Winston Graham's WARLEGGAN: A NOVEL OF CORNWALL

Lordy, I do love me some tempestuous, romantic historical fiction now and then, and it doesn't get much more tempestuous, romantic or historical than Winston Graham's wonderful Poldark novels, of which Warleggan is the fourth. And possibly the most tempestuous, if not the most romantic.

Though it's quite the soap opera, is Warleggan. The title, of course, referring to the family name of those dastardly anti-Poldarks, the gotten-up and unscrupulous nouveau riche Warleggans, whose scion, George, grew up with the cousins Poldark but never quite gained their acceptance because his family was so very, very declasse.

But here he is, getting a novel named for him! Do the Poldarks finally admit him to their charmed-not-really-charmed circle? Do they finally see that he's not the villain of their tale but merely a different kind of hero? Does he get a happy ending?

Well. Sort of. Yes and no. Um.

This most soap-operatic yet of Graham's wonderful Novels of Cornwall doesn't feature George Warleggan all that much (though certainly more than did the prior novel, Jeremy Poldark, feature that boy, who spent almost all of that book in his mommy's tummy). He looms over events somewhat, yes, and it is certainly a carefully executed action of his that is the most important development in the overall Poldark plot, but...

But it is the affairs of yet another pair of star-crossed lovers that hog most of the reader's attention. Lovers and the Poldark who abets them, but this time it is mostly Ross playing cupid rather than Demelza, for one of the lovers is his friend Dr. Dwight Enys (he of the prior tragic live affair in assign earlier novel).

Meanwhile, Ross and Demelza are not themselves the picture of wedded bliss, because Ross's first love, Elizabeth, who jilted him while he was away in America getting his rakish facial scar, is still a big part of their lives. She jilted Ross to marry his cousin Francis, meaning she is both family and neighbor, and then [REDACTED TRAGEDY] strikes and suddenly she becomes an even bigger problem...

And then there is Warleggan. Remember Warleggan? This is a book named for Warleggan. When I watched the original BBC adaptation as a  tween, I gnashed my teeth at him, I bit my thumb at him, I spit at the mention of his name. As an adult better attuned to problems of class and economics, though, I kind of feel for him. His family's success has thrown him into social circles that his family's background has not prepared him to navigate well. He has decent enough instincts for how to behave, has learned what fork to use and all that rot, but he is not to the classy (and somewhat impoverished but still one has FORBEARS) manor born. If the cousins Poldark had been nicer to him as young'uns they might all have been friends, or at least business partners. But nope.

But so, can we blame him for seizing the opportunity he does? Sure, he's kind of a jerk about it, but he has feelings, too, and he didn't just one day decide a chip on his shoulder would set off his slightly coarse good looks, right?

And anyway, he might not entirely be getting what he wants. Hur hur hur. He might only have given his NAME to his son, IYKWIM.

The first four Poldark books are often regarded as a quartet, and to a degree things are decently enough rapped up here, but I find there are eight more "novels of Cornwall", some yet with Poldark in the title, so I'll keep on reading them.

And yes, I had a cheeky peek at the first episode of the new adaptation, but promised my mom I'd wait and watch the rest with her when it airs on PBS here in the states later this year. I see it's got a more lavish budget than the original, and lots more scenery pork, but I don't find the cast to be any improvement on Robin Ellis, Angharad Rees et al. But they might grow on me, these new actors, and I know Ellis has a small part in NuPoldark. We shall see.

Howard of Warwick's THE HERETICS OF DE'ATH

You may recall last fall when my book-crazy mother, fan of all things with even a hint of medieval mystery fiction, turned me on to Howard of Warwick and his truly side-splitting historical farce, The Domesday Book, No Not That One. I was doubled over, I was in tears, I was gasping for air. I took many months to recover from teh funneh.

Then I finally attempted another of Mr. Of Warwick's books, and while I did not have quite the same life-threatening experiences, I did have a pretty good time getting to know one Brother Hermitage, who made a cameo appearance in Domesday but whose true character awaited discovery.

His true character being sort of an idiot savant Brother William of Baskerville, or a very sheltered Sherlock Holmes. And yes, he has an Adso/Watson of sorts in the redoubtable person of one Wat the Weaver, purveyor of pornographic tapestries, in other words, a perfect wordly foil to the decidedly unworldly Hermitage.*

In this first novel of his chronicles, Hermitage finds himself in a situation somewhat similar to that which made Brother William famous**, namely, a murder in a monastery.***Or at least a death, one which seems perfectly natural at first, but the innocent-seeming narrative of which is quickly seized on by powers greater than Hermitage as a way to further decidedly un-innocent ends.

How great those powers are, what is their scheme, and how it all relates to an exceedingly obscure and farcically pointless theological argument (did Jesus get sand in his shoes while enduring his 40 days in the wilderness?) (No, really, that's the point of contention) is kept secret until the denouement, when an entire novel's worth of bizarre and maddening tension is released as rapidly -- and perhaps with much the same sound -- as a balloon that has been inflated, but not tied off, flies around a room.

