Like Durrell, Wolfe is a polymath, with a huge vocabulary: the conceit of the book is, as we learn in the Appendix, that he has translated a book “originally composed in a tongue that has not yet achieved existence.” The Book of the New Sun is (or was when I read it in the 1980s) one of my favorite tetralogies, which included Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet and Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. He eventually meets and supplants the ruler of Urth, the Autarch.Īll right, I’m not a fan of Joyce, but Wolfe’s prose is hypnotic, lyrical, and yet restrained enough not to be distracting. He then wanders the land encountering giants, anarchists, and members of religious cults.
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. A surreal bildungsroman, the book centers on a character named Severian. 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.
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