This review covers both volumes of the Wizard Knight duology.Gene Wolfe and I have an interesting relationship. Of course we have no actual relationship at all aside that which belongs to any reader/writer pair, but since I'm reviewing a book that's fair enough. Here's the thing: I really want to be one of those people who can sing Gene Wolfe's praises to the sky and knowingly wink about all of those complex and enigmatic stories that I totally got the first time I read them. But I can't. Don't get me wrong, Wolfe is obviously a huge talent and I like much of what he's done, but sometimes I just think he's more concerned with composing an elegant literary puzzle than he is with just giving us a good story. And sometimes I'm not even sure the supposedly complex literary puzzle is even there. I mean, have you ever perused some of the ideas and theories about everything Gene Wolfe has written that are on the Urth listserv (http://www.urth.net/urth/)? Have you? I dare you to go and wade through even 1/8 of them. Good. You back? Now....do you believe it!? I mean, it's crazy, right? There's no way that anyone knows everything about everything the way Wolfe apparently does and then codes all of those nuances into every word and punctuation mark he's ever written, right? Right!? Please say you agree, because I like to think I'm a pretty smart guy, but just glancing at some of those supposed 'references' and subtexts that Wolfe is apparently making makes me feel like a total moron.Also, there's the fact that many of Wolfe's protagonists are, how to say it? Generally pretty annoying people, I think is the phrasing. I'm looking at you Patera Silk! I mean, really, can any of you tell me that you actually got part way through the books of the Long Sun without wanting to reach into the text and slap Patera Silk silly and tell him to "Fucking wake up!"? I mean, following this dude around for four large size books as he well-meaningly drifts in a holy stupor from one crisis to the next, forever agonizing over his moral inferiority is a fairly trying experience. And Severian? Well, let's just say that the boy's got some issues, even beyond the obvious. At least Latro has the excuse of actual brain damage for his behaviour.All of this is merely a preamble to say, I understand and feel for all of you that scratch your head and wonder what all the fuss is about when everyone and their brother (I'm looking at you Neil Gaiman and you too John Clute) go on about how Wolfe is the Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and Proust of the speculative fiction world and if you just don't get it you're just not trying hard enough, damn it. I love most of the Books of the New Sun, though it took me two read-throughs for that; I thought the Books of the Short Sun had some of the most amazing writing he's done and I look forward to going back for my second dip; and man, those Books of the Long Sun? Well....I really _want_ to like them, I mean there's some really cool ideas buried there underneath all of that Patera Silk.Anywho, I'm supposed to be talking about The Knight in this review so maybe I better start that now. This book and it's companion volume The Wizard are my very favourite of Wolfe's books that I've read thus far. To be fair they already had a leg up on the others due to the fact that they mix three things I really love: Norse mythology, Christian mysticism, and Chivalric romances into a rather tasty stew. Maybe this simply means that I'm getting a few more of the references that I'd have otherwise missed if this were one of his other works. Regardless, I thought Wolfe did a great job blending those things into a believable and really interesting world.The protagonist, Able, is a lot like most of Wolfe's other protagonists (that I've come across thus far anyway) in that he's another variation on the holy innocent archetype, with an emphasis on the innocent (in the sense of naive, NOT morally blameless) and much less so on the holy. He's a boy from our own world who wakes up one day to find himself magically transported to a medieval fantasy world and given a push onto the road of a magical destiny. All sounds pretty pedestrian so far, right? Well, keep in mind that Wolfe is doing something different here from the run of the mill quest fantasy. Able goes through a lot of growing pains on his journeys, from falling in love with an elven fairy who turns him into a full-blooded man (both literally and figuratively) a bit ahead of time, gaining a demon-dog companion and accreting to himself one of the motliest bands of travellers this side of Russell Hoban's Pilgermann. Able really does grow significantly from one book to the next as he learns to earn the manhood that was thrust upon him and goes from callowly fulfilling most of his adolescent male power fantasies to taking upon himself the load of responsibility that his position ultimately earns him.There are some really great characters here that cross Able's path, from the lovable hound Gylf and the loyal manservant Pouk, to the irritating yet complex Svon and the suave, evil, and utterly likable, Garsecg. Even these secondary characters are allowed to learn and grow and do more than provide background colour for the tale of Sir Able of the Hight Heart (as he christens himself): Svon starts out as a real pain in the ass, a git we want to see humiliated in every way possible, but we learn to see him as something much more complex than a stuck up prig; and the story of Toug's growth from boy to man is at least as important, and central to the tale, as is Able's. In many ways Able acts not only as our window into the world that Wolfe has created, but also as the enabler (ha, en-Able-r...did you see what I did there?) for the growth of the secondary characters who have followed him throughout his story. Ultimately Able earns his place by growing into the man he needs to be and living in such a way that those people whose lives he has touched cannot help but react to him in a like manner and, for good or ill, become something more than they were.Edit, Nov. 28, 2011: I was going to demote _The Knight_ to a 4 star on this re-read given a few of Wolfe's tics that were bugging me in the middle of the book, but the ending, and those elements of it that do work so well for me, convinced me to keep the 5.
