Gene Wolfe: The Book of the New Sun
I bought the two-volume set, and I have a quarrel with the blurb. On it, no less a writer than Ursula LeGuin calls Wolfe's work "breathtakingly original". No, it isn't. The Book of the New Sun can be truthfully summed up as Elric of Melniboné in Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Add a pinch of Lovecraft and trace amounts of other ingredients, run the whole thing through a thesaurus, and voilá: the Book of the New Sun. Breathtakingly original? Hardly.
If that's true, then why does the same blurb say that it's been voted the best fantasy work ever, after the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit? Because it is the best fantasy since Tolkien. Maybe it isn't built from the most amazingly original blocks, but I don't care, because it's mind-blowingly good. If you haven't read it, you must.
Wolfe is a narrator and, in Tolkien's terms, sub-creator, second to no modern fantasy or SF writer. The attraction of the books isn't so much the world itself, or even the narrative or characters, although I have nothing bad to say about any of them. It's the pure skill with which he weaves everything into an incredibly immersive and compelling text. The four volumes of the Book of the New Sun are that rare kind of fiction that you can't put down, and wish would never end.
I'm struggling to think of some kind of negative "however" here, but I don't really have one. Other than the afterwords, in which Wolfe pretends he's created the text by translating it from an original, which are stupid and only detract from the story. Don't read them, and you'll be better off. His taste for obscure words may take a bit of stomaching; it's a fine line between creating an exotic feeling and pure sophistry. I think it works, but that might conceivably be a sticking point.
Having said that, I can't recommend these books highly enough. If you're at all interested in fantasy and haven't read them, go do so. Now.
No comments:
Post a Comment