Mass-market Monday | Gene Wolfe's The Shadow of the Torturer

By Biblioklept on August 26, 2024

The Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe. Timescape/Pocket Books (1981). No cover designer or artist credited. 262 pages.

While no cover artist is credited, Don Maitz is the artist for this edition of The Shadow of the Torturer, as well as for the other three books in Wolfe's Book of the New Sun tetralogy. Maitz is credited on the dust jackets of the original hardback first editions (Simon & Schuster) of the series.

The Book of the New Sun is absolutely astounding.

From Peter Bebergal's 2015 New Yorker profile on Wolfe, "Sci-Fi's Difficult Genius":

For science-fiction readers, "The Book of the New Sun" is roughly what "Ulysses" is to fans of the modern novel: far more people own a copy than have read it all the way through. A surreal bildungsroman, the book centers on a character named Severian. Trained as a torturer on the planet Urth, where torturers are a feared and powerful guild, Severian betrays his order by showing mercy, allowing a prisoner to kill herself rather than be subjected to his terrible ministrations. He then wanders the land encountering giants, anarchists, and members of religious cults. He eventually meets and supplants the ruler of Urth, the Autarch.

The four books that make up the series are sometimes vexing. A wise reader will keep a dictionary nearby, but it won't always prove useful. Though Wolfe relies merely on the strangeness of English—rather than creating a new language, like Elven or Klingon—he nonetheless dredges up some truly obscure words: cataphract, fuligin, metamynodon, cacogens. The setting appears medieval, but slowly we tease out that what is ancient to these characters was once our own possible future. A desert's sands are the glass of a great city, and the creaking steel walls that make up Severian's cell in the guild dormitory is likely an ancient spaceship. Reading "The Book of the New Sun" is dizzying; at times, you become convinced that you have cracked a riddle, and yet the answer fails to illuminate the rest of the story. Wolfe doesn't reveal the truth behind any of the central mysteries explicitly, but lets them carry the narrative along. At first, one hopes that they will eventually be resolved. Ultimately, they become less important than Severian's quest for his own truth.