The Fifth Head Of Cerberus (1994) - Plot & Excerpts
Oh Gene Wolfe why can't I quit you?! Constantly frustrated by your boring viewpoint characters (your secondary ones tend to be so much more interesting!), your constant practice of leaving out the 'good bits' of the story (only to refer to them, if at all, obliquely and second-hand later), and your monomaniacal need to make every story a goddamn puzzle! But I keep coming back for more...keep hoping this time it will be different and I'll get the full experience, be completely immersed, not just find a few excellent bits and flounder amongst the rest. I know it's not you, it's me. I'm just not a good enough reader for you...but dammit I can't stop trying!So here we are with _The Fifth Head of Cerberus_. I will admit right off that even the title of this one confuses me. One thing to note: if you don’t want a bunch of mysteries ruined before you even start and you have the SF Masterworks edition I read then *don’t read the frickin’ introduction!* Damn, I hate it when they write intros to books that spoil key plot and character elements, what’s up with that? Of course, after you finish you might find it helpful in figuring some things out. ‘Fifth Head’ is really a set of three interconnected novellas as opposed to a ‘true’ novel. All of them take place on the binary sister worlds of Ste. Anne and Ste. Croix, apparently initially colonized by French settlers who seem to have wiped out the original aboriginal population and who were themselves supplanted by a succeeding wave of colonization from Earth. The first section, the eponymous ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’, is narrated by a man recalling his strange youth in a brothel on the world of Ste. Croix. He tells us of his early life with his brother David as they matured under the watchful eye of their robot guardian-cum-teacher Mr. Million and the all-pervasive though mysterious presence of their somewhat sinister father. Rest assured not all things are as they appear (it’s a Gene Wolfe story after all), but I won’t spoil the apparent revelations about the man and his family. Of course since it *is* a Gene Wolfe story many of these ‘revelations’ are oblique and circumstantial to say the least…so take your conclusions with a grain of salt. Suffice it to say that Wolfe’s obsessions with identity and memory play a central role in this story and the fact that many of the key events of the tale happen ‘off-screen’ (or are expressed via the unreliable first-hand narration of the main character…damn Mr. Wolfe loves him some unreliable narration) leaves any final conclusion dubious at best. This is primarily a tale of a son coming to the point in his life where he must come to terms with his own identity and challenge his father for supremacy…or is he really challenging himself? Hmmm...The next tale, ‘”A Story”, by John V. Marsch’, is perhaps both the most straightforward and at the same time the most confusing section of the book. It purports to be a tale written by John Marsch, an anthropologist from Earth who has come to visit the twin system in the hopes of discovering some remnant of the mysterious native ‘Abos’, and who played a minor role in the previous story. The narrative is written as though it were a folktale of the Abos of Ste. Anne and details the adventures of John Sandwalker, his estranged twin brother John Eastwind, and the conflict between their two tribes: the hill dwelling ‘Free People’ and the marsh dwelling cannibals of the meadowmeres. There are also the mysterious ‘Shadow Children’ who may simply be magical creatures of the Otherworld, or perhaps they’re extraterrestrials…then again could they actually be the original natives? Whoever they are, they are a mysterious and protean group that seems to exist in a liminal state between the real world and the dreamworld of the mind and who play the role of both bogey-man and preternatural benefactors simultaneously. Identity and consciousness again play key roles in the story and I must admit that the main character’s habit of apparently passing between the ‘real’ world and the ‘dream world’ without notable cues and the way in which memory and perception of the here-and-now seemed to blend together made this section a bit challenging for me.The final section, ‘V.R.T.’, veers into the Kafkaesque as our old friend, the apparently earth-born anthropologist John Marsch, travels from Ste. Anne to Ste. Croix where he runs afoul of the local authorities. This section is primarily composed of snippets of text from various sources: Marsch’s journals and scientific papers from his field work on Ste. Anne undertaken in the hopes of finding a living remnant of the original inhabitants of the planet, and his memoirs and interrogation tapes from his time in prison on Ste. Croix. All of these disparate elements are being reviewed (in a haphazard sequence and piecemeal I might add) by a local agent of the police who has been asked to decide on Marsch’s ultimate fate. The overarching fear and paranoia endemic to a police state play a large role in this section as do, once again, the issues of identity and memory. The ennui and total disinterest of the