SUNS SUNS SUNS: The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapters 21 - 25

Has Severian yet received a shock as great as this? Entrusted with a vital message from his "hero"* Vodalus to the rebels' inside man at the House Absolute, he finds the Autarch himself in possession of the password!

As Chapter 21 opens, before Severian can decide what to do about this -- has the Autarch found the true contact and gotten the password out of him or her as a trap, maybe? -- Appian goes on to pretty much prove that he's the true contact and has taken the message, which Severian has kind of involuntarily pulled out of his murse, to read, saying that he had a feeling Severian was the one he'd been waiting for.

He doesn't let Severian see what the message contains as he puts the weird little piece of metal Vodalus encoded it onto, onto a sort of microfiche reader or something to read, but on reading it decides to entrust Severian with a singular sight. He has Severian fetch a gigantic "book" with "mirror" pages -- this is some kind of computer communications device with hologram technology, as is made clear when, as Severian looks at it, it projects a singular sight: a humanoid female form with butterfly wings, bright and glowing and obviously of a size that dwarfs anything on Urth, so that a flap of her wings disturbs the very substance of the universe itself.**

This sight, which is Severian's first of Tzadkiel, it's pretty generally understood by BotNS wonks, is so profound and shattering that it causes the blood vessels in Severian's forehead to burst, and prompts him to ask if the message from Vodalus told the recipient to kill the messenger. Appian kind of laughs this off, but then...

But then he's on about Severian's future plans. After his blood-sweating look at Tzadkiel, Severian has declared that he will henceforth be Appian's man, and reminds us that he wasn't really all that interested in serving Vodalus and...

But so, what's going on with Appian and Vodalus? It's pretty apparent that Vodalus doesn't know his contact in the palace is (now) Appian, but really -- is this Appian subverting the rebel movement? Or did he, like Wilford in Snowpiercer, somehow conspire in the rebellion's very creation? Possibly just as a delaying tactic to stave off what he knows is coming?

Rumble rumble, rattle, rattle, I don't wanna die

Dude, is my forehead still bleeding?

Dude, don't ask me; I'm way too old to be Vodalus

Appian alludes to this directly next, when he orders Severian to proceed with his original mission to Thrax (remember Thrax?), but to also strongly consider a side-quest to return the Claw to the Pelerines.

Well, of course the Autarch of the Commonwealth knows that Severian has the Claw.

Not that he's admitting to being the Autarch at this point. He apparently does not know that Severian has Head-Thecla, who recognized him immediately. No, he's still talking like he's just some schmoe with access to the Secret House (because I'm sure there are just dozens of those, right?) when he says "The Autarch is here, but long before you reach Thrax he will be in the north too, with the army. If he comes near Thrax, you are able to go to him. In time you will discover the way in which you must take his life."

Whoa!

But that remark of his barely has time to land before a hooded figure appears on the scene -- clues and patterns of presentation strongly hint that this is Father Inire himself in one of his many disguises -- and Appian has him escort Severian out of the House Absolute and off to rejoin the theatrical troupe.

On the way out, Severian has his first encounter with the Vatic Fountain, a water feature that foretells, somewhat obliquely, the querent's future if he or she chucks in a coin. What Severian sees is thus:

A sword. That seemed clear enough. I would continue a torturer. A rose then, and beneath it a river. I would climb Gyoll as I had planned, since that was the road to Thrax. Now angry waves, becoming soon a long, sullen swell. The sea, perhaps, but one could not reach the sea, I thought, by climbing toward the source of the river. A rod, a chair, a multitude of towers, and I began to think the oracular powers of the fountain, in which I had never greatly believed, to be wholly false. I turned away, but as I turned, I glimpsed a many pointed star, growing ever larger.

I'll buy the sword as signalling he'll keep on being a torturer for a while, sure, but what about all the other stuff? The rose is a symbol of the Conciliator, so that tracks; Severian carrying around a thorn from an ancient rose bush that is known in his day as the Claw of the Conciliator (and of course, through the timey-wimeyness of Tzadkiel's ship, he's got a destiny in the distant past of becoming the Conciliator). The river might as well be Gyoll, but he's got a date with Juturna soon on a sandbar in a tributary of Gyoll, too. The "long, sullen swell" of the sea is doubtless the great deluge that will swamp Urth and turn it into Ushas when Severian succeeds in re-igniting the sun. The rod and the chair probably allude to his future as the Autarch (and the Vatic Fountain once told Thecla she would one day seat a throne, which she certainly didn't do in her actual lifetime but totes does as Head-Thecla). The multitude of towers could just be a vision of the Citadel/Nessus, but might also be a vision of Tzadkiel's incredible ship. As for the star, well, duh.

So everything tracks pretty simply. For once. I'm sure there's more but not even Robert Borski has devoted too much time to puzzling out what that more might be, so I'm certainly not going to, because it's reunion time!

Dr. Talos, Jolenta, Baldanders and Dorcas are camped out in a pleasant clearing within the garden, awaiting the time when they are supposed to perform Talos' now-infamous play, "Eschatology and Genesis" for the House Absolute crowd (this time minus the "scare away the rubes and collect the dropsies bit" one might presume, but, uh, yeah, about that...).

Severian has a curious interaction with Baldanders straight off. We've understood to this point that only Jonas had managed to stick with Severian in the chaos at the Piteous Gate at the end of Shadow of the Torturer, but here's Severian asking him “why he had left me in the forest beyond the Piteous Gate.” So, um, yeah. Baldanders was along for a bit of the post-Gate adventure, but not much. And Baldanders isn't too forthcoming about this, saying “I was not with you. I was with my Dr. Talos.”***

But of course, for a little while, he wasn't, if Talos/Jolenta/Dorcas were separated from Severian/Jonas/Baldanders. And presumably there was some time when Baldanders wasn't with either, for an unknown length of time. This lacuna Robert Borski argues was spent getting it on with Juturna and her sisters, still searching for their Max to help them get free of Immortan Joe Abaia.