Or, in other words, this time around, the belly laughs are saved up for a big gasping mess at the end, like, say, verbs in a German sentence. As described by my mom, anyway.****

Speaking of the ending, it also sets up the most ridiculous conspiracy theory, maybe ever, concerning a certain very famous event in English history.

Now, if I can just figure out what a Dingle is. It can't be what my inner twelve-year-old thinks it is.

Great stuff. My compliments to the scribe.

*Whose name, we learn, was bestowed on him early in his monastic career, when his fellow monks realized his nature as a big ol' dork even by monk standards, and suggested strongly the he consider a life of contemplative solitude. And silence.

**I'm talking about Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which every reasonably civilized person should at least watch in cinema form if they're not up to reading its very dense and allusive and erudite pages. But you'd be cheating yourself, however wonderful the film is (which is very).

***An edifice which rejoices in the name of De'Ath's Dingle. Um.

****I don't know much German.

Paul Elard Cooley's THE BLACK: ARRIVAL

I enjoyed the hell out of my good friend* Paul Elard Cooley's The Black: A Deep Sea Tale, his debut in the aquatic horror/adventure genre, and so my expectations for this sidequel, in which a group of scientists on the mainland must grapple with the same creature that terrorized the oil rig in the first book, were high.

Readers of that earlier book will already know what to expect here. Cooley has nailed the technique of bogging the reader down in technical/scientific minutiae to heighten the tension of what we all know is coming, which means that, yes, the first third or so of the narrative is a bit of a slow burn as we get to know a new set of characters and their hopeful, happy little world before havoc is wrought upon it and them, and the novel explodes into an action-packed, yet claustrophobic, thrill-ride.

Again, some readers might get a bit impatient with this, if they are not immediately captivated by the relative novelty of the setting. I was captivated; the behind-the-scenes look at an industry on which we all depend, I found, is intrinsically interesting as well as providing the perfect backdrop for what is at bottom an animal vengeance tale.

We don't learn a whole lot more about the monster, except perhaps that it is a bit more capable than it had appeared in the first book. No one gets much chance to study it while it chases brilliant scientists around a quarantined facility. Perhaps more knowledge is forthcoming in the third novel, but perhaps not: knowledge can blunt the edge of fear, and stories like this work best when fear is sharp and vicious.

As it is, we do encounter a sort of Weeping Angels diminution here, as the monster takes rather a familiar form for scenes of open pursuit that, while tense and adrenaline-eliciting, are not as creepy as the slower and more insidious flow of the entity that characterized our first encounter with it. A certain type of reader (and I am that type) might get distracted by questions of how an entity that spent untold eons as a puddle of goo under incredible pressure at the bottom of the ocean knew how to [REDACTED], for instance.

Fortunately, though, the characters are real enough, sympathetic enough, and resourceful enough to distract from such distractions, to pull the reader back into caring about their immediate and horrible predicament. Time to wonder about that stuff later. We need to ESCAPE!!!!

And, too, as with the first novel, which hinted obliquely at the parallel horrors unfolding in this one, The Black: Arrival hints obliquely at parallel horrors occurring elsewhere in the screwed, screwed city of Houston that we'll no doubt observe in the next book. Oil: The Revenge has not yet spent its fury. And Cooley, as he always proclaims, does not believe in happy endings.

I can't freaking wait!

*Once again, since Cooley is my friend, I do feel I should issue a bias alert, but just in case you think my judgment of this work clouded, you can head on over to Paul's site and listen to the audio version of this or his earlier book for free.

Hilary Mantel's WOLF HALL

For a book that I originally rage-quit after only a chapter or so back when it was first published, Wolf Hall has proven to be pretty much exactly the kind of historical fiction I have most wanted in my life, now that I know the "secret" of its lack of dialog tags and highly unorthodox pronounery. That secret being that about 98% of the time, the "he" and "him" pronouns, regardless of the context clues surrounding them, are meant to refer always and only to Thomas Cromwell, blacksmith's son, sometime soldier of fortune, lawyer and courtier to King Henry the Overrated, I mean Eighth, of England.

And yes, of course, it was the BBC TV adaptation that prompted me to give the book another chance, because there is always so much that is interesting and amusing that gets glossed over when cutting things down to a mass-consumption-and-camera-friendly version of a novel. And boy, is there.

Ah, Thomas Cromwell. His very story gives lie to the whole notion of the divine right of kings, of their complete and utter supremacy, of their paramount importance. Junker Heinrich (as Martin Luther referred to Henry VIII) could still order one's head struck off, but it wasn't too hard to avoid that, really, unless, of course, you were married to him and served as extremely public proof that he mostly shot X chromosomes when he didn't shoot blanks, as it were. The others he had beheaded were those who were stubborn about imaginary sky daddy doctrine and/or swore they owed obedience to a different divinely ordained figurehead over in Rome. Smart people were flexible on these points, and kept their heads while they went about the business of actually running the country (well, until they picked the wrong replacement wife, but Cromwell's ultimate fate does not come to bear on this particular novel's narrative), as Cromwell demonstrates mid-narrative in an interview with the deeply silly Henry Percy, who would keep insisting that Henry couldn't marry Anne Boleyn because Anne was already Percy's wife:

How can he explain to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift West and are burned up in the Sun. Not from castle walls, but from counting houses, not by the call of the bugle but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot.

