100 Books #107 - Walter Moers' A WILD RIDE THROUGH THE NIGHT

"I've got no idea what's gone wrong with your dreams of late, but they've definitely been getting wilder."

When your own dear personal psychopomp aka "dream princess" who is also your late great-great-great grandmother tells you this, you know you're in for a weird adventure. Of course, by the time twelve-year-old Gustave Dore meets his ancestress and hears this observation, he's already been on one for a good bit: captaining his own ship and all but losing it to the "Siamese Twin Tornados", meeting Death and his sister Dementia, saving a Damsel in Distress from her Dragon but learning that he kind of misread that situation a bit...

Wait? Meeting Death? Yes. Death wants the kid's soul, like now, and the only way young Gustave can avoid complying is by performing a series of tasks. Welcome to the wild, weird, wonderful world of Walter Moers, here exhibited as part Where the Wild Things Are, part Maakies (Drinky Crow and Uncle Gabby would have felt right at home on Gustave's ship), with a dash of the Twelve Labors of Hercules thrown in.

Every Walter Moers book I pick up becomes my new favorite Walter Moers, and A Wild Ride Through the Night is no exception, despite the absence of Moers' cartoons. That's not to say the book is unadorned by illustration, though; far from it. The story took its inspiration from twelve engravings by 19th century French engraver and illustrator Gustave Dore*, and these appear sequentially in the book (and, being engravings, look pretty okay in e-Ink, to my surprise), making it at least partly a sort of wry commentary on sequential art and how any sequence's story can be altered by any amount of interstitial storytelling; it can even be made into an imaginary portrait of the artist as a young man.

I've been a fan of Moers since I first stumbled across The City of Dreaming Books in the new books section of my public library a few years ago. With a title like that, how could I pass it by? That book was nothing like I'd expected, but altogether wonderful -- and the lovely thing about his Zamonia books* (I mean, besides their inherent charm and their amazing, adorable illustrations) is that any one of them is a wonderful introduction to this world, populated by sentient, literate, civilized dinosaurs, adventuring educated dogs, blue bears who captain ships, and yes, dreaming books. But also, any one of them is a total gateway drug; once you've sampled from it, if it's at all to your taste, you will feel utterly compelled to go and get them all. So, you know, here.

A Wild Ride Through the Night is an earlier work than the Zamonia books, but already quite a mature one: Moers has already worked out his signature style (and so has his translator, John Brownjohn), blending whimsy, satire and pathos with fairly strong character creation (Lil' Gustave is no Rumo, but who is?) and a whole lot of just plain WTFery. If you don't laugh at loud at some of these bits, see your psychiatrist. And while a lot of the weirdest stuff (like a monstrous flying pig with lizard/goat legs) originated from the fevered imagination of Dore, I really don't think Dore could have come up with the kind of dialogue Moers gives to such grotesqueries. Truly, he is like no other writer, living or dead.

But you know, if you can't have Moers illustrations in a Moers book, Dore will do. Yes, yes he will.

*Illustrations used are taken from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", Orlando Furioso, "The Raven", Don Quixote, Legend of Croquemitane, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Paradise Lost, and the Bible.

SUNS SUNS SUNS - Shadow of the Torturer 6-10

We left Severian after a curious encounter with the old picture cleaner Rudesind, about whom I kind of want to think some more. His namesake saint* was a member of the Spanish nobility who became a bishop when he was just 18 years old, founded a bunch of monasteries, governed a good chunk of Spain, led armies against invading Norse and Moorish forces... but in the world of BotNS he's just a humble picture cleaner? Really? Well, nobody is just what they seem in these books, of course.

Does his miracle hold a clue? Let's see. Before he was even born, St. Rudesind's mother, Ilduara, prayed at a hermitage and learned from St. Michael that her son would be a great leader and holy man. In gratitude, she built a church there, and when Rudesind was born, of course he needed to be baptized there. One problem: no baptismal font. So one had to be hauled up the hill. Only the cart hauling it broke down. But then MIRACLE: the cart traveled the rest of the way up the mountain on its own!

But so anyway, what, if anything, does this have to do with the character of Rudesind, who cleans a picture of Neil Armstrong, talks to Severian about the moon and how bad things would be for Vodalus if the outlaw fell into the hands of the Torturers' Guild, and pretty much drops out of sight? Maybe nothing, maybe everything -- because lots of people think that Rudesind is actually Father Inire getting his first direct look at Severian. Of course, as we'll see later in Claw of the Conciliator, Rudesind speaks of having gotten instruction from Inire as to what he's supposed to say to Severian when he again delays the young man, Ancient Mariner-like, in a corridor that might be part of the Citadel, might be part of the House Absolute, might be both. My brain is teasing out a metaphor now, about Rudesind acting mostly as a tool but sometimes being self-directed, but it isn't quite there yet.

Ahh, Mr. Wolfe.