Hey, do we know for sure that Baldanders *doesn't* eat people?

I see nothing particularly compelling about his argument for this, but don't see anything wrong with it, either. The Brides are systematically interviewing candidates for the New Sun and Baldanders is one of them, and they've got to have seen him some time. Why not now?

Meanwhile, Dorcas. Dorcas is more interested in telling Severian what's been going on since Gate-gate, which chiefly involves her horrible, horrible dreams. In them, she has what seems like normal interactions with townspeople, shopping, eating, etc., but has a powerful sense that they regard her as unclean and horrifying. Severian tries to reassure her over and over again that she is none of those things, and they fall to conversing about how Dr. Talos calls them “Death and Innocence”, which Dorcas says she doesn't like because it feels like Talos is accusing Severian of something when he calls him “Death.”

But what about my little joke a couple of entries ago that it could be the reverse that is meant, that Dorcas is Death and Severian is Innocence? Dorcas is the one who's come back from the dead, after all, and Severian, at least as he portrays himself in his narration to us, is kind of blunderingly clueless most of the time.

Furthermore, I'd refer the really interested to this thread on Urth.net, in which members speculate about how Dorcas might actually be a vampire, or at least associated with them. She might have been an undead, unclean monster long before her original death back when she was young and married to the unnamed boatman who was searching the Lake of Birds for her corpse, which, the Lake of Birds is a somewhat unusual place to stash a corpse in this culture, which generally buries bodies in a cemetery, hence the first scenes of BotNS. Whether you buy this particular set of arguments or not, there's something a bit weird and uncanny about Dorcas, quite apart from the notion that she's actually Severian's grandmother.

And then there's Jolenta. Beautiful, sexy, voluptuous Jolenta, who draws hordes of admirers wherever she goes, and the gardens of the House Absolute are no exception. Surrounded by a bunch of performers from other shows, she is unceremoniously dragged away by Dr. Talos, who beats her. Severian points out that this is hardly her fault, but Talos doesn't care. He's just interested in order, I guess.

Poor Jolenta. As Severian observes, she's kind of all alone even within their troupe: “Dorcas and I had each other, Baldanders and the doctor their crooked friendship, and we came together in the performance of the play. Jolenta had only herself, the incessant performance whose sole goal was to garner admiration.”

This is a pretty crappy projection onto her on Severian's part, but it's going to get much worse. Jolenta, tired of all the hounding admirers and uninterested in/unable to (much is made of how her voluptuous fleshiness makes her unsuitable for any kind of actual work; her breasts are too big, her hips too wide, her round thighs chafe, etc.) help with setting up the stage and scenes for the performance, she talks Severian into going for a walk with her. She complains to him a lot about how it's not just men, but women, too, who hound her (the women usually offering her advice and protection from the men in suffocating ways, but they really, too, just want to sleep with her), and Severian just sort of clucks his tongue at her and then they wind up in a boat, with Severian rowing and Jolenta just kind of going to sleep because all that walking and complaining is fatiguing, and then... Yeah. One of the ickiest scenes in the whole series is this boat ride, because even as Severian muses about all of the nicer feelings he has for all of the other women in his life, his impulse towards Jolenta is to treat her like crap.

Jolenta's desire was no more than the desire to be desired, so that I wished, not to comfort her loneliness as I had wished to comfort Valeria's, nor to find expression for an aching love like the love I had for felt for Thecla, nor to protect her as I wished to protect Dorcas, but to shame and punish her, to destroy her self-possession, to fill her eyes with tears and tear her hair as one burns the hair of corpses to torment the ghosts that have fled them.

Yuck. There is just so much wrong with that passage. So much. More than any other bit of this whole series, that passage makes me doubt every single relationship Severian claims to have had with women, whom, let's recall, he pretty much always portrays as throwing themselves at him.

Believe me, I have the best memory. Really infallible memory. 
I remember everything. And I'm going to sue Jolenta. She's so fat, she's yuge.

Anyway, the question of whether it is or is not rape is not addressed by Severian, but I can't imagine this was exactly what Jolenta, who is actually in love with Dr. Talos, wanted out of this little excursion. Yuck.****

And of course, depending on how one is choosing to perceive Dorcas (and I must confess I kind of like the vampire theory), this interlude likely has even worse implications for Jolenta's future, for Dorcas, upon Severian's and Jolenta's rejoining the group, perceives what has happens and weeps with jealousy (according to Severian).

Then it's play time. Chapter 24 finally presents the text of “Eschatology and Genesis,” which is basically a hologram/puzzle of Severian's mission as the New Sun and its consequences. I skip it a lot, when re-reading, because I find it tiresome, its few illuminating bits just as well illuminated by other things in the novels, and I'm just not interested in going over it here. Besides, there's this bit, which feels an awful lot like Wolfe making fun of enterprises like mine:

There were conversations in the audience, and I could here those as well -- one about the play, which discovered in it significances I had never guessed and which Dr. Talos, I would say, had never intended.

Suffice it to say that it's performed, and performed pretty much the way they've been doing it for the rubes in the countryside, even to Baldanders' feigned psychotic break and attack on the audience, which wasn't supposed to happen this time; there's a whole fifth act to the play that they were going to do here. But nope.

The punters of the House Absolute, however, don't scare so easily. Many are armed, and fight back as Baldanders rampages through the audience. And someone “possessed that rarest of all weapons, a dream” which is flung at Baldanders, and envelops him, putting on a peculiar show as he stands there. “It seemed then that he stood wrapped in all that was past and much that had never been: a gray-haired woman sprouted from his side, a fishing boat hovered just over his head, and a cold wind whipped the flames that wreathed him.”