In other words, this is the beginning of the end of the rule of inherited authority. The future is for those who work both hard and smart, rather than those who happen to have lucked into the correct noble surname and thus don't work at all unless some peasants or heretics  need killed.

Speaking of killing heretics, OMG, Thomas More. As a girl raised on great old films like A Man for all Seasons, I was more than a bit shocked at his portrayal here; he's pretty much the villain of the piece (but of course, for that matter, Cromwell is usually the villain-or-something-like-one in tales of this period, no?). Seen from Cromwell's perspective, he is a snob, a heartless and often cruel enforcer of orthodoxy, and, most importantly, a man who feels perfectly justified in breaking promises to, lying to, and treatng as sub-human anyone he deems a heretic. Which is pretty much everybody who goes along with Henry VIII's party's program to install Queen 2.0.

Cromwell-the-character, meanwhile, remains, if not exactly compassionate, at least passionate about sparing More a degree of suffering that seems wholly unnecessary. One tiny, practical compromise, saying "some words" and More could go home to a family that loves him, a comfortable estate, a good life overall. More had to earn these things just as Cromwell had to; why doesn't he value them as Cromwell does?

For we see in this portrayal that Cromwell certainly did. Under different circumstances -- his daughters' survival into adulthood, say, which might have filled his house with grandchildren -- he might not have been as willing to rise quite so high as he did? Certainly there is a sort of turning point late in the novel, when the last of his wards/foster children marries a household staffer of his and moves out of Cromwell's house, taking the staffers's children with him, that Cromwell seems very like an empty nester. Might as well become king in all but name...

Ah, but then there are the Boleyns, of course: Sir Thomas, scheming and smooth; George, touchy and annoyed; Mary, pimped out to royalty until she's had enough (really, Mary is a fascinating character here, a survivor who shields herself with amusement and has fun sharing her strategies with Cromwell); Anne, Queen 2.0 whose dark eyes Cromwell imagines as clacking like beads on an abacus. They've a mind to ruling, too, and outnumber him. Fortunately for him, too much of their power rests on Anne's uterus (though, really, it's on Henry's testicles, no?).

Cromwell will have to work much harder than any Boleyn to get himself beheaded. Even harder than More, whose execution ends this first novel (I believe Anne's ends the second, so surely Cromwell's will end the coming third).

And meanwhile, waiting in the wings, is Jane Seymour, of Wolf Hall, a place for which this novel is named but at which no action takes place; we are meant merely, I think, to feel it as a looming presence only. Queen 3.0 is ready.

Monarchy, man...

*Never mind, for now, that these guys turned out to be big jerks, too. Just let me enjoy this moment, mmkay?

SUNS SUNS SUNS: The Claw of the Conciliator 11-15

Back in Chapter 10, Jonas did a pretty good job of summing up what Severian thinks his goals are at this point in the story, even as he mocks how some of them just might cancel each other out:

You want to serve Vodalus, and go to Thrax and begin a new life in exile, and to wipe out the stain you say you have made on the honor of your guild -- though I confess I don't understand how such a thing can be stained -- and to find the woman called Dorcas, and to make peace with the woman called Agia while returning something we both know of to the women called Pelerines.

 Can Severian do any of this, at this point, let alone all of this? We'll see. But first he has a Very Special Meal to eat, and it's even ickier, and more life-changing, than we've been led so far to anticipate, for the "analeptic" (stimulant) quality of the alzabo is just the first course of this bizarre "meal."

Recall that Severian first met Vodalus and Thea in the midst of a grave-robbing. Didn't you wonder what they were going to do with the corpse? Now we're going to find out. Not, of course, with the corpse that they were stealing back then. Oh no. There is a much more important corpse out there now. And it's been roasted for increased edibility, but then dressed and posed so artfully that for a second, Severian seems to think that maybe Agia's note didn't lie, because THE MAIN COURSE IS THECLA!

So now Severian has something in common with this little lady. We thought she liked eating Eddie...