But wait! This is supposed to be about Chapters 6-12! Where stuff that doesn't involve Rudesind at all happens! Where stuff that is actually quite important happens! Where Severian falls in love again! To his great cost! So let's get on with it!

We find that Severian's errand (say that a few times with marbles in your mouth! No, wait, don't, please) that brought him into the orbit of the likes of Rudesind is to fetch some books from the Guild of Archivists for a very special prisoner, the Chatelaine Thecla**. Severian is basically lost in a forest of exultants in these early chapters, for of course Ultan***, the Master Archivist, is one as well. When Severian meets him, he describes a curious sensation that I'm still, reading after reading, trying to decide how I regard it -- meaningful? Just a bit of color?:

Again I seemed to hear bronze, and quite suddenly I felt that he and I were dead, and that the darkness surrounding us was grave soil pressing in about our eyes, grave soil through which the bell called us to worship at whatever shrines may exist below ground. The livid woman I had seen dragged from her grave rose before me so vividly that I seemed to see her face in the almost luminous whiteness of the figure who spoke. "Whose apprentice?" he asked again.

Um, doesn't this seem kind of significant? But of what? Now again, there are all those theories floating around that there are lots of Severians and a new one is cast off every time "our" Severian "almost" dies. Is he intuiting the sensations of his other self, who was not rescued by the undine in the river Gyoll, maybe? Or is he just reacting to the extreme age and blindness of Master Ultan, and since Severian claims to be insane, hallucinating the Chekov's Corpse that Chekov's Graverobbers stole from the cemetery a few chapters ago?

Severian, of course, doesn't dwell on it, and soon, since it turns out Ultan is pretty much blind but apparently doesn't trust Severian to read the letter he's brought, we meet Ultan's apprentice, Cyby, who is at least 40 years old, and are treated to a discourse on the Feast Day of Curators (the Torturers' Feast Day of Holy Katharine -- yes, she of the Wheel, having just recently passed) when Severian asks (he is wondering when, if ever, Cyby will be elevated beyond his apprentice status, an event that happens on a Guild's Feast Day). Ultan tells him all about how pretty it is, in the spring, when all the curators and librarians parade in grey...

In the midst of all of this, we get our second reference to the Claw of the Conciliator, for the Curators' cathedral has "candles in blue glass" to symbolize it. And we learn that the somewhat Borgesian Library extends beyond the walls of the Citadel, and is also the library of the House Absolute, and is also accessible to the public.

And remember, somewhere in all those corridors is the Atrium of Time. Dizzy yet?

Anyway, after a long discourse on the charms of the Library and on how the Curators' Guild initiates new members (children who get lost in the Library and come across the Book of Gold are "descended upon" by the other librarians "like vampires" who talk to the child and the child joins them. "Henceforth, he is in the library wherever he may be, and soon his parents know him no more." Kind of sinister, isn't it? It almost sounds like some kind of hypnosis, no? And again, there's that reference to gold. Does Severian, who doesn't know his family at all, maybe come from a family associated with the Curators?), we learn of what books Thecla has requested. Three whose titles Cyby knows well, and a fourth called The Wonders of Urth and Sky, which Ultan says is shelved next to the Lives of the Seventeen Megatherians**** and about which Severian is immediately curious. Wonders... turns out to be three or four hundred years old at least, and purports to be a compendium of all kinds of forgotten lore and knowledge, such as how to make holograms. Or a bit about the "corpse eaters", who can, if they ingest a dead person's flesh together with a certain "pharmocon", can relive the lives of their victims.*****

These and lots of other ideas are discussed there in the Library. In lots of ways, this chapters is a piece containing the whole, just as the holograms described in Wonders, just as the corpse consumed with the pharmocon: "The entire life is in each finger." We'll see lots more of this kind of thing later, in Dr. Talos' traveling show. Wink.

We never do get a look at the other three books, really. I keep thinking if I read more closely, I'll get more detail from the hologram fragment that is this chapter, but no. One book is some kind of collection of religious iconography, we see, as Severian dawdles his way back to the Matachin Tower, but that's all. Le sigh.

Of course, soon, we're meant to forget all about the books, because Severian finally meets Thecla, because Drotte, now a journeyman, is too busy with another client and talks Severian into bringing Thecla her books and her dinner. In no time at all, Severian is head over heels in love with the "Traitress," and his days among his guild are numbered, for all his protestations that her friendly overtures to him "won't help." We are treated in some detail to Severian's internal exposition about how this is so, but of course our lord doth protest too much.

Once he has left his lady's presence, Severian learns a bit more about exultants, how highly placed many are and aren't, how whole families of them have been extinguished (often by Severian's own Guild), how the most highly placed families are forced to turn over their fairest daughters to serve as the  Autarch's "ceremonial concubines" (but how they don't actually have to sleep with anybody; shadow women, common girls who resemble the chatelaines, take on that job when it's required, unless the chatelaine in question feels like subbing in for the hell of it).****** Thecla is one of those concubines, the first of such to have come into the Guild's hands in all the years that Master Gurloes has been a Torturer. Oh my!