It's largely this imagery that convinces Borski that Baldanders has recently had a tryst with one or more of the Brides, under the sea, or at least deep in a river, about which, more next time.

The dream doesn't faze Baldanders a bit, though, and he keeps on smashing his way through the audience, some of whom are revealed to be – not human! Yes indeed, here there be some aliens, very likely ones we're going to get to know later on, namely the hierodules Famulimus, Barbatus and Ossipago, and Severian's first glimpse of them grosses him out but good. And in the chaos, he loses track of Dorcas, whom he takes off to locate while burdening us with his profound thoughts about the nature of men's love for women and the actual extent of the House Absolute as he blunders around in the dark overnight, encountering nature (including a monkey that some think is, somehow, yet another guise of Father Inire, because his face is described as “simian” and he sometimes carries a staff with a mummified monkey head on it) and finally giving up and going to sleep, where we shall leave him for now.

*I put "hero" in scare quotes because, the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that Severian's hero-worship of Vodalus makes no sense. I re-read the first chapter of Shadow of the Torturer a few times recently (because I'm still puzzling over who Vodalus and Thea were digging up when Severian came to their rescue), and Severian's explanation for how Vodalus captured his loyalty is circular and silly, even for a Severian explanation. First he says that Thea appears precious to him because of how fierce Vodalus is about protecting her, then he says that he finds Vodalus admirable for so fiercely protecting Thea. Bah. But when you factor in the presence of Head-Thecla (though yes, she wasn't there in his head at the time of his first meeting with Vodalus), whose influence is at times overt and at times quite subtle, a reason for becoming devoted to Vodalus emerges. Thecla's emotions and memories and loyalties are coloring Severian's memories of this first encounter, so he tells it as though he was instantly thunderstruck by the rebel leader. More likely, in Severian's usual way, he allowed himself passively to be maneuvered into a situation in which he sort of had to give Vodalus his loyalty, as he'd hit a point of no return in saving the man's life.

**Insert your own lame butterfly effect joke here.

***I love how he says “my Dr. Talos” here, as though Talos were his dog or something. The implication, of course, is not far wrong; we'll learn later on (and the idea has already been presented to us in “The Tale of the Student and His Son”) that Baldanders, far from being just a big dumb lump of muscle and bone, is a master of some weird knowledge, including the making of homunculi (models of humans that can be animated “magically”), and that Dr. Talos is, in fact, one of his creations – which is why Talos never takes a share of the money the troupe earns, and, presumably, why he is the only being on Urth who doesn't want to bone Jolenta.

****And if that's not yuck enough for you yet, this might also have been twincest, as Jolenta is a favorite candidate for Severian's missing twin sister, if such a sister actually exists.

SUNS SUNS SUNS: The Claw of the Conciliator, 16 - 20

We rejoin Severian, Jonas and the resident/visitors in the Antechamber as they are recovering from the strange attack of blue "lightning" (how Severian interprets electricity throughout these books), green flashes, giant saucer-eyed faces, and laughing women. As we learn going into Chapter 16, this is rather a common occurrence, more or less, in the Antechamber, because like privileged young jerks throughout time and space, there's a bunch of young Exultants who think it's fun to go into the Antechamber late at night and whack away at its denizens with electrical whips. Head-Thecla reveals that she was once part of such parties, and doesn't seem particularly remorseful about it.

But more importantly, Jonas. This section of the novel is mostly concerned with Jonas, who was already having a rough time of it once he realized that it's very likely that lots of the people in the Antechamber are descended from a shipmate of his, if not of Jonas himself -- and that they're up to about nine generations removed from said shipmate. Timey wimey, yo. I'd wig, too.

So Jonas is now in full-on fugue state, and his dialogue makes much more sense to us than it does to Severian. "We must get power to the compressors before the air goes bad." "I feel weight!" "It must be only the lights." He's flashing back to his time as the crew of a spaceship, most likely from way, way, way back in Urth's past, at the beginning of the Great and Bountiful Human Empire, as it were, but maybe somewhat also on Tzadkiel's ship (which we'll get to when we get to Urth of the New Sun, of course, but it's the main reason for all the timey-wimey-ness of this here story).

Severian, meanwhile, is taking this opportunity to discover a thing or two about how Jonas is put together, as he tries, surreptitiously, to heal him with the Claw, which only helps a little bit because, well, because Jonas. Severian has long realized that Jonas has metal parts, most notably an entire hand of metal, and I've been referring to Jonas as a cyborg, but here we finally see that Jonas is mostly metal, and, once he's calmed down a bit, he tells Severian about the spaceship crash that landed him on Urth, in which at least one Urthbound human died, and Jonas was badly damaged. There weren't any spare parts to fix him, so he, uh, had to use the biological parts at hand. There's a great bit later in this section when Severian, watching Jonas working with one "regular" and one "prosthetic" hand, realizes that the flesh and blood hand is the prosthetic hand. That always just makes me chuckle.

Jonas more or less seen to for now, Severian starts looking around, and finds a peach-colored scarf with a very lovely scent, and is stashing it away to keep when a little girl (we learn three novels later that her name is most likely Oringa*) tells him that not only is it bad luck to keep what one finds (says who?), but that probably the Exultant jerk force is going to come back for it at some point and it wouldn't be much fun for the guy who has it. In the way of little girls, she quickly changes the subject and wants to know about Severian's own clothes, and he is very frank with her about who he is and why he wears black. She then describes to him an old-fashioned funeral scene that is a story told and retold in the Antechamber, and that Robert Borski et al have decided must be a description of John F. Kennedy's funeral, because Baby Boomer narratives are the most important ever, as well we know, and so of course they'd still be told millennia later.**

Anyway, then Jonas wakes up and finally figures out where and when he actually is, and, furthermore, that he may have pieced together more about the where than anyone has for a long time. This big room used to be lots of little rooms, and has a dropped ceiling, and ok, this is as good a time as any for me to play around with an idea I've had about what Nessus, or at least the Citadel, actually is.