police agent as he reviews the sad facts of the case of Dr. Marsch brings into sharp focus the horror and paranoia that underlies this tale. Our confusion (or mine anyway) is only exacerbated when these ‘facts’ as reported by Marsch become less and less reliable as he obviously becomes more and more unhinged by the events that overtake him. Or does he? Perhaps something mysterious really did happen during his journey to ‘the back of beyond’ on St. Anne in which he had only one local guide (who claimed to be half-Abo) as a companion. What mystery, if any, did he discover out there and what happened to him as a result? I’ll leave it to you to discover this.Did I mention that legends state the Abos were shapeshifters? And that there are theories not only that they still exist, but may even have subsumed the human population so effectively that they have in essence become the human population? Well, let’s just add that to the pile of mysteries Wolfe brings to his set of tales. This is definitely a ‘Wolfean’ story: many, if not all, of Wolfe’s primary hobby-horses are in evidence, from a fascination with memory and identity, to unreliable narrators and key pieces of the puzzle never being revealed (or only revealed after the fact and behind a curtain as it were). If that’s your bag you’ll like this one and it will definitely bear re-reading and give you plenty of food for thought…I’m still left with an empty feeling inside though. As with nearly every adventure I take with Mr. Wolfe I just wish I was better equipped to parse his lingo, to see between the cracks in that way he so obviously wants me to. Sometimes I think I succeed, if only in small way, but I still end up coming away thinking: ‘that would have been an awesome story if it just came together and maybe made a bit more sense!’
Copied from my Blog reviewSynopsisThe novel is a cycle of stories, consisting of three novellas which share two common planets – Sainte Croix and twin-planet Sainte Anne -, a common character – John V. Marsch, and common topics about identity, humanity, and memory.The Fifth Head of CerberusThe first novella is a coming-of-age story with a narrator called “Number Five” written from a first person point of view. He looks back at his youth on planet Sainte Croix, the murder of his father and his way to freedom. He was brought up in a luxurious brothel, which financed his father’s genetical experiments on him and his brother David. He meets anthropologist Dr. Marsch and gets to know that he is a descendant of a “family” of clones. Sick of the terrible experiments, he decides to kill his father, gets caught, is imprisoned. Free again, he returns to his old home, only to repeat his father’s history, because he cannot change.‘A Story’ by John V. MarschThe second novella shifts planet and time to the sister planet Sainte Anne and the ancient past. It tells of the aborigines Sandwalker who searches his kidnapped brother Eastwind. He meets humans of another race, the mythical “Shadow Children”, who influence a starship to land. The brothers’ identities merge and one meets the arriving French people who will colonize the planet. By the time of Number Five several centuries later it’s even argued that the abos have been entirely wiped out.V. R. T.The last novella is about the H. R. Haggard “She” like diary of anthropologist Dr. Marsch, read by an officer on Sainte Croix. Marsch was mistakenly arrested for murder in the Fifth Head of Cerberus. The diary tells of Marsch’s adventures on Sainte Croix where he wanted to study the aborigines. At some point it becomes clear, that Marsch is really replaced by a shape-changing aborigine.ReviewThis is a brilliantly narrated Gothic Mystery, a pivotal story in Gene Wolfe’s writing career and one of the high points of 1970s Science Fiction.“When I was a boy my brother David and I had to go to bed early whether we were tired or not.”This first sentence echoes Proust and is the beginning of a masterpiece in prose, world-building, and engaging riddles. The setting of this coming-of-age novella is a future turned to past: slavery friendly Fin de Siècle, post-colonial French town called Port-Mimizon on planet Sainte Croix. The narrator’s home remembers me a bit of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast with its grotesqueness.You can read the novella as a straight-forward story, but revisiting it leads to the included riddles. Just to name a few: Number Five’s real name, his relation to his girl-friend Phaedria, the nature of the five heads of Cerberus. I won’t point out the solutions here, but if you’re curious, there is a great Wiki resolving all those riddles.The novella is one of the SF genre’s early discussions of cloning, evolution theory, and human identity: Identity is not only a matter of genes and environment, but also of the soul. By duplicating his father’s life, he denies his individuality.Besides of the intellectually interesting details, the novella is exciting, emotional, wonderfully Kafkaesque, and full of great ideas. But it is also ambiguous and leaves some elements unresolved – so, if you’re a friend of clear words and fixed endings, then Wolfe might not be your preferred author.