And Thecla's sister is Thea -- the woman whom Severian first encountered in the company of Vodalus the Rebel! Oh my!

And she has requested that none other than Severian keep her company, when he's available. Better not get her pregnant, Severian, says Gurloes. Oh my!

But Thecla doesn't seem to interested in "having her bed warmed." She is deep in the delusion that the Autarch will relent and she will be set free and found a cult based on her accounts of her experiences in the Matachin Tower -- that she will make up. And in telling Severian all about the House Absolute, which, it turns out, is invisible!

Meanwhile, since Gurloes has winkled out of Severian that Severian is still a virgin, his old pal Roche comes to bring him on a special mission: to pop Severian's cherry in the House Azure. Soon Severian is at the tender mercies of "Chatelaine Barbea" and some other women who are probably also Barbea in not very good disguises, or at least not-very-good until she comes out disguised as Thecla.******* And except for the height, she is apparently a dead ringer for Thecla, and the reader finds herself wondering, perhaps along with Severian, if Faux Thecla isn't standing in for Prisoner Thecla, who isn't being missed at the House Absolute at all... but of course that can't be, and soon he is accusing Faux Thecla of fauxery and she is trying to convince him to "master reality" and pretend. And in so doing, says something pretty subversive: "What is the Autarch but a man who believes himself Autarch and makes others believe by the strength of it?"

And... commence light boning.

Of course the intended effect of all this -- that Prisoner Thecla, taken at least symbolically down from her pedestal, would be less of a figure of awe and desire for Severian -- backfires, and Severian winds up more in love with Thecla forever. He even sits still while she learns him real good (impossible not to think of Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon in a certain set of scenes in Bull Durham... "she read poetry to me all night, it was more tiring than f@#%#ing"), always a sign of infatuation. And Severian, too, gets a taste of being treated like a nice underaged piece of man candy.

I've always pictured Severian as Jaeger, from Carla Speed McNeil's Finder series, 

which is almost as intricate and dense as BotNS, really.

Lots of months pass. Severian learns more stuff, including that when Thecla's mother was in labor, she went to a prophetic fountain and there learned that Thecla was destined to sit a throne. Which, she sort of is (see footnote** below. Heh), but darn those pesky details that prophets and fountains never quite seem to get right! And anyway, everyone knows that Father Inire is the real power behind the throne. Old, old Father Inire, who has served as vizier for hundreds of years...

And so the Feast Day of Holy Katharine comes around. Severian's apprenticeship is finally over, and he gets to choose -- leave the Guild, or become a journeyman Torturer! Severian claims that he's never even considered leaving, but in his heart, especially after his year or so with Thecla, he doesn't have much respect for the Guild anymore "inefficient and ineffectual, serving a power that was not only ineffectual but remote" but then he asks his masters and himself, "Where would I go?" Oh ho ho ho! But his masters agree: anywhere he went, he would be known as either one nurtured by the torturers (hee hee) or, if he had agreed to "take the fulgin", as a former torturer. And so they tell him the final secret of his Guild, which he must never reveal to anyone not himself entering said Guild. Severian swears to this, but then tells us he has broken that oath "many times."

Except the sonofagun does not tell US. And here endeth Chapter 10!

*Gene Wolfe had a whole thing about naming characters in these series for saints. Oh, don't even.

**Chatelaine is the formal title given to all female exultants. Her namesake saint is a very early one, a disciple of St. Paul, who took his message of chastity seriously. This pissed off the saint's mother and fiancee, and somehow poor Thecla was sentenced to be burnt at the stake. A miraculous storm saved her. Later, still following St. Paul, she ran afoul of a nobleman who had the hots for her, but she fought him off, only to be sentenced to be eaten by wild beasts! Another miracle: the female beasts defended her from the male ones! She also has a supposed tomb in Syria, where once a mountain opened up to save her from pursuers. But it's mostly the beasts that are interesting here, eh? Because, of course, Gene Wolfe's Thecla has a date with an alzabo.

***Another saint's name. St. Ultan was an Irish abbot and hermit, who rescued some precious books and manuscripts from a monastery that was under attack. So at least this time, the choice of name for this character makes obvious sense.

****Megatherians being the term for the giant aquatic aliens like Abaia and Erebus who are the chief way-behind-the-scenes villains of this story. They are generally understood as representatives of all of the aliens out there who are out to punish humanity for depredations like those in The Fifth Head of Cerebus, and who seek to prevent anyone from bringing the New Sun, since the damage to the old sun is most likely the punishment that was inflicted in the first place.

*****Gosh, wonder if that has anything to do with the graverobbing Severian witnessed back in Chapter 1?

******And of course, as Master Gurloes explains all this, we also get our first hint that there is something wrong with the Autarch, for "it is more than somewhat doubtful if he has the pleasure of any of them."