It's elementary Wolfeiana to notice that the Matachin Tower that houses the Guild of the Seekers of Truth and Penitence was originally a spaceship. But perhaps the entire Citadel is, too? The way it's partly underground, the way it seems to be so many spaces at the same time (kind of like China Mieville's two conurbations in the same space in The City & The City), the Archives that melt into the House Absolute (as we discover a bit later in this section, when Severian is blundering around looking for his sword and meets the curator/painting cleaner Rudesind again) that connect to the Matachin Tower and might at least be partially beneath the city of Nessus... Being the Alastair Reynolds fan I am, I always love the idea of a giant spaceship crashing onto a planet and being repurposed into a human habitat. What if the Citadel is a repurposed future/past/whatever version of Tzadkiel's ship? Or, if not Tzadkiel's, then whatever ship Jonas crashed in, and/or whatever vessel brought the enormous aliens, Abaia and Erebus and Scylla, to Urth?

Anyway.

Jonas is quickly on to other topics, like feudal politics as he learned about them from a book on one of the ships he's traveled on. At first the reader might think it was some kind of dry history, but then he more or less directly quotes a line from very early on in Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll's second Alice book. "The White Knight is sliding down the poker. He balances very badly, as the king's notebook told him." In Through the Looking Glass, Alice wrote this, counterfeiting the White King's handwriting, in his little memorandum book, just for fun, her way of maybe imposing her will, for a moment, on the narrative? Recall, too, that the White Knight is depicted as having a big and bushy white mustache, kind of, maybe, like Gene Wolfe's own... is this maybe a reference to the storyteller maybe not always being who we think it is? Possibly as a way of reminding us that some of the narrative we're getting is from Thecla's point of view, buried in Severian's? But meanwhile, Jonas has moved on to babbling about the founding of the Hapsburg dynasty and then we're interrupted for mealtime!

As the Antechamber residents are gobbling their pastries and coffee (that's the kind of fare they get, because this isn't a prison, but a waiting room, Nicarete reminds us), the guards shove in a new "guest" and it's Hethor. The Antechamberians soon carry him off to get his life story out of him, and Severian and Jonas sit down to eat... and Jonas starts wigging out again. This time, to calm him, Severian pulls out the Brown Book (I think this is Tales of Urth and Sky), which he kept from the collection he'd fetched for Thecla back when she was a living prisoner, and picks a story from it "at random" to read from.

This, "The Tale of the Student and His Son" is a mash-up of Jorge Luis Borges' "The Circular Ruins" and the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur. The monster is a narrative stand-in for Abaia, and triples the roles of King Minos, Daedalus and the Minotaur. A princess, his rebelling daughter, plays the Ariadne role and probably is meant to point us to Juturna and the rebel undines.*** Anyway, the story does the job of calming everybody down, and everybody decides to get some shut eye, except for Severian, who starts thinking about insomnia in various ways and eventually Thecla's thoughts on the subject surface but then "she" realizes where they are and next thing we know, hey, Severian knows where the Exultant Jerk Squad's secret door is and "soon" Severian and Jonas are off to explore other bits of the House Absolute.

After lots of wandering and discussion of Jonas' nature, which I've already talked about above, they find a strange room, which proves to be Father Inire's chamber of "mirrors" (though, as Severian observes, they reflect and bend, not just light, but reality) and Jonas uses it to disappear, perhaps never to return, though I'm going to be looking for him among the chems on the Long Sun Whorl, and a sort of amalgamated version of him is going to rejoin Severian later on in the form of the resurrected solider, Miles. But that's later.

Severian then wanders around some more, alone, hoping to find Dr. Talos et al (whom he saw in passing just as he and Jonas were being captured, so he knows there here at the House Absolute somewhere!) encountering the khabit version of Thea (last seen in the brothel "The House Azure" where prostitutes "resembling" (or maybe sometimes "being") famous exultant women are there for paying customers' entertainment, spends quite a lot of time (with the "help" of Odilo the Steward) searching for the disused closet where the praetorians stashed Terminus Est when he was captured, and then blunders into Rudesind, still cleaning paintings and insisting he's doing so in the same place where Severian first met him long, long ago. Severian protests it was in the archives, this is the House Absolute. To-may-to, to-mah-to, Rudesind basically says, and while he goes back to work, Severian blunders into a painting! Sort of!

See, it turns out that when the House Absolute was built, Father Inire had the walls cunningly fashioned to hold and hide very shallow, dimensionally weird extra rooms, amounting to a whole "Second House," as a strange, androgynous and weirdly familiar person he encounters in the shallow side-room explains to him. Who is this person? Why, it's the pimp from the House Azure! And thus, Severian has met Autarch Appian for a third time.

And Appian has a doozy of a segue. When Severian asks the way back to the garden where he is pretty sure Dr. Talos et al are, "Even supposing that I knew the way, why would I reveal it to you? Many will seek to flee by that road if the pelagic argosy sights land."

DRAMA BUTTON!

