The Shadow of the Torturer, Volume 1 of The Book of the New Sun, reprinted in Shadow & Claw, The First Half of the Book of the New Sun

1980, Orb, NY, 211 pages

Neil Graham has called this “the best SF novel of the last century.” This nebula and World Fantasy award-winning tetralogy, is, in my opinion, the best fiction written in the 20th Century.

The components of Wolfe’s masterpiece are present from the first page: a setting bizarre enough to qualify as dark fantasy; an oblique view of this strange ages old world from an innocent and ignorant point-of-view. This is accomplished in such low key terms that the astute reader soon understands that the character who appears to be dictating or writing his memoirs from a position of supreme authority, rose to the level of ‘Autarch’ from the lowly status of an orphan boy, amid a crumbling civilization lingering atop a vast bed of decaying technology.

The Shadow of the Torturer begins with a near death experience and its immediate aftermath; a drowning survived in such a way that the apprentice boy, Severian, acquires a special sense of himself that the author takes four volumes to explore through Severian’s reflections, but mostly through his interactions with others. The chapters of the book are not numbered, but titled, titled in a personal way that evokes fondness for the remembered, even when those remembered were enemies. The book has the feel of a memoir born of reflections had by one close to Death’s door.

The nature and specifics of the world of the Old Sun must be gleaned by the reader. One knows no more than Severian knows. He knows his city to be Nexus, greatest city of the world, at the center of the world, on the greatest river. We might deduce that Wolfe has crafted a world where Amazonia enjoys a temperate climate, and is the center of human activity on a dying planet. But Wolfe never intrudes, never tell us this, never speaks to us through any means other than his sensitively crafted characters.

Another master stroke of Wolfe’s was to make Severian a member of an ancient and reviled guild; making him an alien, and so presenting him in such a way as to share much of the reader’s ignorance of this world. I regard Gene Wolfe as the author that picked up where George Orwell and Tolkien left off, and excelled far beyond their stark vivid dreams. This is like Orwell’s 1984 retold by Tolkien.

Severian plays with other boys in a necropolis. When he encounters a grave robber of the highest cast, an ‘exultant’, and is questioned about his identity, he responds, “Severian, I am a torturer. Or rather, I am an apprentice of the torturers, Liege. Of the Order of the Seekers for Truth and Penitence.”

Severian goes on in his narrative capacity to remind the reader that ‘memory oppresses me’ and that those accepted into the Torturer’s Guild were drawn exclusively from the children of the guild’s ‘clients’. The ‘clients’, are not paying customers, but the victims given over to the guild for agony and death. Wolfe has wrought a bizarre yet believable world in which politically correct diction has become so deeply anchored in tradition that even the conscience of the most powerful man in the world is a slave to a vast, ancient and toxic mind-fuck construct.

The world of Severian is girded by wonders: a wall that is unthinkably high, a green forested moon that is maddeningly close [obviously the product of stupendous technologies], and is also suffused in madness, and decay; and plagued by superstitions that may in fact be based on some manmade horror rather than man’s mere metaphysical imagination. The most telling view of the world of Nexus being of unthinkably ancient vintage is when Severian visits a library, rarely used by men, but utilized by rats who scrawl their crude language on the ancient relics with feces.

For a taste of the narrative scope and eerily personal nature of the story I offer an example from page 10: “The necropolis has never seemed a city of death to me; I know its purple roses (which people think so hideous) shelter hundreds of small animals and birds. The executions I have seen performed and have performed myself so often are no more than a trade, a butchery of human beings who are for the most part less innocent and less useful than cattle. When I think of my own death, or the death of someone who was kind to me, or even of the death of the sun, the image that comes to mind is that of the nenuphar, with its glossy, pale leaves and azure flower. Under flower and leaves are black roots as fine and strong as hair, reaching down into the dark waters.”

If you have an interest in science-fiction, fantasy, horror, religion, or the often dystopian nature of large scale human societies, do yourself a favor and read Shadow of the Torturer. Wolfe is hard to find on book shelves, but he can still be had online. The Book of the New Sun is science-fiction literature as it might have been in an age beyond gee whiz gadgetry, yet before it was overtaken by romance writers and politically correct editors. Thanks to Gene Wolfe we can do more than wonder what kind of literature might have been produced in such a time.