*******Barbea being one of the candidates most often brought up as Severian's missing twin sister (whose possible existence is not even hinted at until, I want to say, Sword of the Lictor at the very earliest?), chiefly because of her hair "so near to burnished gold that it might have been a wig of golden wires" but also because "there was something in the eyes..." that Severian says "recalled something I had seen elsewhere (I could not remember where)." I am not a Barbea/Severa supporter, though. I think it's just a wig and its golden color is just part of her mock-exultant costuming, because that's what the customers most want to pretend their getting. As for her seeming familiarity, well, Severian has fallen in love with every woman he's met so far, so, uh, he's probably really focusing on the attributes that men usually claim to be focusing on when they don't want to be caught ogling breasteses.

100 Books #106 - David Mitchell's CLOUD ATLAS (with thoughts on the film)

My experience with Cloud Atlas, book and film, has been a most unusual one. Pretty much always, if a book in one of my general areas of interest attracts enough attention to be actually greenlit and made into a film, I won't go near said film until I've read the book, which is always better than the film (even though I love film). I figured this case would be no different, so when previews for this film started showing up before all the big dumb superhero movies and whatnot this summer, I took notice, recalling that some of my friends had recommended this book to me and that I'd decided it sounded interesting enough to get hold of and read someday.

Then the film announcement and PANIC! Not much time to read the book, aaaaaah! But I was reading all of these other books (seriously, the number of books I'm reading at any given time is truly absurd). But surely I could fit this one in. So I started it.

And it kind of fizzled on me. I read the first section -- half-baked Joseph Conrad, lots of White Man's Burden -- and slowly propelled myself on sheer inertia into the second... and then Angry Robot dropped some new books and Candlemark & Gleam dropped one I was OMG excited for (that would be Mr. Blank) and I got an eARC of something else I was excited for (Fridgularity) and the Humble Bundle came out and...

BOOM! Theatrical release. And early buzz on the film was decidedly mixed. I quickly discovered that most of the haters, though, were hating on the controversial make-up jobs; to convey the continuity of characters/souls/whatever over time (this is, at least in part, a reincarnation story, after all), some big-time make-up work was required to, e.g., make white actors look Asian, black actors look white or Asian, etc. It got to be a whole thing. As things do.

But that's all beside the point, for me. Which is not to say that I don't get or feel with the people who were complaining about the makeup (which was also very distracting, perhaps even more so than that done on Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Looper), just that, to me, it seems that doing what the directors did with these actors helped ground the film's reality in a way that casting racially correct actors wouldn't. And really? Cloud Atlas, the movie, needed plenty of grounding, because it, and the novel it adapted, are nothing like what audiences are used to getting from a big budget film like this.

Both film and book offer a spectacular array and variety of storytelling. There is a 19th century high seas adventure full of perfidy and plotting (that would be the aforementioned half-baked Conrad), a High Romantic tale of forbidden love and musical composition on the eve of WWII, a 1970s conspiracy thriller (even in the novel, this part of the story felt like an action movie), a contemporary senior citizen's nightmare riff on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a dystopian high tech sci fi tale of clones and revolution, and a post-apocalyptic last grab at redemption for humanity that features the remnants of a high tech civilization collaborating with a tribe of aboriginal types who survived the apocalypse only because they were never part of the high tech world to begin with. Which is to say that there is very likely something for everyone.

But I didn't get that feel at all when I started the book! In both book and film, the stories are broken into chunks and intercut with one another, but the book has bigger chunks and fewer cuts. Ordinarily, this would argue for the book's being a richer and more comprehensive experience, but in this case, the film's three directors (Andy and Lana Wachowski and Tom Twyker) and the editor (Alexander Bener, whom I think needs to get an Oscar for his work) broke the stories into much smaller chunks, did a great deal more intercutting even from the very first, and did not respect the novel's chronology all that much -- and in so doing conveyed the novel's point* better than the novel did.

That's right. Chopping up the story/stories and remixing them like some kid from Pirate Cinema actually made it all make more sense. And rekindled my interest in the book. Hell, rekindled isn't the term -- more like ignited. Because I knew that, even though the film is longish by mainstream cinema standards, it probably wasn't totally serving all of the stories as well as one might like (I'd love to find out that a gigantic directors' cut DVD is in the works because that would be one to own). I especially suspected that there was more going on in the high tech sci-fi story, in which a Neo-Seoul, Korea, is ruled by a "corpocracy" than the film touched on.

And I was right.