What do You think about The Fifth Head Of Cerberus (1994)?
There's a preoccupation with doubling and shifting identity in The Fifth Head of Cerberus that brought Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa to mind, though the two books are otherwise quite dissimilar. There's none of Potocki's fascination with the occult here, and, as another reviewer aptly observed, Wolfe's concerns are in fact political: domination, conquest, identity, hybridity. The two books differ as well in their shape and topology: While Manuscript is constructed as a series of nested frame tales (sometimes descending so deeply that your ability to maintain context is severely taxed), the many stories enter the novel like a thread unspooled in a labyrinth, and it's easy enough to find your way out. But The Fifth Head of Cerberus, though it only comprises three distinct stories, is a knot.(Having said that, I'm not sure that I think that this book is as opaque as some of the other reviewers indicate; I do think that a second reading would clear up a few questions.)
—Jacob
Gene Wolfe is difficult to praise highly enough without sounding unconvincing. One can urge people to read his work, claim that he's one of the greatest living writers in the English language regardless of genre (indeed, perhaps the greatest), one can ramble on about his virtues for hours to friends and strangers, and in the end, to those who have not read him, the claims start to sound unhinged, even deranged. "Aren't you overselling him just a tad?" they inevitably ask. To this I can only say: read some of his work and see. "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" is perhaps the best place to start, not because it is his easiest work (it is not), but because is both fairly compact and an example of Wolfe at his best. The commitment is smaller than if you launch in to the Latro books, or "The Book of the New Sun", but the joy to be had on reading is no smaller. You will know soon enough if Wolfe is, for you, all that his admirers say he is. I say "for you" because taste in literature is inevitably personal, and perhaps you will find that Wolfe is not what you are seeking. Perhaps, however, you will find that he is, and if so, you have a wonderful treat awaiting you. I suggest that you not read any review of this book that describes the plot. In fact, I suggest that, if you choose to buy the book, you avoid reading overly much about it, looking at the cover image, or reading the back cover copy. None of them will improve your experience of the text. No summary will do you any good, anyway. I could explain the plot of in a couple of moments, and it would in no way convey the pleasure that reading it will bring to you. In fact, knowing anything about the plot at all will explain nothing about why you want to read it, and might, in fact give one precisely the wrong impression about why one would want to read it. Wolfe is said to have claimed "my definition of good literature is that which can be read by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure." "The Fifth Head of Cerberus" is, by that standard, some of the very best literature there is. Immediately after I first read the book, I was driven to read it again. I have since re-read it perhaps five or six times over the course of many years, and each time I find both that understand the book better, and that, like a bottle of incredible wine, aging has only improved the content. I would normally be reluctant to give five stars to any work, but not in this case. Can this book really compete with, say, "Moby Dick", or "Hamlet", or "Lolita", or "Ulysses" in the canon of great literature? I claim yes, it does. See for yourself. I will close with a few remarks to serve someone newly encountering Wolfe's work. He is a master craftsman, and makes few if any mistakes in shaping the intricate puzzle boxes he hands to his readers. Every sentence in a book has been placed there for a reason. No detail of character, setting or action is described thoughtlessly, and no detail will be described to you twice. Wolfe does not telegraph his motives or paint a summary on a billboard -- he expects a thoughtful reader. That said, I discourage you from treating his works as mystery stories or as a game to be solved. They are not. You should not be attempting to commit each line to memory, and should not try to drain every last bit of meaning from them on first reading. You will not succeed, and it will serve no purpose. Instead, dive in, enjoy the elegant prose, hang on to the galloping story as it carries you forward, and marvel at the form of the whole as you reach the end. When you inevitably wonder about something you may have missed, worry not -- you can and will enjoy the work even more on re-reading.
—Perry
The Review:Background Context:Before I begin, lets set some background to plot so you'll know what the hell I'm talking about. OK so there are two colony planets that orbit earth in this novel; Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix. During a time of human exploration and war, the planets were founded and settled by the French [hence the French names]. Sainte Croix has slaves where Sainte Anne does not. Sainte Anne is where the Annes or shortened Abos come from, the aboriginals before the French if you li
—Sophie Dusting