Maybe, though, Columbia would have been less upset if she'd gained the sort-of-benefit that Severian does here, because alzabo+Thecla+Severian's freakish Marilu-Henner memory = Thecla's entire experience, even a sort of print of her mind, now permanently shares Severian's skull with Severian.* Just the way we'll learn that someone else does much later on, for Vodalus & co. are not the only ones who exploit the strange properties of the alzabo. But so, no wonder Severian is crazy, and some of his narrative flights of memory seem so discombobulated; he's recording his story years later, and his skull is not entirely his own. Sometimes Thecla cuts in with her own memories. And perhaps someone else has a say in things, too. Dude. And so again, when he says that it's really Thecla's education that makes him capable of holding his own amongst the cultured, it literally is: what she learned and how she learned it, in minute biographical detail, is how Severian knows what the Snape people are talking about.**

But here's the thing: many people are sharing this experience, though for everyone else memories of it will fade naturally. For a time, though, all these people in Vodalus' inner circle are now going to experience all of Thecla's life in some degree. Including her time in the Matachin Tower of the Torturers' Guild. Including all the times she had sex with Severian. Well, I'd feel a little weird about that, were I Severian, is all I'm saying. Some of the guardsmen who'd escorted Severian and Jonas to this gathering were kind of ickily excited about the Sharing (and it seemed to make a difference to them that their, uh, meal, this time was a pretty Exultant woman). So, um, eww.

But anyway! We also finally learn about the mission Vodalus has in mind for Severian: go to the House Absolute -- it turns out that Dr. Talos' theatrical troupe has been invited, so he and Jonas have the perfect excuse to be there -- and pass on a message (in the form of a small piece of steel, vaguely knifelike, of the kind you strike a piece of flint against to get a spark and start a fire) to whoever gives the code phrase "the pelagic argosy sights land"; and if a return message is then given, Severian can pass it on to anyone who tells him "I am from the quercine penetralia."

So, I think at least the first code phrase is referring to the megatherians -- a pelagic argosy being, basically, a flotilla near the shore? Really near the shore if it's sighting land? But as for the "quercine penetralia"... um, quercine basically means "oak" or "oaken" and "penetralia" refers to interior or private parts but NOT ONLY IN THE SEXYTIMES SENSE YOU GUYS I've seen the word used in the context of describing, say, rooms deep inside a house. So, I'm from the heart of the oak? But oh wait, that was the name of a naval song in Nelson's navy! They played it on Jack Aubrey's ships sometimes in Patrick O'Brian's novels. So that, too, is rather an oceanic or nautical thing to say. So, yep, it's all about the megatherians. Or at least those among them or their lackeys who "wait until man is purified again, ready to join with them in the conquest of the universe."

Next morning, Severian and Jonas(who reveals he didn't eat any Thecla, actually doesn't really eat much at all [because he's most likely a cyborg, about which more some other time]) wake to find everybody's gone, but they've been left with some very nice horses to speed them on their way to Autarchland. Easy peasy, lemon -- what the hell is that? Oh look, we're back in Clark Ashton Smith territory again, as ATTACK OF THE WEIRD BLACK DRAPY THINGS THAT SUCK HEAT. Which Severian quickly learns are a mistake to slice up with his sword because that just makes more of them. Fortunately, as bravely bold Sir Robin Severian runs away, he comes upon an uhlan (basically, a lancer, except this is a POWER LANCE THAT SHOOTS BLUE BOLTS OF POWER, YO) and basically maneuvers the "Notules" into attacking the uhlan instead. Of course the uhlan fights back, but of course his BLUE BOLTS OF POWER, YO just give the things more energy and they finally overwhelm the poor sap and GET SUCKED UP INTO HIS MOUTH AND NOSTRILS.

So the uhlan seems to be basically dead, but neither Severian nor Jonas seem particularly concerned about that. Jonas, it turns out, has encountered these things before and knows that the only way to really deal with them is to contain them in something air-tight. So he draws each of them out of the guy's head and stashes them in the guy's little herb box and BOOM, they're done.

But now Severian is feeling a bit guilty about sic'ing the notules on a probably-innocent stranger, and gets an idea. While Jonas gets the horses, he whips out the Claw and puts it on the uhlan's head for a moment and maybe it brings him back to life? But then Jonas just thinks he wasn't quite dead? But never mind, because Hethor is here! And he's brought us a new friend, Beuzec!****

Why are you looking at me like that?

I haven't talked much about Hethor in these posts yet, but it's not because he's not an interesting guy. I'm just trying for SOMETHING like brevity here. Hee. Anyway, Hethor, whom we last saw whining over the loss of his sex doll, has declared himself Severian's "slave" and has been following him doggishly since forever and will turn out to have been the author, by mysterious means, of the notules, as well as many other weird and inimical creatures Severian encounters in his travels. Now, Robert "Solar Labyrinth" Borski has a whole thing about Hethor and maybe Beuzec too being shapeshifters (and thus aliens?) as the best explanation for how Hethor manages to cart his menagerie of monsters around, but as far as I can guess, Hethor is named for St. Ethor (aka Hethor), a Celtic saint and martyr who was killed with 89 other monks in a Viking raid. And as for Beuzec, Beuzec is an alternate name for another Celtic saint, Saint Budoc, who was supposedly born in a cask in which his mother had been sealed by her jealous stepmother ("beuzi" being the Breton word for "drowned"), who no sooner had been born than was reassuring his terrified mother that "we have nothing to fear. God is with us, we are near the end of our voyage, and the time of consolation God promised us by his angel is at hand." He grew up to be a great churchman, whose saintly relics if sworn on guaranteed punishment to those who broke their oaths. But so that kind of blows Borski's shapeshifter thing by his own logic, because only humans from Urth get saints' names in BotNS?