Am I conveying that there's a hell of a lot going on in this novel? Because there is. At bottom, these six interlinked stories ask all kinds of difficult questions about how we treat one another as human beings, questions about slavery and freedom, respect for the individual and his/her right to self-determination, what civilization is, even how we might define what constitutes a human being. These are chiefly explored through the lens of slavery and related forms of coercion: the first story deals with the historical institution as we all remember it; the second with the horrors of an attempt to transform willing servitude/apprenticeship into slavery via blackmail; the third shifts gears to examine how a free society can be enslaved and endangered by corporate interests eager to feed the hunger for more ever more energy and stuff; the fourth examines the plight of an old man tricked into a retirement home whose residents are essentially prisoners; the fifth brings it all together in the story of a clone designed for a life of food service drudgery, engineered and conditioned to believe it's a wonderful life but awakening to its actual horrors -- she is a sentient being who is the property of a corporation and her every waking and sleeping moment is under its control, until suddenly it's not***; and the last story shows us the potential consequences of all of these elements and impulses run mad: a devastated environment, a loss of civilization, a return to life that is nasty, brutish and short, in which a character from the first story's credo that "the weak are meat the strong do eat" becomes literal.

The stories are interwoven most cunningly, for these are not merely sequential episodes. Ideas and images from one story echo in others** and some elements from "earlier" bits only really make sense after one has gotten to later ones (lots of nice "aha" moments). The feeling that it's all quite profound is, I think, earned.

But I genuinely think that I would not have enjoyed this book as much had I not read it concurrently with the film. The novel tells a great story/set of stories; the film tells it better, but in doing so has to leave out a lot of bits that make the novel a richer version of the story. They complement each other beautifully.

But really, I would have probably dropped this novel unfinished had the timing of events not produced their sequence in my personal life as they did.

*At least as I understand it.

**Naturally, the visual motifs are more apparent in the film, and some more are added (I think chiefly of the sapphire buttons from the first story and how they keep turning up), to elegant effect.

***The film pulls the most cynical/subversive punch from this story, which shouldn't surprise anyone, really; in general, the film versions of the stories have some teeth pulled and are given rather happier endings than they have in the book.

SUNS SUNS SUNS: Shadow of the Torturer 1-5

It's interesting, isn't it, how Severian the Great almost forgets to tell us the important early detail of his having been rescued by the undine who may or may not turn out to be Juturna (but probably is) in his haste to tell us about how he first met Vodalus and Thea? But of course, as he insists on telling us oh, so often, Severian is incapable of forgetting, right? Right???

An important choice to make in reading or re-reading Book of the New Sun -- or any Gene Wolfe, really -- is how much one is going to rely on the unreliable narrator. The first time I read these novels, I trusted Severian's account completely (or almost completely. I mean, come on, every woman he meets falls in love with him, or at least lust? Really?), and I've told EssJay, who was getting skittish as she learned of the existence of things like Urth.net and its years and years of archived argument and speculation about these books that doing so is still a worthwhile and enjoyable experience, but even so, as I crept toward the end of Citadel of the Autarch, I had to wonder just how much and how deeply I had been bullshitted. Or if maybe I was just reading Severian bullshitting himself.

Then, of course, I got my hands on things like The Solar Labyrinth and started delving through urth.net and I really lost my mind. Not since I tackled Ulysses for the first, second and third times have I encountered so many strategies for appreciating a story. If a character is associated with gold, he or she is a secret relative of Severian's. If you never see his/her/its face, it's probably Father Inire. Oh, and there might be a whole bunch of Severians. There might be a new "cast-off" Severian created every time "our" Severian has a brush with death. Some of the more interesting characters might actually be living their lives backwards, Merlin-style, but still appearing to age normally from our perspective. On and on and on.

But since one of my best reading buddies is reading these for the first time and I don't want to piss her off/scare her away, I'm going to focus on how these books work on the surface level for the time being, both to try to avoid spoilers (though it's hard to avoid these when so many plot developments are telegraphed so far in advance, like the fact that Severian is going to be Autarch someday) and to try to keep my posts down to readable length.

Oh sure, I say that now, you say. Heh.

At any rate, so far, Shadow of the Torturer comes across as a somewhat standard-looking fantasy novel, albeit with some science fictional elements that hint at the series' nature as a variant on the Dying Earth subgenre. Chiefly right now these are just hinted at: the moon is large and green instead of the little white orb we're used to, the main levels of the Matachin Tower are referred to as being where the propulsion chamber was, etc.*

But right now, we're just exploring Severian's Humble Origins as an apprentice to the Seekers of Truth and Penitence, aka the Torturer's Guild, the kind of union that only a really repressive regime would find indispensible, right? Right????

Anyway, Severian and his friends Drotte, Eata and Roche have gone on one of their sneaky swimming expeditions, cutting through the great city of Nessus' sprawling and ancient cemetery to get to the river Gyoll at the tail end of their last summer together as apprentices. Soon Drotte and Roche will become journeymen, while Severian will become the captain of apprentices. Though Severian tells this story to us backwards, he at first nearly drowns in Gyoll, trapped in the roots of a veritable forest of nenuphars (water lilies -- you've got to love Wolfe's appropriation of archaic and obscure words for these books, or else you'll go nuts). He doesn't ever start sucking in water, though, does he (wink to the re-readers)? No, he is found by the giant underwater woman with the beautiful but inexpressive face, aka an undine, a Bride of Abaia, who is probably Juturna but doesn't have to be, but I tend to subscribe to the idea that it is, because we can't have too many rebel undines out there, can we?** Or maybe she's just mistaken. But, Juturna or not, what is she doing there, anyway?