*The saint she's named for was a traveling miracle worker in 14th century Italy. She doesn't work any miracles here, unless you consider getting Severian to explain himself a little to be a miracle, or somehow seeing Thecla in his place for a moment to be a miracle, so this is one of those characters that I'm always wondering maybe turns up "in disguise" somewhere else later on? Or that we've already met? Kind of like the dark haired woman in the pale gown whom Vodalus and Thea were harvesting from the graveyard the night Severian saved them. Too early to be Thecla, who at that point was still at large and not even a prisoner of the Torturers, but... are they just pulling random bodies out to have for their alzabo-feasts, or is that someone important? No one seems to have any good suggestions for who that is, either. This kind of stuff just drives me nuts.

**Though as these people are likely descended from the survivors of a timey-wimey spaceship crash, this funeral cortege might not be quite so old a story for them; those original survivors might have been members of my own generation, say, or Millennials -- kids who grew up with Boomer parents who imposed these narratives on them first hand.

***Which, speaking of the rebel undines, I've developed a new theory about them, too. They aren't necessarily interested in the larger issues of the New Sun and the redemption of humanity or any of that nonsense; what if instead they are simply sick of Abaia's shit, don't want their babies to be warlords, and just want to go do their own thing? That's right: Undines: Fury Road, bitches.

Hey, Abaia, looking for this?

But of course, oh shit, that means that...

Max is Severian -- he starts off his adventure in a big ugly mask! -- and Furiosa is Jonas the cyborg. I just blew my own mind.

SUNS SUNS SUNS Program Note, Or Whatever You'd Call It

Just letting y'all know, since I've had more questions about this posting series than about anything else I've ever done on this blog -- I have not abandoned this, oh no! In fact, I'm going on pseudo-vacation pretty soon (I say "pseudo" because as a person with increasing chronic pain issues, it really just means I'm going to be severely limited in my daily activities in a different location) and I'm planning on resuming this right where I left off, er, quite some time ago. So keep your eye on this space, Wolfe-ites! More junk analysis of Book of the New Sun (and, someday, Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun) is coming soon!

For those of you who want to brush up on this (as I had to do, to find my place), here is a link to the entire series to date. As always, because this is Blogspot, start at the bottom and work your way up.

Grab your sunglasses!

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?

Gene Wolfe's PEACE

On the surface, Peace seems the most quotidian Gene Wolfe novel I've yet read, but the surface is never to be trusted with this guy. Oh, no. This is very likely the most elusive, occlusive and deceptive writer ever.

And this is -- and I say this as a passionate fan of all 12 books of Wolfe's maddening Solar Cycle but especially of the Book of the New Sun -- one of his most remarkably elusive, occlusive and deceptive books. And also, and this is probably because of its quotidian elements, the most tantalizing, because grounded in ordinary reality, mostly, and thus promises a certain possible relative ease of interpretation.

Not that it delivers on same. Or at least, not very much. Ahh, Gene Wolfe.

So on the surface this is just the regretfully nostalgic meanderings of an old man who lived an idyllic and improbable (to the modern reader -- c.f. how I felt reading Philip K. Dick's In Milton Lumky Territory) early 20th century small town in the American midwest, with all the Normal Rockwellian pastoral pleasures and soda shop scenes that implies. Albeit with a slightly sinister flavor, in that there's an awful lot of death and talk of death. And of course there's the way the narrative skips around in time, which may just be a dotty old man free associating but may also be a bit of a Billy Pilgrim-unstuck-in-time thing. And you can totally just stop there and read Peace as Gene Wolfe's Slaughterhouse-Five. But...

But then you notice all these recurring themes. How every single story that our man Alden Dennis Weer (usually called Den, one of the many onomastic clues that led good old Robert "Solar Labyrinth" Borski to spin out a whole involved theory about how Peace is Wolfe's version-cum-inversion of Goethe's Faust, with Den as Mephistopholes) tells or is told has certain repetitive elements that fractally echo other parts of the story that all relate back to Den's childhood sin of pushing a little boy down some very dangerous stairs.

And then there's that ending. Not since I first read Infinite Jest have I felt so compelled to go back to the beginning of a novel and read the beginning again because only now did I finally have the clue I needed to understand what was going on there. Except Peace is not over 1000 pages long. It's not even 300. You can read that in a night.

And Bog help me, I did. Yep. For the first time ever in my life, I read a novel twice in a row, with not so much as a short story, poem or internet article in between. And when I got to the end, even after hours and hours of figurative light bulbs popping and exploding over my head, I was still somewhat tempted to start again from the beginning*. But, as you'll see shortly, I have other reading and blogging obligations in the offing, and none of them allow for re-reading a novel almost as old as I am.

There. I almost read a book three times in a row. If that's not a ringing endorsement, nay, command, to drop everything and go read Peace at your earliest opportunity, what is?

*Neil Gaiman has famously observed that he only realized that Peace is a horror story on his second reading. And while elements of horror and ghost stories were noticeable the first time around -- I was especially seized by the theme of humans slowly turning to stone while they were still alive (there's even a mention of the Cardiff Man hoax! Hooray!) and the whole creepy carnival theme that springs up in the novel's second half -- I still don't read it so much as a horror story in the sense that term is usually used. The horror is that of guilt realized, of atonement rendered as impossible as redemption. Peace is simultaneously the most ironic and most perfect of titles for this book.

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Claw of the Conciliator 1-5

After leaving  us with a bit of a cliffhanger in the chaos at the Gate of Nessus at the end of Shadow of the Torturer, Gene Wolfe engages in a bit of torturing of his own now by starting us off with a scene involving someone named Morwenna, which who the Snape is this and why do we care? What happened at the Gate, dammit!

We get bits and pieces but Severian is grudging with this information and insists on mixing it in with his dreams and his "perfect" memories, claiming that sometimes he just trips out on those memories like when someone says the name Vodalus. And someone said Vodalus to him on his arrival, post Gate Chaos, in the town of Saltus, where we're taking up his story, so as far as  he's concerned, his perfect memory is crowded by... his perfect memory of his cemetery encounter with Vodalus at the beginning of the first book?