Anyway, it still doesn't preclude Hethor's being some kind of beastmaster, possibly one with access to the same weird mirror technology we learned about in the story of Father Inire and the fish.

But enough about Hethor and Beuzic for now, because suddenly all attention is on a flash of white in the distance and it's like H&B aren't even there anymore. And off goes Severian on a wild walking statue chase.

Walking statues? Yes. Four times life-size and inhumanly beautiful and walking around what is rapidly becoming a garden as they progress. Maybe we're closer to the House Absolute than we think, yes? Yes. Because suddenly praetorians! In impossibly shiny and reflective armor that makes them very hard to see, so perfectly does it mirror their surroundings! And they've arrested Severian and Jonas and, presumably, Hethor and Beuzic! And it turns out that they've all been on/in the House Absolute for quite a while now, because the House Absolute's roof is covered in soil and stone and flowers and paths and walking statuary! Because the House Absolute is underground! As Thecla already kind of knew, come to mention it, but Severian is still getting acquainted with how the whole Head-Thecla thing works.***

But soon it's 100% Thecla memory as Severian works out where they've been brought: the infamous Antechamber, where we soon learn generations of prisoners have lived and died waiting for an audience with the Autarch to explain away their crimes. Or their ancestors' crimes? It's all very weird and terrifying and monstrously unfair. Jonas winds up shanghai'd into lengthy conversation with a lot of people who have never been outside of the Antechamber, whose parents never got out, etc etc until they have a lot of weird funny ideas of what the outside world is like, on the order of believing that the people who carry sugar are armed with swords to defend it****, because the whole concept of "bees" got lost in a big game of generational Chinese Whispers.

Meanwhile, Severian has been pulled aside by two old people, Lomer and Nicarete (no, not the stop smoking aid, but rather a lady whom our friend Robert Borski has convinced me just might be the mother of Thea [Vodalus' girlfriend] and Thecla, the latter being Nicarete's-or-someone's illegitimate daughter by the Autarch). Lomer seems to be a garden variety offender, but Nicarete, Nicarete is in the Antechamber voluntarily! She claims it is in order to help humanity earn the forgiveness of all the pissed-off-aliens who sent the megatherians by way of making it hard for society to forget that there are generations of people trapped here in the Antechamber. But she appears to have grown old there, so, how's that working, huh?*****

And then we come to Jonas' big freak out. What he has learned from the habitual prisoners is bothering him in lots of ways, right into a big ol' existential crisis. He reveals some things. Like that the group of prisoners he was talking to all claim to be descended from a guy named Kim Lee Soong, a name that seems to have considerable meaning for Jonas because it might just have been his original name when he was 100% organic human, centuries ago, and was maybe part of an early wave of space colonists from, not Urth, but Earth (a time and place when Kim Lee Soong "would have been a very common kind of name")...

BUT, no time to ponder that now, though, because lights out! And they really mean it. It's pitch black in there at night. Except when it isn't. Except when it's lit up by brilliant flashes of green light, which are pretty much our clues that there is danger, not only because they are unusual, but also because they are a good sign that our friend the Green Man is making another time-tripping attempt to pay off his debt to Severian by saving his life! Chaos ensues! Severian hears "the clear laughter of a young woman: then it was gone."

And... scene. More or less.

*A crowded, crowded place is Severian's skull. But I'm trying not to be entirely spoilery here. But it's a crowded, crowded place.

**And but so take that, Severian sister-hunters. I submit that the puzzle of Severian's missing sister (eyeroll) that so many are on about is entirely beside the point. Severian has one woman that he is closer to than any other (and yes, Robert Borski, she meets the creep-o criterion for female relatives in that he has boned her), and that is Thecla, living in his head. She may be dead, but she has a more intimate connection to Severian than anyone could (well, except for [REDACTED FOR NOW]). And it is perhaps this, the ultimate in highly developed feminine sides, that gives Severian the edge in terms of New Sun candidacy. That also-ran, Appian [HEE], only got a feminine side after he was gelded for his failure. Har. I am the funniest Gene Wolfe blogger.

***For me, it's impossible not to imagine this relationship as being pretty much exactly like Head-Six on Battlestar Galactica. And yeah, I could picture James Callis playing Severian, come to think of it. Hmm.

****There is probably something very clever to be said tying this remark to the former life of the current-within-this-part-of-the-narrative Autarch, Appian, who apparently started palace life as a honey steward, but it's not coming to me now. Nor is the clever remark about the Antechamber being a microcosmic hologram of Book of the Long Sun's generational spaceship full of people who don't remember that the artificial intelligences that govern the ship are artificial intelligences governing a ship but rather think they are gods who control a small hollow earth lit by a really gigantic fluorescent tube suspended in the middle, which they call the Long Sun. Insert your own here.