All of this near sorta-drowning (wink) and being rescued takes up lots of time, though, and so by the time our boys are ready to head back, it's sundown, and the gate to the cemetery is locked up tight. Oh noes! Fortunately, a bunch of louts, one of whom has the key, have shown up to guard their recent dead from graverobbers! Hooray! But these aren't quite the dumbasses Severian and co. take them for, and so their attempt at guile fails and they have to rely on Eata just sneaking through the gate the louts have opened, so they have the excuse to hunt him down together.

So of course, because Gene Wolfe knows better than to ignore the dictates of Chekov's Graverobbers, Severian runs afoul of the graverobbers, who turn out to be, not just run of the mill ghouls or weirdos, but exultants -- members of the ruling class of Nessus who exhibit the extraordinary height and long limbs of, say, humans who evolved on a world with lower gravity, somewhere out there among the stars.*** One of these turns out to be Vodalus, the closest thing to a rebel leader Nessus seems to have; another is one Thea, a beautiful woman with a "heart shaped face" with whom Severian develops an obsession that is going to change his fate rather a lot. When Vodalus risks his life to protect Thea from the louts, Severian decides without deciding that he will now be a Vodalus partisan for life, and, for good measure, saves Vodalus' life. Drama button!

Vodalus is grateful in an offhand way and tosses Severian a coin that turns out to be a gold chrisos with a portrait of the Autarch on it. For some reason, Severian is somewhat surprised later on to find that the portrait bears no resemblance to Vodalus -- this being in a crisis in which Severian reveals to us that he considers himself to be insane. Hooray for unreliable narrators.

We then get a slice of apprentice torturer life, including a gruesome interlude with a maidservant who has just been partially flayed in "the full boot" and a visit to Severian's secret place, a mausoleum he chose for its coat of arms depicting a spaceship, a fountain and a rose (!!!!!!!!) before we meet a figure who won't actually be important until, oh, Urth of the New Sun, Triskele****. But he's moderately important in this bit, too, is the big doggie whose life Severian saves (or restores?), because it's in chasing him that Severian first stumbles into an unknown part of the Citadel, the Atrium of Time and meets Valeria, a pretty and dark-haired young woman in "antique" metallic clothing (ding ding! We know who Robert Borski thinks she is, in addition to who she is going to become, unless this is our first reading) who explains that all the clockfaces and sundials about the place aren't why it's called the Atrium of Time, but rather that they are there because it is the Atrium of Time, and treats Severian to a nice tea-time before saying cheery-bye. Hell of a name for a place, the Atrium of Time, what?

We next follow Severian, some time later, into what may well turn out to be a part of the House Absolute as well as part of the Citadel (both being the sort of places that are kind of everywhere and nowhere), though we never find out for sure. What we do know, is that its walls are lined with ancient paintings, and among them is Rudesind, a strange man whose job is to clean and restore them; he's been doing this for so long that he's about to begin working on a picture by the famous Fechin (an artist of such mythic stature that every person of a certain age in the land claims to have met him back in the day) for the second time in his lifetime. But as Severian first encounters him, he's working on something else, highly iconic for us 20th century reader:

The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The visor of this figure's helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation; in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and nothing more.

From this description and the discussion that follows, it's pretty obvious that this is a photograph (or painting of a photograph) of Neil Armstrong on the Moon. So this time around, my eyes got a little misty. Pardon me.

But then this thought occurs to me: if Borski is right, and everybody with whom gold is associated is to be understood as a relative of Severian's, does this mean we're to take Severian as a descendant of Armstrong's?

Of course, does it matter? Probably not. It's just interesting. Or not. At any rate, because Rudesind was telling a Vodalus story to some armigers (the class below exultants, aspiring to better but never getting the respect the exultants do and resentful of this), after the armigers leave, Severian tries to steer the conversation toward his hero, only to be disappointed when Rudesind has little to tell him beyond some wry observations about what's likely in store for Vodalus if Severian and his Guild ever get their hands on him. Rudesind then hustles Severian on his way to Master Ultan of the archivists, to whom Severian is supposed to bring a message from one of his own Masters.

And thus endeth Chapter the Fifth!

*Now that I know Alastair Reynolds is a New Sun fanboi, I can't help but enjoy imagining the giant lighthugging spaceship, Nostalgia for Infinity, which winds up spending a span of its life on a planet being used as a vast building, as a sort of homage to the Matachin Tower and the Citadel as a whole.

