Gene Wolfe's four-volume (plus coda) work The Book of the New Sun is widely regarded as one of the greatest works in science fiction, with a setting of great mystery and plot of enormous complexity. Since its publication in the 1980s, it has won many admirers, but few detailed examinations, and most of what's in print, such as the guides of Andre-Driussi and Borski, are amateurish and self-published. In ATTENDING DAEDALUS: Gene Wolfe, Artifice, and the Reader (Liverpool University Press, 2003), Peter Wright presents the first critique of academic quality on Wolfe's masterpiece.
ATTENDING DAEDALUS begins with a general introduction to Wolfe's body of writing, and two of his early stories are explored in depth, "Trip, Trap" and "In the House of Gingerbread". What I found especially enlightening here is that Wright presents the long series of critical reactions to Wolfe's work, even admitting that CASTLEVIEW is a problematic novel, and showing that OPERATION ARES was worth surpressing.
Wright's examination of the Urth cycle is based on two aspects of the work that have gained wide consensus through discussion on the Urth mailing list and other fora. The first is the deceitful religiosity of the book. While the Hierogrammates seem divine, the Claw a holy relic, and the deluge upon the coming of the New Sun sacrificial, humanity is really only being manipulated by the inhabitants of Yesod into furthering their own ends. God is, in the final analysis, nowhere in the picture. The second is the unreliability of Severian as narrator. Wolfe attended introductory courses in psychology in Texas and later in Ohio, and Wright conjectures that here Wolfe would have studied historic cases of perfect memory, providing a model for Severian's behaviour. Just as historic mnemonists, such as "S." studied by Aleksandr Romanovich Luria, were incapable of reflecting on their experiences, instead merely re-remembering events without analysis, so Severian stands between the reader and the true events of the work.
With these in mind, Wright's main thesis is that the Book of the New Sun is the epitome of a very complicated literary technique devised by Wolfe in which the reader is consistently challenged and baffled, and yet consistently given the necessary keys to unlocking the plot. Wolfe also consistently reminds the reader that what he is reading is fiction through a continual stream of metaliterary allusions and jibes. Wright's assertion that all of Wolfe's novels after the Book of the New Sun are meant to provide a series of elucidations for its mysteries is sure to be controversial, but is for me nonetheless quite convincing in many instances.
If you are a dedicated fan of Wolfe, having sought out everything he's ever put written and read the Urth cycle more times than you can remember, I would highly recommend ATTENDING DAEDALUS. With the intricacies of plotting revealed here, I appreciate Wolfe's skill more and more, and see him as one of the most significant English-language writers of our time. Don't heed what naysayers claim, this book is entirely dedicated to Wolfe's oeuvre and is very relevant to those investigating the Urth cycle.
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- Epi from WarwickshireReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 26, 2012
You asked me for a light for your candle, and I tried to give you the sun