*****Nicarete's namesake saint is pretty interesting, too, by the way. An early (5th century) Christian, she was a student of theology and became a physician and follower of St. John Crysostom, whom she once cured of a stomach problem. I don't know for sure how transgressive it was then for a woman to be involved in this kind of stuff, but it kind of fits in with our character's self-given mission to make sure the poor dwellers of the Antechamber aren't forgotten, eh?

SUNS, SUNS, SUNS - Claw of the Conciliator, 6-10

So how's that for a lacuna, my pups? A little over two years since I left Severian in the dark at the end of Chapter 5. I'm not going to waste time with excuses. Stuff. Reasons. Whatever. Anyway, this post is continuing a project I started a few years ago, originally as a read-along with friends, taking a very close look at Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle. To see the older posts, click here and start reading from the bottom.

But so, Severian has gone off on a wild Thecla chase and wound up blundering into Clark Ashton Smith territory, which he is just starting to realize as Chapter 6 opens. He's scaled a Mt. Rushmore-like cliff (as we'll learn later, whole mountain ranges on Urth have been sculpted into the likenesses of Autarchs past, and I like to imagine that by Severian's very late day, pretty much every mountain or rock that's still standing above water has been carved into a monument to some jerk or other. It's the way far future, yo. The continents aren't even the same. Etc. But really it's just me being a little gleeful about that image of water falling out of a high cave mouth "like saliva from the lips of a petrified titan". But he's going to see some petrified titan lips soon enough, anyway, so why not now.), entered a cave through which a stream is flowing, and is heading upstream into the dark. D'oh.

Just in case his adventure somehow actually does involve Thecla, he calls out her name a few times. She, uh, does not answer.

But instead, clouds of glowing mist "of an impure yellowish green" appear. First one, then a few, then many. He never encounters this mist, though, because it isn't there. There is some truly bravura scene and mood setting at work here that I don't want to spoil for first time readers, so I'm just going to jump ahead to the serious Klarkashtoniana -

ATTACK OF THE BIOLUMINESCENT MAN-APES who, Severian realizes, are still pretty much human and definitely as sentient and self-aware as he himself is... and they are fully aware of their condition: "As the old are imprisoned in rotting bodies, as women are locked in weak bodies that make them prey for the filthy desires of thousands*, so these men were wrapped in the guise of lurid apes, and knew it." But lest you think this is going to be some kind of compassionate reaching-across-the-species-gap kind of feel good moment, one of the man-apes comes at Severian with a mace made out of a thighbone, another comes up from behind him, and it is ON.

Of course Severian slices up all kinds of man-ape ass, and the carnage only stops when he falls over and the Claw of the Conciliator falls out of his boot-top (he's taken to storing it there since so many people seem to be so good at sneaking things out of his murse), and it's glowing like a freaking Silmaril. It reveals what Severian has been suspecting in the lead-up to and during the fight, namely that this mine he's touring contains a big buried city** full of stacked silver ingots, and that the man-apes are holding off their attack, not out of fear, but out of reverence for the Claw. Whether they are doctrinaire believers in the Conciliator/New Sun theology is never examined, but my guess is that they are, they recognize the Claw, and who knows, may even in some fashion recognize Severian.

Meanwhile, in the azure light of the claw, he kind of recognizes them, too:

...their faces were the faces of human beings. When I saw them thus, I knew of the eons of struggles in the dark from which their fangs and saucer eyes and flap ears had come to be. We, so the mages say, were apes once... Old men return to childish ways when at last the years becloud their minds. May it not be that mankind will return (as an old man does) to the decayed image of what he once was, if at last the old sun dies and we are left scuffling over bones in the dark? I saw our future -- one future at least.

The future if nobody succeeds in bringing the New Sun.

But so okay, here's as good a place as any to get into this a bit more. I remember the first time I read through these books, and I thought the Conciliator was a really odd and esoteric way to refer to a prophet or messiah, and then really just sort of filed it under stuff to maybe think about again someday. But of course after, I think, three re-reads (and this makes a fourth) I'm having a serious DUR moment about it, and maybe some of you guys missed it, too. If nothing else, it's good to be honest. I'm not a Gene Wolfe expert, just someone who really digs his stuff and likes to talk about it, so, yeah, it was only this time around that I realized why, not only the revered holy man of the past is specifically called the Conciliator, but why it makes perfect sense that Severian winds up being both the Conciliator*** and the bringer of the New Sun. Urth is in the situation it is, a Dying Earth way before its time, because its biped children made like they were in a T-Bone Burnett song and colonized already inhabited planets and worse, and so some of the other beings/civilizations wronged by those jerks fought back and punished the Urth by introducing a black hole or something that is prematurely killing off the good old sun that you and I and Gene Wolfe are living under. Except, because said beings/civilizations weren't quite the jerks that we were, they left Urth a way out, if we proved to have been misjudged: the New Sun.