**Okay, either she's a rebel or she's in for the d'oh moment of all d'oh moments when she realizes later on who she saved. If she realizes it, which, I don't remember if she does because I don't have a "perfect" memory like Severian.

***Or maybe on Green Lune, who knows? Anyway, their great height is apparently genetic, so it's not like a single generation lived on the moon or someplace and came back; they represent almost an instance of speciation if they are returnees from the diaspora to outer space but it's unknown if their height is something that might be bred out of them since we don't know how mobile the classes are (but all signs point to "not very"). Severian tells us that, since the members of his Guild are only taken from the children of dead "clients" lots of the boys imagine themselves to be the children of exultants (no one ever imagines he's descended from stable-mucker types if he or she gets to imagine, just like no one who believes in reincarnation was ever a dung collector in his previous life; he was always Julius Caesar or somebody), but then wouldn't there be a lot of tall torturers around? As it is, people mostly seem to hate the exultants because they support the Autarch; look elsewhere for leadership of any overthrow movements. Except maybe not!

****Whose name, as far as I can tell, refers to the Celtic/Bronze Age art motif of three interlocking spirals and now I'm wondering if he appears three times rather than just the two I'm recalling right now, or if there is some other triple-symbolism associated with him that I've just never been smart enough to parse out?

100 Books #105 - Gene Wolfe's THE FIFTH HEAD OF CERBERUS

I have definitely joined the camp of those who consider The Fifth Head of Cerberus to be set in the same universe as Book of the New Sun/Long Sun/Short Sun. Indeed, the predicament in which Urth finds itself in BotNS now feels like the wages of the sins committed in the establishment of the societies described in Cerberus. Set on a double planet* some twenty light-years from Earth/Urth a good hundred years (at least) since its colonization by the French, who named one planet St. Anne and the other St. Croix, the three novellas comprising the book are haunted by a terrible consequence of that colonization, one that seems to be typical of humans among the stars in this universe -- and in our own.

For St. Croix, at least, was not uninhabited when we got there. But the aboroginals -- abos for short -- didn't survive our coming for long. And now theories abound as to how and why that is so -- or if, indeed, it is. Some St. Annes, at least, are obsessed with a theory that the abos had once been human, descended from an earlier wave of human expansion, which would mean that they had killed off their own kind. No one seems sure if that makes it better or worse.

Another theory is that the abos possessed the power to mimic humans so successfully that they then lost their power of perfect mimicry, lost it because the humans they mimic don't possess it, and either lived among the humans in forgetful secrecy as St. Anne/St. Croix society developed or, in one radical interpretation, actually killed off and replaced the human colonists and live on now believing they are the colonists themselves. How would they know?

It's to haunting ideas like these that Wolfe scholars like Robert "Solar Labyrinth" Borski point when they start talking about the predicament of Urth in Severian's day as a punishment inflicted on humanity by alien intelligences of the kind of awesome power we only get glimpses of until we encounter them full bore in Urth of the New Sun. I'm trying not to get spoilery here, but if the kind of unwitting bad behavior that founded is at all typical of how humans from Urth behave among the stars, no wonder the megatherians are fighting behind to keep Severian and other candidates from fulfilling their potential.

Even without the game of drawing connections to Wolfe's later work (The Fifth Head of Cerberus is only the second book Wolfe published; the dude was just warming up, here)**, these three novellas are satisfying reads in their own right, though when you're done with them you'll have spent so much of your brainspace on puzzling out all the questions of identity, in particular, that they pose, that you might doubt your own.

The titular novella concerns a boy growing up in a high end brothel, whose father specializes in customizing his employees in ways the airbrush artists at fashion magazines could only dream of, but using a similar aesthetic, and who is himself the product of generations of experimentation not unlike what he himself practices in his lab as he grows up. The second, "A Story by John V. Marsch"*** is told from the point of view of a minor character in "The Fifth Head of Cerberus", an anthropologist who is either making up or participating in a story of the lost abo culture and its first terrible contact with humanity. The third, "V.R.T." riffs on themes in the first two, calls into question all the assumptions the reader may have been making on the first read of those two, and sends her back to read them again to see whether she was wrong, right, confused or had been hit on the head by something and just dreamed them.

Yeah, it's like that. Because it's, you know, Gene Wolfe.

*Which itself seems an awful lot like the double-planet system to which the Whorl brings its colonists at the end of Book of the Long Sun, one world being blue and one green. But Gene Wolfe, when pressed "doesn't know" why this motif of Urth/Lune, St. Croix/St. Anne, Blue/Green recurs.

**But this is an irresistible game. For instance, we know that some of the inhabitants of Urth in Severian's time are returnees from the stars, returnees who came back weirdly changed and perhaps not altogether human (kind of like, say, the Ascians [BotNS spoiler alert] of whom it is impossible not to think when the protagonist of the middle story sees Shadow Children riding men like ponies) and brought back various odd creatures, and might even have terraformed the moon to make it into Green Lune out of homesickness for having a sister planet in their night sky.