Aww, man!

But soon Wolfe is making it up to us, because Saltus is serving  up a variety of delights, partly just because Severian is there. The aforementioned Morwenna needs killing, for one thing, and so does another guy, who everyone has decided is a dirty spy for Vodalus (hence the Memory Lane), and so does yet another guy, a cattle thief. And if there's gonna be an execution, there needs to be a fair! And if there are gonna be three executions, it needs to be a really great fair!

And the first attraction is, a very special attraction! Saltus, it seems, has a tradition of sealing up malefactors in their houses (after removing all of the food and valuables) to starve in the dark! And then, when said malefactor is good and dead, they break open the house and remove the corpse (or thing the malefactor has, uh, become*) and sell the house off! And Severian and Jonas (the only member of the Gate Gang who managed to stick with Severian) are just in time to watch the fun! And so, onward, the battering ram, let's get this guy Barnoch out.** Barnoch being, of course, the aforementioned dirty spy. Who might not be dead yet because hey, if they'd have known Severian was coming, they would have baked a cake. Or at least not tried baking a Barnoch?***

And of course Severian, who still considers himself a follower of Vodalus, starts fretting about having to kill one of his fellows. This doesn't stop him from following the battering ram into the foul-smelling house once they break through, though! And yes, what they find is kind of a tall Gollum, except instead of muttering about The Precious he insists that "I will be free... Vodalus will come!"

Oh, and in the resulting hullabulloo, whom does Severian glimpse in the crowd but Agia? Man, that chick is a bit of a stalker, no? But then Severian can't locate her! But soon something more important happens because GREEN MAN.

He was apparently captured a little while ago, and is going to be exhibited at the fair. He might even grant you three... oh wait, wrong green man. Or is it?

And also, Severian learns, someone brought a cathedral to the fair! And yes, it's that cathedral! Well, a replacement for that cathedral because of course the one Severian accidentally pillaged burned down! And supposedly rose up into the air on the updrafts it created because the cathedral is a big tent! Maybe that's what Severian and Dorcas saw! But, you know, only on the most pathetic level of reality.

But then, monomaniac that Severian sometimes is, he gets the idea that the Green Man might know where Agia is, since green men know everything and all. And so soon Severian is alone with said green man, whom he finds a prisoner and possibly a slave, which is contrary to his ethics. But he is also quite a fascinating specimen who claims to be from the far future, his green hue being due to his people's having established a symbiotic relationship with some algae so that the green man can basically keep himself going via photosynthesis instead of food, as long as his captors don't get mad at him and cut off his sunlight. Finally, though the green man can only tell Severian that Agia is "above ground" Severian hands him half of his whetstone -- in other words, giving the green man the means to free himself from the chain that binds him to this place and time. This act of kindness will resonate very subtly through the rest of the Book of the New Sun, and possibly through the entire rest of the Solar Cycle, but Severian pretends to be unaware of this at this point in his narrative and just mentions watching comprehension dawn on the Green Man's face as he realizes he's being freed.

Then comes the time for Severian to do his job again, this time with Jonas as a sort of assistant. This turns out to be even more of a production than when he executed Agilus near the end of Shadow of the Torturer. This is not only because there are three victims, but also because the alcade of Saltus is a bit of a showman, though a nervous one. First he leads everyone in a prayer to the Increate/Conciliator/God that is pretty amusing considering that Severian is standing right next to him as he intones:

"You, the hero who will destroy the black worm that devours the sun; you for whom the sky parts as a curtain; you whose breath shall whither vast Erebus, Abaia and Scylla who wallow beneath the wave; you that equally live in the shell of the smallest seed in the farthest forest, the seed that hath rolled into the dark that no one sees."

I've always paid more attention to the first part of this prayer than the second, but since I've come to align myself with those who argue that the Whorl system in which Book of the Short Sun takes place and that of Urth (which is our own good old familiar system in the unbelievably distant past or future, depending on how you choose to look at this whole Cycle) are one and the same, I find myself entertaining thoughts of Severian  somehow carrying on through Book of the Long Sun and Book of the Short Sun, perhaps via the Green Man, who might be himself in a later state of being just as some suggest that Severian himself might be Typhon in a new guise/incarnation; perhaps in some more mundane form in the person of Patera Silk, or something? I need to think longer on this. My brain is wanting to make a logical narrative connection in which Severian winds up in Green's jungles, wherever they "really" turn out to be, but I'll confess to feeling a little defeated in this, just now.

At any rate, it's killing time. First up is Morwenna, accused of poisoning her husband and child, chiefly on the word of one Eusebia, who we learn was in love with said husband and considered Morwenna a hussy who stole him away. Eusebia's successful prosecution/persecution of the beautiful Morwenna is her revenge, but Morwenna manages to avenge herself before she dies by poisoning a bouquet of purple roses Eusebia brought to taunt her with ("die before these fade") on her way up to the scaffold. As Severian ends Morwenna's life, he tries to comfort her with another unintentionally amusing observation "Try to remember that almost everyone who has ever lived has died, even the Conciliator, who will rise as the New Sun."****

From here we move briskly along to the aftermath in which Severian and Jonas enjoy a brief spell of being treated like rock stars. We don't get any description of the man's execution, because Severian tells us he doesn't really feel like talking about every single one he performed on his way to his post at Thrax. "When I describe my travels, you are to understand that I practiced the mystery of our guild where it was profitable to do so, though I do not mention the specific occasions."

Over dinner, Severian finds himself the recipient of a note! And what a note it is, for it is purportedly from none other than his beloved Thecla, who claims that Father Inire interceded on her behalf and she just faked her suicide. "Did you look? I lay as still as death... I seemed to feel your pain when  you saw me there." And Severian is given instructions to proceed to a rendezvous with her that she might impart to him "a grave secret." Snickerhoot.