Wolfe is a flawed genius. I read this book and it's prequel in 48 hours while I with laid up with a cold. It is easily one of the best fantasy books I have ever read. I would put it an a shelf next to Lord of the Rings and Alice in Wonderland. While it's achievements are incredible it's shortcomings are equally enourmous. Wolfe as usual has created an enormous and breath takingly realized world. One that is vivid and recognizable as well as wondrous and strange as fantasy should be.His prose, dialogue and characters are masterfully done. His command of plot is stunning. As usual the mobius strip like creation he makes out of the over all plot is a tour-de-force- a puzzle that like a game of chess is working on many layers. A reader could return to the book again and again and find new hidden meanings and riddles. ( I still find myself scratching my head over the time travel trickery involved in his magnum opus The Book of the new Sun).However . . . unfortunately, Wolfe's strengths as a writer seem to have blinded him to a huge list of annoying tics and traits flaws that made hundreds of pages so unenjoyable it was at times unbearable to keep reading. The major ones are worth noticing for any writer, fantasy or otherwise:1. He often skips the battle scenes or glosses them over hastily.2. In order to create his abundance of puzzles and riddles his first-person unreliable narrators withhold essential infortmation over and over again. Pull this trick once in a great while and it is a formidable device with powerful results. But doing all the time and it feels like your being taken for a long ride by a story teller you can't trust. No reader enjoys that.3.The middle of the book should have been trimmed a lot. (Basically everything that occurs in the land of the giants is extremely dull.Unfortunately that's a third of the series. The beginning is 5 stars the end is 5 stars the middle is zero. I speculate that Wolfe knew his begining and end but created filler in order to stretch a 1 volume story into 2 volumes)4. His heros are too virtuous. The reader never feels there is much chance of the hero actually failing. 4.5 And because his heros are so dependable, his HUGE cast of supporting characters are sadly not given much to do. They do a lot but it has no GRAVITAS. It matters not, as they are overshadowed by the main character. Which is a shame because all of his characters are vivid and often quite beleivable. This is perhaps his biggest flaw.5. His characters spend way too much of the time playing 20 questions with eachother. Wittily fencing with eachother, trading little bits of information. It is a strange tic that he imbues all of his works with.Lastly all of Wolfe's work is basically a re-telling of the story of a Christ figure.This, and the fact that he is quite challenging is probably why he is not more popular.This writer is a maverick and his mistakes are as big as his talents.I am sure I will ponder this book for a long time to come. Likewise I don't plan on reading another book by Gene Wolfe for a long to to come either.
What do You think about The Knight (2005)?
Looking briefly at the other reviews here on Goodreads, one thing sticks out. You either love Wolfe, or you hate him. Any writer, aspiring author, or editor will surely cringe at the number of "writing rules" Wolfe breaks form the first sentence of any of his books. But guess what? It doesn't matter!Case in point. I heard about Wolfe from a scholarly article on First Things Magazine (!) and happened on him in an airport bookstore. The only book of his they had was The Knight, with a terrible cover and bad quality printing. Not a good beginning. But I had heard good things, so I jumped in. I was forty pages in, and only the fact that my backpack was cutting into my shoulder reminded me that I had been standing there for over half an hour, completely absorbed by his writing.That isn't to say he isn't flawed. Some of the action scenes are impossible to visualize, his style is so surreal. He also skips major events, coming back to them in retrospect, and sometimes a major plot point that he purposely doesn't reveal for a very long time, when revealed, fails to give the necessary "bang!"But all that doesn't matter, ultimately, because his writing is just gorgeous. No less a person than Neil Gaiman calls Wolfe the best writer in English alive today. I agree wholeheartedly.
—Nicholas Kotar
A lot of the books I've read this year have been the kind where you can just read it, take what it said at face value, and move on to the next. This is not one of those books. I'm always worried, when I read a Gene Wolfe book, that I didn't get it. That I missed something that was subtle. So I read his books carefully, then I think about them for awhile after. I tried to read this book way back in 2006, just when we were moving out of the condo and into our first house. I lost the book in the move, but so much of it stayed with me so powerfully. I know it's eight years later, and I'm only just now getting to the end of it, but a book like that doesn't just stay with you unless it has something. I struggled on 4 or 5 stars. Probably it's a 5 and I'm wrong, but I'll stick with my guns on it for awhile.I was wrong. Totally 5 stars.
—Liam Johnstone
Fool that I am, I tried reading this after giving up on Pirate Freedom by the same author. Still didn't work. Something about the beginning of Gene Wolfe's novels always captures me, but about halfway through, I realize how much I hate reading them and give up. This has happened both times. I'm really not a fan of his writing (possibly because I've not yet attained the level of intelligence required for it). I found the novel a load of gibberish, and I barely had a clue what was going on. The main character was writing a letter, but he didn't give his thoughts as a normal protagonist/letter writer would. Instead, readers find out about 25 pages after an event what Sir Able felt during the event, voices that he heard before the event... etc. It was... strange, to say the least. It's like the author just wrote down these scattered thoughts onto papers and bound them up. Verdict: not for me.
—Ryn
