The Shadow of the Torturer

I'd been meaning to read Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer for a long time. Wolfe's reputation is towering — Mieville is on the record as claiming that he's one of our greatest of living authors, regardless of genre — so the Gollancz ebook editions of The Book of the New Sun were just what was needed to overcome my inertia. And I'm glad I did: it's a brilliantly baroque masterpiece of dazzling language, sweeping scope and imagination, and clever narrative framing.

The narrative is formed from Severian's account of his own past, starting in early days as an apprentice torturer. He portrays his time in the Matachin Tower as good fun and firm friendships, punctuated by chance encounters with the great and powerful. But there are moments when the mask slips, when his behaviour seems to conflict with his intentions, when he stresses the infallibility of his memory only to fail to recognise someone or to admit that he can't quite recall what happened at particular moment. There are other moments, for example when Thecla is put to death using a particularly nasty torture device, where the comforting veil Severian has cast over life in the Guild of Torturers is rudely pulled aside.

After disgracing himself in the eyes of the guild, Severian is given a valuable sword by one of the masters and sent off to Thrax to be their local executioner. Travelling through the chaotic and confusing city of Nessus, he gets caught up in a series of almost picaresque adventures involving actors, femmes fatales, religious cults, and mysterious notes. The book ends with Severian and his new travelling under the city wall and finally leaving Nessus behind.

The scale of Wolfe's vision is impressive: Nessus feels like a living, breathing city, with every location, however surreal, so beautifully and truthfully drawn it's almost impossible to believe that it might not exist. The language too is lush and inventive — entirely in keeping with the conceit that the account has translated from another language — while Severian's slippery, self-serving first person account is delightfully untrustworthy.

A thoroughly modern classic.