Not one to wait around when a girl calls for him, Severian asks to borrow Jonas' horse-thing but winds up stealing a destrier (some kind of alien-horse hybrid that serves as the mount of the very important) and following a brook to its origin in a cliff face "flooding out like saliva from the lips of a petrified titan."****** This is how to get to the mine shaft where he is supposed to meet Thecla. Cue Admiral Ackbar? At any rate, Severian would utterly fail at text adventures, for he never bothered to Get Lamp.

And thus, in the dark, we leave him for now.

*As the alcalde (the mayor, more or less) tells Severian: "A woman sealed in the dark long enough can become something very strange, just like the strange things you find in rotten wood, back among the big trees. We're miners, mostly, here in Saltus, and used to things found  underground, but we took to our heels and came back with torches. It didn't like the light, or the fire, either." Heh heh. Sounds like at some point they accidentally cooked themselves a Gollum, eh? But of course, what they sealed in the house might have only appeared human to start with. This is Urth, not Middle Earth, after all.

**When people fret that Gene Wolfe doesn't seem to have a sense of humor, I always want to trot out Barnoch. As far as I can tell, and I'm no hagiographer, not even Catholic, but as far as I can tell, this guy's namesake saint is Barrog, who is famous for being... hee hee hee... a hermit. A hermit whose chapel became a famous pilgrimage site. Come on. That's funny!

***Hee  hee.

****Tee hee.

******Our first hint that all of these mountains have been turned into a giant Mount Rushmore, really, no? Or at least a foreshadowing of same.

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Shadow of the Torturer 31-35

We now find Severian poised to do his job for the first time in public. Step One: stand there and look menacing to "symbolize the unsleeping omnipresence of justice" and intimidate the crowd. Step Two (apparently) muse to himself about the nature of crowds and mobs and make socioeconomic assumptions about this particular crowd-mob who is gathered to watch him execute Agilus. Step Three: Off with his head (with graphic descriptions of how it feels and smells to cut off someone's head). Step Four: Profit. So at least Severian has this over the Underpants Gnomes. Step Five: Sing an XTC song* to your [REDACTED] new girlfriend. And reflect on what a dirty liar Agia was for saying, among many, many other things, that the avern's leaves alone could kill people. Ha.

And while Severian and Dorcas are somewhat cattily recounting their adventure together so far, talk turns to the note left for them at the Inn of Lost Loves. Severian goes fishing in his murse for the copy of it he made but pulls out... oh noes! The Claw of the Conciliator! Which  he and Dorcas figure out must have been slipped into the murse during the scuffle at the Pelerines' Cathedral Tent by Agia, making Severian into a dirty liar in that encounter.

And of course, though this won't occur to Severian until later (supposedly), the presence of the Claw on his person when he fell into the Lake of Birds is probably what brought Dorcas** back to life. For of course she was not only a corpse in the lake, but the very same Cas for whom the Boatman was searching, suddenly in vain. Poor Boatman.

Anyway, then they see something over which I still tend to scratch my head a bit: "Hanging over the city like a flying mountain in a dream was an enormous building -- a building with towers and buttresses and an arched roof." Severian's jaw barely has time to drop before it disappears, though. Of course, this is probably our first look at Tzadkiel's spaceship, and maybe Tzadkiel getting His/Her first direct look at Severian, but why here, why now? Is it really just because he found the Claw at this point?

Oh, the Claw. The Claw and the vision of the City In The Sky Thing touch off a long philosophical discussion between Severian and Dorcas about metaphor and meaning and The Wonders of Urth and Sky that is basically just Gene Wolfe making sure we understand that this is not just another Dying Earth adventure story we're getting into, here. We know, sir. We know.

And while they puzzle over this stuff, they encounter, well what do you know? Dr. Talos and Baldanders' Traveling Show! Performing right now! And Severian is just in time to play his part, and hey, there's a part for Dorcas, too! Severian is Death and  Dorcas is Innocence!*** And though they don't know their parts at all, Talos is such a great director that they manage to play them anyway!

Oh, and by the way, there is a new member of the troupe, though it turns out Severian met her once before, for she was the bedraggled waitress whom Dr. Talos convinced to let him make her into a beautiful actress. Which Talos did, boy howdy. Helloooooooooo Nurse! Jolenta**** is one Marilyn Munroe caliber bombshell (and Wolfe has said in interviews that this was a resemblance he intended, but, you know, Wolfe in interviews. Heh). But meanwhile, the play. The play! We don't get to read the text of the drama until the end of Claw of the Conciliator because Severian has chosen at this point to convey only his confusion and first impressions of it. Baldanders is Big and Scary. Talos is Wily and Foxy. Speaking of Foxy, Jolenta is Purty. Did he mention that Jolenta is Purty? Jolenta is Purty. And the play is Weird and Metaphorical and he gets to tie everybody down at some point or other, like a good little Torturer. And then at the end of the play, when Baldanders scares off the audience real good, the party combs the field for "dropsies" -- valuables that audience members happened to leave behind in their haste to get away from the Maddened Giant. How droll.

Really, I kind of love this interlude. Can you tell?

Then it's time to sleep under the stars, and, for Severian, to secretly ogle the Claw some more. And, um, reminisce about his first teacher, Master Malrubius (who was possibly Father Inire in disguise before Master Paleamon was Father Inire in disguise? Maybe?), and then dream (or maybe not?) about a visit from Triskele, possibly following up on the Tzadkiel fly-over? Perhaps summoned by Severian's thoughts of Triskele's fellow aquastor? And then Severian, now lying happily back-to-back with his (resurrected?) dead dog, dreams of Master Malrubius quizzing him on the seven systems of government. How much of this is a dream and how much a visitation from his aquastors? Are they testing his fitness for his eventual role this early? But if not, why else would these two appear in the story at this point? And does Baldanders get a similar visitation in the night?