And how might we prove ourselves misjudged? We're going to need a Conciliator (i.e. an arbitrator between parties in a dispute). And lo, though the one lived centuries before the other, the Conciliator and the New Sun are the same dude, because Tzadkiel is so wibbly wobbly timey wimey that he makes that other guy look like an apprentice watch repairman.

So yeah, dur. As you all are probably yelling at me right now. But hey.

So anyway, back to the Claw and the man-apes. While the latter are admiring the former, and Severian is trying to back away and escape, Severian realizes that they are not alone. Yes I'm totally thinking of the Balrog right now. But this is Gene Wolfe, so the Balrog is never onscreen (or at least not right now). All we get is a loud noise, "a step that might have been the walking of a tower on the Final Day**** when it is said all the cities of Urth will stride forth to meet the dawn of the New Sun."

And lo, just like the goblins in Moria, the man-apes want none of this ish and flee. Wisely, so does Severian, who, by the way, notes with interest that once the man-apes are gone, the Claw's light goes out. Now, some guys might interpret this as the light only shining when it's needed to scare away the baddies, but what Severian concludes is that "it had flamed for them and not for me." Perhaps because they believe sincerely, and at this stage of the story, Severian just thinks he's some schmoe trying to rescue his dead-but-maybe-not-but-actually-dead-but-living-on-in-his-head-no-really-she-totally-is-he-just-hasn't-gotten-to-that-bit-yet girlfriend? And here endeth Chapter Six. Phew!

And thus we come to very probably my least favorite bit in the novel, if not in BotNS overall. Chapter Seven starts off as a breathlessly exciting escape!.... but soon Severian, ever having to justify his actions and tell us he's not a Bad Guy, mediates a bit on cowardice and bravery, which leads him to recall a time when he witnessed one of his mentors being cowardly.

The reminiscence reads as banal-if-you-can-accept-professional-torturing banal, but then, but then... We find out that the cowardice on display is in the mentor's having been unwilling to directly sexually abuse a Client (prisoner) as ordered, and deciding to use a big iron dildo instead (this made all the more creepy and chilly by Severian's comparing the way the Master smacks the dildo against his palm to the way the man-apes smacked their clubs against their palms before combat). Yuck.

But anyway, escape! But he's no sooner or of the cave than someone is shooting fiery projectiles at him! Of course it's Agia!***** Of course he defeats her and her henchmen, but then wait! A man-ape shows up and I hate this part, too, because the man-ape in question is newly missing a hand ("I recognized the clean cut of Terminus Est"), and fixes Severian with a "beseeching look" that breaks my heart but just leaves our hero speculating about why the man-ape hasn't bled to death yet.

Ugh.

Anyway, the poor thing just wanted another look at the Claw, which Severian gives him. Agia gets all excited to see this thing again and who knows what would have happened had not good old Jonas showed up. Much talk ensues, chiefly of the Agia-shaking-her-fist-at-the-meddling-man-ape variety (she wrote the of-course fake Thecla letter), and Severian lets her assume he's going to kill her now she's at his mercy, but as she's telling at him to just do it already, he and Jonas sneak off into the night.

Within the context of the chapter, we are to understand, I think, that it's cowardice and not mercy that stayed our man's hand. Or at least that that's what he wants us to think.

At any rate, he's onto bigger, if not better things. Kind of literally. Telling Jonas all about his adventure in the mine, he starts pumping Jonas for information about what the not-Balrog might have been, because its presence and barely-glimpsed nature remind Severian both of a story Jonas told about the strange "soldiers" living inside the Wall of Nessus, and of the stories Severian and Thecla read together back in the Tower from a book called The Wonders of Urth and Sky. 

Yes, it's all about the megatherians. Jonas, who has admitted to being some kind of outsider, knows a bit about those, enough to conclude that whatever's in the mine it's not one, because "Their actual size is so great that... they can never leave the water -- their own weight would crush them." So it's at best a servant of theirs in the dark. Severian asks how mere puny humans could possibly defeat beings who are supposedly destined to devour the continents when the sun goes out, but Jonas doesn't really have an answer for that, or at least none that we get, because soon Severian is off on another of his extended journeys down memory lane, rhapsodizing about what it was like to have sex with Thecla, recalling in detail the dream of the undines he had the night he shared a bed with Baldanders (in which he maddeningly tells us that he now understands why Abaia and Erebus have decided to suck him into the battle over the New Sun, but doesn't bother to tell us anything of this revelation), and then BOOM! Kidnapped!

He and Jonas get bundled off, on the back of a baluchether (and don't get me started on this. I had a minor obsession with these creatures, or at least their prehistoric equilvalents, hornless rhinos 20 feet tall, the biggest land mammals that ever were, when I was a kid), past a huge field full of disturbed graves and strewn with perfectly preserved corpses so it all looks like a failed Rapture, to parts unknown. Furthering the post-apocalyptic feel of things (and, of course, indulging in a bit of foreshadowing), Severian, reminded by the baluchether's smooth, silent gait of travel by boat over calm water, tells Jonas "I feel now that I'm traveling through the Citadel in a flood, solemnly rowed." Not until Ushas, buddy.

