The Shadow of the Torturer

"I would not want to call this one a resolved series, because one of the most important things about it is that when you’ve read it all the way through, it doesn’t make any sense to you until you’ve read it twice. Only on the second pass, when you know the structures of what’s happening, do you have the ability to understand, remotely, what actually occurred even in chapter one – in an amazing way. Gene Wolfe is my model for how complicated a world build can be, and how deep and layered; and also for how complicated a narrator can be, and how many layers there can be to peel back as you learn more about them, like the layers of an onion. Book of the New Sun initiated what we now call ‘deep future SF’. It takes place so far in earth’s future that every mountain has been carved into a portrait of a king by now – that’s just what mountains are shaped like. Everywhere you dig a hole, there’s a city underneath. And space travel and contact with aliens was so long ago that it’s lost in the depths, not of history, but of mythology – before even the currently remembered eras of humanity. We’re so far in the future, in fact, that the sun is growing dim and the earth is getting cold. It’s an incredibly worked-through and deep world. You’re plunged into a culture that is understood by your narrator, but who doesn’t know what you don’t know. So he’s often describing things that you have no apparatus to understand, and you have to figure it out as you go. There are moments where he’s describing, say, a castle with a tower made out of a strange metal that has a magical furnace in the bottom – and you realise it’s a parked space shuttle. But you have to figure that out, because that’s not a concept to him anymore. It’s just an incredibly intricate, often cruel and frustrating read. My own metric as I write is always, I will never be as mean as Gene Wolfe; when a character hasn’t shown up for two and a half books and you don’t remember who they are, I will remind you, which he does not. But for all that difficulty, the depth of them and the payoff as you get deeper through this incredible world is just gorgeous… It’s gorgeous to think about what it’s like for a culture to accumulate that long, and then use that to reflect on how many layers our own culture has. Yes, we have one narrator, Severian. He is an apprentice torturer who works in an enormous castle at the edge of an enormous, strange city, and he was raised there in the strange unquestioning expectation that it’s his job to carry out bizarre and gruesome executions for a distant society. We watch him move through the world and come to understand it better. If I tried to pretend that there was a plot, it would be misleading, because whenever it seems like there’s plot, you realise you need to back away from it. It has a structure like Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître , or like Tristram Shandy . There’s a great moment toward the end of book one, where we’re travelling with a caravan of people through a gateway, and suddenly there’s a battle. We don’t know who either side of the battle is. We were in the middle of being told a story about these magic beans that a woman brought back from a travel to a strange place that’s probably another planet, which has something to do with this weird river… and then in the middle of the story about magic beans, we are interrupted, and a battle between people that we don’t know and different people that we don’t know occurs. And that’s the end of book one! Then book two starts six months later in a different place, and we never find out the end of any of what was going on in that scene. Because the point of it isn’t any micro element of plot: it’s this much larger, much deeper progress of the earth, on the scale of millennia. One of the things he does by introducing you into what feels like a traditional plot – say, a battle with sides – and then cutting away, is to get you to realise that you should never be invested in ‘what’s happening’. What’s happening is incidental in the course of history. You need to be invested in understanding the world and its structures, and time and its structures, and space and its structures. The actual plot is: Severian gradually gets to understand the world better, and so do we. There’s one chapter which is just the narrator sitting on a rock, looking up at the night sky, watching the stars move and thinking. He’s going through all of the philosophy and ethics and ideas about the creation of the universe that he has, and nothing occurs in this chapter; he doesn’t even physically move. There is literal stasis, except for the slow turning of the planet. But it’s one of the most pivotal and exciting chapters in the whole series, because the reflections on this world and philosophy and time are what it’s about . So if you like big ideas books and puzzle box books where you’re trying to figure out what’s going on, and deep world building and reflections on time and space, then it’s a wonderful series. If you want to know what happened at the end of the battle, you will be extremely frustrated."