeper, becomes consumed with jealousy of Dorcas. And even though Agia is supposedly using Severian for her own ends, after she's failed she is still in love with him. The classic temptress, caught by her own wiles! Also, Severian occasionally unleashes startling acts of violence, like backhanding Agia off her feet, a moment which is played for dry humor.

Conveniently, both Agia and Dorcas stick to Severian like glue; though Agia has her own reason, as we find out later, Dorcas has a childlike devotion to Severian simply because he showed up. Dorcas is a blank slate, arriving with no memories, which is convenient since we'll need her on our journey for the sexing and also the occasional philosophical pillow-talk. While her love is "love" it is also obligation, in the sense that she needs his protection, because of her amnesia and because she's a woman in a predatory society.

To recall Bakker: even when I was disgusted by the constant disdain for women (both intellectually and sexually), there were occasional chapters in the voice of a female character. I felt a certain fondness for Bakker's female characters, whose emotional lives were given depth and complexity, even against the context of constant rape, abject subservience and humiliation. I don't mean to imply that Wolfe is "not that bad" in comparison; if anything, Wolfe was writing from 1980 and Bakker from 2008, which is its own indictment. Wolfe's treatment of women is nowhere near as horrific as Bakker's. But despite Bakker's horrifying tendencies, the characters and plot construction were far stronger. Wolfe, by comparison, has created one very strong character in Severian, but has largely failed to sustain that promise with other interesting characters. And unlike, say, Tolkein, who kept women far enough from the storyline that you have very little occasion to wonder about them, with Wolfe the women are always drawing near, and they seem less and less real because of it. Perhaps I'll change my mind about as the story develops.

Furthermore, though Kirk assures me that the DND structure fades away after a while, right now I am very tired of it. Classic DND/adventuring structure, which bores me nauseous, always starts with 1) our hero who is 2) given his weapon and 3) sent on a journey where he 4) joins with a small company or occasional companion and 5) pursues his quest and 6) maybe some side quests. This is presented with very little variation in many RPG video games, I don't mean to confine it to the DND genre; I think of it as springing from DND because of how it managed to franchise what is at its essence a useful storytelling convention. Perhaps Wolfe's writing suffers because in 1980 he managed to prefigure what a video game RPG would be like, where you have one main character in charge of all the decisions and the supporting players, who are on your side but don't have any will of their own. It's hard to tell here whether this tiredness is a flaw of the writing or of the fact that this trope has since been done to death.


Onward to "The Claw of the Conciliator"! I realize my impressions here are preliminary, after part one of four, but I wanted to record my thoughts because right now the issue of (lack of) plot complexity and the flimsy female characters are such a strong part of how I'm relating to the story. Although I've focused on Wolfe's problematic aspects here, I also want to emphasize that his writing is really on another plane from other authors. The linguistic fun I mentioned earlier (cleverly glossed in the appendix as an artifact of the "translation" from a future language not yet invented) is not just your average fantasy author making up words -- there is clear intellect and thought and just plain good writing at work. There are surprising reveals of emotion and charged scenes that are rendered with subtlety and finesse. I didn't find myself mentally re-writing awkward sentences when I read, which often happens with other authors. Wolfe's writing is very writerly, in that sense, even when the underpinnings of plot and character don't always rise to the occasion.