Book review
Jan. 12th, 2013 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brushwolfLast week I went through Howl's Moving Castle but the post which had the review had some other stuff and was access/friends list locked. Please let me know if you think I should repost it as its own separate entity! This week, I went through The Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe.
The only times I'd seen this one referred to or reviewed before, it was pretty highly praised, so I was eager to go read this. I knew sort of the basic story; Severian, the torturer, falls in love with a "client" and kills her rather than have her die slowly in terrible agony. This turns out to be not entirely true; that's about half the book, and in that half, Severian goes from being a mere apprentice to being a journeyman, meeting a mysterious revolutionary bound to be important in follow-up stories, meets the "client" and falls in love with her, and sneaks her a knife which she uses to kill herself (Severian isn't sure she's going to do that) rather than face further torture.
You know the whole thing about "show, don't tell"? That's very much what happens in this half the book. While this chunk of story is going on, Wolfe's throwing in details about Severian's world, so far in the future that things like moon landings are now old quasi-mythology, and dominated by a huge and powerful empire, governed by a seemingly godlike Autarch, with big powerful ancient guilds like the Torturers based out of this huge, sprawling, Gormenghast-like "Citadel" which is pretty obviously built in and around what used to be spaceships. A mix of anachronisms - animals include huge borophagid dogs and dire wolves, peltasts carry transparent shields, and the setting's still overall quasi-late-medieval - kept my expectations really off balance. It was seriously easy to fall for the beautiful world-building.
Another weird thing I really liked here; the noblewoman that Severian falls for is ridiculously highly placed. Enough that her swift, painless death is politically embarrassing such that the Guild can't simply kill Severian and forget the whole thing. And he never actually has sex with her, much as he'd like - he's completely obsessed with her, and she thinks he's this nice kid who thinks a lot for a Torturer. That was kind of an interesting touch. The political embarrassment means that the Guild ships Severian off to be a headsman in rural nowhere.
And this is where the book kinda falls apart at least for me.
The short form of what happens; Severian falls in with some theatrical types, and then a brother-sister team of con artists try to get his sword, even though he's been given it to use in executions and there's no way he'll give it up. They try even harder once they use the pommel to hide this amazingly valuable gem significant to a religious order - both of which presumably will show up later. They try to get hold of the sword by staging a rigged duel to the death using this weird viciously poisonous future plant leaf, with the idea being that the winner gets to keep the loser's stuff (which would include the sword), and it takes Severian a while to figure it out, because until he survives the duel mysteriously, he's pretty sure the duel is unrelated to the con artists and is some sort of political deal. Finding the right viciously poisonous future plant involves going to this weird future botanical garden full of odd details like the pond full of dead bodies and an area where people get amnesia and wander aimlessly, which is where Severian picks up this pretty blond with amnesia who helps him later.
Reading my summary of the second half of the book, it seems weird and rambly. It's far more weird and rambly in the actual book, especially after that amazing beginning. It's still well-written technically, but overall, the effect is as if the first half is something like Middle Earth or Earthsea where you're completely in love with the book, and then the second half has you going huh what?
There are sequels. I kind of want to read them.
The only times I'd seen this one referred to or reviewed before, it was pretty highly praised, so I was eager to go read this. I knew sort of the basic story; Severian, the torturer, falls in love with a "client" and kills her rather than have her die slowly in terrible agony. This turns out to be not entirely true; that's about half the book, and in that half, Severian goes from being a mere apprentice to being a journeyman, meeting a mysterious revolutionary bound to be important in follow-up stories, meets the "client" and falls in love with her, and sneaks her a knife which she uses to kill herself (Severian isn't sure she's going to do that) rather than face further torture.
You know the whole thing about "show, don't tell"? That's very much what happens in this half the book. While this chunk of story is going on, Wolfe's throwing in details about Severian's world, so far in the future that things like moon landings are now old quasi-mythology, and dominated by a huge and powerful empire, governed by a seemingly godlike Autarch, with big powerful ancient guilds like the Torturers based out of this huge, sprawling, Gormenghast-like "Citadel" which is pretty obviously built in and around what used to be spaceships. A mix of anachronisms - animals include huge borophagid dogs and dire wolves, peltasts carry transparent shields, and the setting's still overall quasi-late-medieval - kept my expectations really off balance. It was seriously easy to fall for the beautiful world-building.
Another weird thing I really liked here; the noblewoman that Severian falls for is ridiculously highly placed. Enough that her swift, painless death is politically embarrassing such that the Guild can't simply kill Severian and forget the whole thing. And he never actually has sex with her, much as he'd like - he's completely obsessed with her, and she thinks he's this nice kid who thinks a lot for a Torturer. That was kind of an interesting touch. The political embarrassment means that the Guild ships Severian off to be a headsman in rural nowhere.
And this is where the book kinda falls apart at least for me.
The short form of what happens; Severian falls in with some theatrical types, and then a brother-sister team of con artists try to get his sword, even though he's been given it to use in executions and there's no way he'll give it up. They try even harder once they use the pommel to hide this amazingly valuable gem significant to a religious order - both of which presumably will show up later. They try to get hold of the sword by staging a rigged duel to the death using this weird viciously poisonous future plant leaf, with the idea being that the winner gets to keep the loser's stuff (which would include the sword), and it takes Severian a while to figure it out, because until he survives the duel mysteriously, he's pretty sure the duel is unrelated to the con artists and is some sort of political deal. Finding the right viciously poisonous future plant involves going to this weird future botanical garden full of odd details like the pond full of dead bodies and an area where people get amnesia and wander aimlessly, which is where Severian picks up this pretty blond with amnesia who helps him later.
Reading my summary of the second half of the book, it seems weird and rambly. It's far more weird and rambly in the actual book, especially after that amazing beginning. It's still well-written technically, but overall, the effect is as if the first half is something like Middle Earth or Earthsea where you're completely in love with the book, and then the second half has you going huh what?
There are sequels. I kind of want to read them.