The next morning, Severian shares a bit of an account of his experience with Talos, who assures him that out here in the real world, he noticed no such thing, and since he doesn't really ever seem to sleep, he would notice if there was something to notice.

Then over breakfast, Severian lets fall the news that he's not going to travel along with the troupe; he has "business" with the Order of Pelerines, i.e., he wants to return the Claw to them. So then comes time to divvy up the money, and Talos shocks everyone by not taking a share at all.

And then they are interrupted by the coming of Hethor, he of the unprepossessing yet familiar appearance and stuttering, riddling talk of a sailing ship among the stars. It all sounds, again, very like a hologram-view of Severian's larger story arc. Turns out he is quoting from the play, the text of which we readers have not yet had the benefit of getting, which is itself basically a hologram of Severian's story. Ow, my brain. At any rate, he comes across as just a deranged fanboi at first, and Severian dismisses him as such (once Talos establishes that he isn't one of those lunatics who thinks the play is real): "There are a good many of them... They find pleasure in pain, and want to associate with us [Torturers] just as a normal man might want to be around Dorcas and Jolenta." And all Hethor wants is to come along with them, just for the love of... them.

Oh yeah, that's going to end well.

Next thing  you know, Dorcas is talking again about how much she didn't like and actually was kind of afraid of Agia and Hethor is offering to carry Severian's sword! Of course Severian politely refuses, and while he's yes, thinking of Agia's plot to part him from Terminus Est, he thinks it's just a coincidence.

And then CHAOS. Because they've finally come to the enormous Wall (so tall that only big powerful birds like eagles fly over it, made of the same strange black metal that the spaceship-that-became-the-Citadel was made of, etc.) that surrounds the city of Nessus*****, and there are crowds. And from the crowd emerges a man on a merychip (basically, an archaic name for what might well be an archaic horse. At any rate, I've always pictured a near ancestor of the good old horse we know, possibly one with toes), Jonas(Hooray Jonas!) who claims that he's heading to meet the Pelerines on business himself! But actually, they've left the city; he saw their mournful procession (doubtless mourning the loss of the Claw?).

So through the Gate they go. Or rather, into the Gate, which Severian compares to entering a mine, but a mine with windows in its walls through which passersby can observe men and women and "cacogens" (aliens) and "beasts with too much of men about them, so that horned heads watched us with eyes too wise, and mouths that appeared to speak showed teeth like nails or hooks." Talos explains that these, all of these, are soldiers who live in the wall "like mice" in honeycomb-like passages and tunnels all through it; they are Nessus' real defense.

As they proceed, Jonas ingratiates himself further to the party by telling them a myth he knows about the Wall, which of course also gives  us some hints about the origins on Urth of Abaia and his Brides in the tale of a woman returned from the stars with a handful of black beans and told the "lords of men" that if she were not obeyed she would throw them into the sea and thus end the world. Which, guess what happened there.

Meanwhile, chaos. A wagoneer accidentally-on-purpose hits Jolenta's face, then Dorcas', with his whip. Severian attacks the wagoneer, everybody else freaks out, and... the story shall continue in The Claw of the Conciliator. Where we can immediately start off by wondering WTS is Morwenna, and what does this have to do with this mad scene at the Gate?

*This one. And yes, I have it playing on the jukebox in my head every time I come to this conversation.

**And here is as good a time as any to talk about Dorcas and death. As far as I can tell, this character's namesake saint was a disciple (mentioned in the Book of Acts) basically famous for dying and "being mourned by all the widows." So merely by her name, Wolfe is telling us that she was dead until Severian came along.

***Though I suppose a case could be made for it being the other way around, eh?

****I guess she's named for Yolanda (aka Jolenta) of Poland? Beatified for her kindness to the poor while married to Duke Boleslaw the Pious (she herself was the daughter of the King and Queen of Poland), she is otherwise only known for being the daughter, wife or sister of famous and important good people. In addition, the BotNS character is described by Severian in the same kind of terms with which he described the woman who portrays Holy Katharine for the Guild's ceremonies: Jolenta's face is "pure and perfect as the curve of a rainbow" (earlier in Shadow of the Torturer, Severian described Catherine/Katharine's face as "a pool of pure water found in the midst of a wood").  This all kind of argues for her maybe being Severian's imagined twin sister in addition to all of Borski's claims. But like I said, the sister hunt is not that big a deal for me.

*****I want to take a closer look at the name of the city here, because it is here that we learn a bit about why it has that name. Jonas tells us that Nessus was not the original name, for back when the Autarch first established his dominion there and built the Wall (not to defend his city from outsiders, but to defend himself from his subjects), "the river was unpoisoned." In Greek mythology, Nessus was a centaur whom Heracles defeated, and whose tainted blood in turn killed Heracles. Nessus' blood, of course, was tainted by a poisoned arrow Heracles fired at him when he tried to make off with Heracles' wife; whom the centaur tricked into dosing her husband with his blood later on in the mistaken belief that it would keep him faithful to her. I'm still sorting out how all this relates to the relationship between the Autarch and his city. I suspect it has something to do with a bad bargain the exultants struck with the Autarch to come and suppress dissent and class war. Old King Log vs. Old King Stork and all. I'm also interested in how this river gets the name of a creature from mythology, which, according to the naming scheme pretty much everyone has accepted for these books, means that, somehow, the river itself is somehow an alien? Or perhaps it was just altered to make it more hospitable to the aliens like Abaia and his Brides?