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The Book of the New Sun is unanimously acclaimed as Gene Wolfe's most remarkable work, hailed as "a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis" byPublishers Weekly. Sword & Citadelbrings together the final two books of the tetralogy in one volume: The Sword of the Lictor is the third volume in Wolfe's remarkable epic, chronicling the odyssey of the wandering pilgrim called Severian, driven by a powerful and unfathomable destiny, as he carries out a dark mission far from his home. The Citadel of the Autarch brings The Book of the New Sun to its harrowing conclusion, as Severian clashes in a final reckoning with the dread Autarch, fulfilling an ancient prophecy that will forever alter the realm known as Urth. "Brilliant . . . terrific . . . a fantasy so epic it beggars the mind. An extraordinary work of art!"-Philadelphia Inquirer "The Book of the New Sun establishes [Wolfe's] preeminence, pure and simple. . . . The Book of the New Sun contains elements of Spenserian allegory, Swiftian satire, Dickensian social consciousness and Wagnerian mythology. Wolfe creates a truly alien social order that the reader comes to experience from within . . . once into it, there is no stopping."--The New York Times Book Review… (more)
User reviews
This second half
Those revelations were interesting as were some of the scenes and philosophical asides. But just before most of those revelations, in the book's last fourth, I lost enough interest in the story to put the book aside awhile. It was Wolfe's intention to do something different with the cliches and templates of heroic fantasy of the Tolkien mold. And, to a certain extent, he did. Making our narrating hero an honest to goodness torturer is something different. Ultimately, though, the interruption of Severian's story for the nested tales and fables presented by other characters began to bore me. The novel's central mystery reminded me of the more concise and enjoyable ending to Charles L. Harness' The Paradox Men, and the ever increasing Christian imagery and allusions made me impatient too. They were enough to make me wish Wolfe had either never introduced them or gone all the way into truly allegorical territory a la a medieval romance. And, though a torturer, Severian turns out to fufill much the same cliched role as many a fantasy hero who are the saviors of their people.
Yes, Severian does reveal all he promised, but the revelations turn out to not be all that interesting.
I guess The Book of the New Sun is a classic. Do I see good things in it? Yes... there are dozens of wonderful ideas in this series.
Yet this book never grabbed me. While there are riveting concepts here, the writing is so utterly flat to me. I am honestly bewildered how so much wonderfulness can be so, well... boring.
Aside from a writing style I didn't exactly fall into, I struggled with the absence of plot. Like a roughly-connected series of DnD adventures featuring cool min/max characters, Severian just moves from adventure to adventure, gaining the occasional clue, an item here or there, and bits of experience. He gets progressively awesome with his sword (too much xp for each adventure!), and quickly seems immune to most human weaknesses (even when he's near death he's still pretty snappy). Bits of character development are still flat. A more emotive story-teller could have really put some zing in these books.
Still, it gets 3 stars. It was okay. I'm glad to move on, though.
The content of the plot is pretty standard epic. Severian travels through the wilderness of the world and into plenty of different environs, unbelievably managing to meet up with every interesting person on the planet again and again. Not to say this is a bad thing, a story without a monomyth would be a boring thing indeed. And in this area, I think this book succeeds more greatly than it's prequel (or prequels technically). The only thing that is lacks in content, in my opinion, is romance. He doesn't develop any further romances and the longings he has for past romances are all bittersweet ones. More connections to humanity would have continued to enhance my own connection to Severian, I believe.
The plot is also honest, which I've come to admire over time. People randomly die, there is often sadness, things are not wrapped up, and most tellingly, the main character will often exaggerate or lie. His speech and actions often deviate from his thought process greatly. This, especially combined with times when he's drugged or weary, leads to an interesting edge of not really being sure of what's going on. Like I said before, this is a double-edged sword. It's hard to really feel for a character who speaks in such a self-centered manner and relates his feelings and thoughts in such an indirect way.
Because of this, I don't think I can ever say that Gene Wolfe's stories (if they are all similar to this style) will be my favorite, but I admired the amazing control of language and style found in this novel. It is of a level of quality rarely found in modern-day science fiction and fantasy and to be treasured. This novel is in my list of only a couple books that really demand a re-read.
The Sword of the Lictor finds Severian arrived in Thrax performing his duties until he doesn’t kill someone for the city’s Archon and runs for the hills. He ultimately meets up and battles Dr. Talos and Baldanders in which his sword is destroyed. The Citadel of the Autarch finds Severian continuing his wanderings towards the war in the North when he stumbles upon it. Through his war experience he meets up with the Autarch and becomes his successor after eating him.
The opening volume of the book, Sword, is the nadir of the entire series as I came to dislike Severian as a character and Wolfe as a writer because of awful everything was. What made it worse was that the concluding volume of the book, Citadel, began well and gave a false promise about redeeming the entire series then Severian meet up with the Autarch and it quickly went into the abyss. Wolfe wrote five “in-world” stories, one in Sword and four in Citadel as part of a storytelling contest, which were all better than either one of these volumes.
I had high hopes for this classic series by Gene Wolfe, however Sword & Citadel concluded one of the most overrated series I’ve ever read.
The Sword of the Lictor (1.5/5)
The Citadel of the Autarch (2/5)
Was it my fault or what it the books'? Well, it's definitely at least partly the books' fault, I know that, but how much? I think it's at least partly mine; I read these in a pretty fragmented, jumpy way, and I don't think I got as much out of it as I could have with more sustained focus. As I said last time, they say you don't read Book of the New Sun, only reread it, so at some point in the future, I will give these books a second go and see if they click for me. But I think that will be awhile yet.