But despite this moment of weird tranquility, Severian doesn't go quietly. He waits until one of his captors tries and fails to draw Terminus Est from its sheath (there's a trick to it; it involves both hands moving in opposite directions sideways, one holding the sheath and the other the sword hilt), screws up and hurts himself and another guard,  and lickety split starts effecting a slicing and dicing escape from the howdah on the back of the beast. He's just about completely free when they arrive at their destination, which means he has really just managed to make a spectacular entrance to the camp of his hero, Vodalus. Remember Vodalus? This is a song about Vodalus.******

Now, recall that Severian saved Vodalus' life way back at the beginning of Shadow of the Torturer, because Vodalus does. Being a hardened leader of men (and having grown up in the upper class), instead of saying thank you, he tells our boy in fuligin that he has a Seekrit Mission for him. Come have some dinner.

But first, a kind of pre-dinner, Vodalus and his consort, Thea (half-sister of Thecla), outline their philosophy of opposition to the Autarch in terms that even Severian (and we) can understand: The Autarch is complicit in keeping humanity backward and Urthbound, but humanity once ruled "the daughters of the sun" and other places, and should again. Never mind that the megatherians and all the other aliens disagree and will destroy our sun if we try to make that happen; Vodalus does not concern himself with such. For him, it's purely a political matter. And Severian is potentially important in this. But we'll talk more about that at dinner.

Later on, but still before this mysteriously important dinner, Severian gives Thea details about Thecla's last days, and in return, Thea gives Severian a clue about what's so special about the upcoming dinner. The "analeptic alzabo", derived from the gland of an alien carrion eater, is to be consumed. And alzabos, when they consume human flesh, know "for a time the speech and ways of human beings." She hints that thus is somehow going to help them know more about the past, which they must "if our allies and masters who wait in the countries beneath the waves are to triumph."*******

Something weird is going to happen.

*No, I'm not sure how I feel about this observation.

**Every time I get tempted to delve into what city this might be, I get tangled up in all the intricacies of the decades of discussion about this and ALL THE OTHER MINITUIAE at Urth.net and I sprout 17 new grey hairs. But it's probably a city from our era. A lot depends on what continent you think Severian is wandering on. The prevailing theory is that it's South America (and that his city of origin is either a Dying Earth Buenos Aires or a Dying Earth Santiago), but you can find unorthodox souls who think it's wild stuff like Africa but drifted up to where Europe was and the Mediterranean shrank down to a river and that river is Gyoll (where Severian almost drowned among the nenuphars and probably first met Juturna way at the beginning of Shadow of the Torturer). Hey, have at it. Me, I'm punting on the geography question.

***Yeah, yeah, spoiler for first time readers, but I'm pretty sure I lost the first-time readers a long time ago. I doubt much of any of these posts have made sense to first timers.

****I always want to think, despite Jonas' coming assertion, that this is maybe an unnamed non-aquatic megatherian. Nowhere is it stated that I can find that all of them are the same size, so why can't one be vastly huge but not so huge he/she/it is confined to water. The image of the walking tower presented here makes me think of Abaia, who, when he makes his appearance later on, making his way up the Gyoll, is mistaken for a really big ship. But that's just his head. Ship head, building head, hey, why not? But Robert Borski thinks this not-Balrog is a figure referred to as the Guardian of the Lost Archives (the Lost Archives being the subject of a story told elsewhere in BotNS in which various attempts to preserve all human knowledge have led to some autarch or other confiscating all of the handwritten documents that were created when the machines began to fail, and stashing them in an undisclosed place and setting some kind of big scary something to keep interlopers out (for their own good, of course. Don't need people rediscovering space travel, now, do we?). A something that Severian and the man-apes accidentally woke in their scuffle. OF COURSE the two need not be mutually exclusive, for who has a greater interest in confining humanity to earth than the megatherians? So perhaps one being posted like a cherubim with a flaming sword isn't terribly beneath them?

*****You didn't think she was just going to let Severian execute her brother without turning into a vengeful stalker, did you?

******Sorry not sorry, Arlo.

*******This remark of hers used to really bake my noodle. Vodalus is opposed to the Autarch. The Autarch is a failed New Sun candidate who now seems to be cooperating with the megatherians in confining humanity. The megatherians live in the ocean. So how can they be allies or masters of the likes of Vodalus and Thea? I can only conclude that Vodalus is somewhat in league with some alien rebels, i.e. whomever Juturna seems to be siding with? But of course that might be way too simplistic. Abaia et al are a punishment detail, our jailers. But does that mean they are totally inimical to us? Perhaps they are hoping that we can reform. Perhaps they don't want to destroy the Sun and devour the continents and they're simply under orders to do so if we prove irredeemable. Perhaps they (or some of them) want us to succeed, to reform, and helping Severian and Vodalus is just their thumb on the scales? I think I've just convinced myself of this. How about you?