***Prefiguring his strange and weirdly entertaining Pandora by Holly Hollander, Wolfe seems to like to play with the concept of authorship in titles more than any other writer ever.

SUNS, SUNS, SUNS, Here they Come!

Welcome to yet another group read at Kate of Mind, this one of (at least) the first five novels of Gene Wolfe's famous "Solar Cycle", The Book of the New Sun, consisting of, for our purposes, Shadow of the Torturer, Claw of the Concilator, Sword of the Lictor, Citadel of the Autarch, and the sort-of stand-alone coda Urth of the New Sun. It's a smaller group than I re-read The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings for over the summer, only consisting right now of myself and SJ over at The Snobbery* for sure, but Alastair Reynolds and a few others intimated that they might join us, too.

At any rate, we agreed not to work off a schedule this time; it began to feel too much like work, Puttin' the Blog in Balrog did, after a while, and there are challenges enough to be had in taking on these books without the added psychological burden of deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise.

We're also, because we are geniuses, starting up during National Novel Writing Month. Which is to say that irregularity will be, as it were, de rigeur. For instance, SJ still isn't quite ready to start yet, so while I'm waiting for her to be ready (and she is participating in NaNoWriMo for the first time ever, and is raising four children (plus husband and her father), and... and... and...), I'm having a look at yet another Gene Wolfe, that is brand new to me, that is sometimes considered to be a prequel of sorts to The Book of the New Sun, The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

Call it my version of SJ's pre-PtBiB examination of The Silmarillion.

And yes, if people are down with it after we finish Urth of the New Sun, we sure can move on to the Book of the Long Sun (four novels) and the Book of the Short Sun (three novels). I will myself, but am fully prepared for others to drop off. This is not because I consider myself more reader than you, but because I already know I like them and have been itching for an excuse to return to this world.

Meanwhile, there's still plenty of time to hunt up copies of these novels and join us. If you do want to join us, leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter. I'll do as SJ did with PtBiB and keep a links roundup for any posts folks write related to this.

*Who owes me for my slogging through all of the Harry Potter novels AND all of the Dark Tower books this year.

UPDATE: And lo did the Great and Terrible Oliveri just hit me with this slab of awesome, which I unilaterally and without discussion declare the theme song for this here readalong.

100 Books #104 - Louis L'Amour's SACKETT'S LAND

You've got to admire, or at least smile at, this founding document of the fictional Sackett dynasty, not only for its main character's, Barnabas Sackett's* minute consciousness of the fact that he is a founder of a dynasty, but for how he (again, very consciously) goes about doing so. For while, as his companion Jubain tells him early in the story "some of the great families of the world were founded with nothing but a sword and a strong right arm," Barnabas is all about establishing something other than just another coat of arms for his descendants to polish and admire and lord it over the neighbors over in Britain.

He knows there's more out there in the newly discovered Americas. And he's going to do something about that.

But first! I love that what really starts Barnabas moving towards Illustrious Ancestor status is the discovery of a small cache of ancient coins, which leads to the discovery of a small cadre of people who are devoted to acquiring and studying them. So thus L'Amour's fictional exploration of where the settlers who took over and exploited the American West came from is starting with people who are interested in exploring where they came from, all the way back to the pre-Roman Iceni.

I'm reminded a bit of Edward Rutherford, in a way, he of the 10,000 year story-line. But that's not really what L'Amour is up to. He, like Barnabas, is chiefly interested in the past as a springboard into the future; those coins Barnabas finds are worth a life-changing amount of money, which would make for a pretty interesting story right there, but it wouldn't really make for a L'Amour story, would it?

For a real plot-propeller, L'Amour turns to the good old angry aristocrat. The day Barnabas brings his coins to a local antiquarian enthusiast also winds up being the day he witnesses one doing something dumb in front of a pretty lady, and if there's one thing such types hate more than the Laughter of Women, its having witnesses when they provoke it. The fact that said aristocrat already has reason to hate Barnabas (unknown to Barnabas at the time) doesn't help.

Barnabas has to Get Out of Dodge. Which he does, though not in the way that he planned.

What I like best about Barnabas, and this first Sackett novel, is that this Big Damn Hero could very plainly accomplish his goals by following in his mercenary father's footsteps; Barnabas is "as strong as two men" and his father taught him every sword-fighting trick in the book.

But Barnabas is determined to succeed by his wits instead. Even if sometimes it seems a bit perverse of him to do so.

It's as if Jayne Cobb decided to knuckle down and master business administration. Who wouldn't want to read that? And who wouldn't want to know what happens next?

*And as a matter of fact, no, I was not, in fact, able to stop thinking of Barnabas Collins through this, and yes, kept expecting him to meet a vampire on his journeys. Why do you ask?