ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.Gene Wolfe’s The Sword of the Lictor essentially contains no plot, but it’s the best plotless book I’ve ever read. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read, period. I loved every moment of it! (I read this on audio; Audible Frontiers' audio version, read by Jonathan Davis, is exceptional.)This third installment of The Book of the New Sun continues Severian’s journey from apprentice in the torturers’ guild to Autarch. He doesn’t seem to be getting any closer to his exalted position (if anything, I’d say farther) and we’re no closer to understanding how he’s going to get there. But that’s totally fine. Unburdened by a need to be anywhere or to achieve any goals or deadlines, Severian wanders the earth almost aimlessly, and it’s this wandering that’s so fascinating.For a reader who’s only anxious for action and story progression, The Sword of the Lictor is not likely to work and, indeed, I usually get annoyed with authors who take too long to tell their stories. However, when I’m reading Gene Wolfe, it not only works — it is pure delight. For Wolfe’s old earth, set in a far future when the sun is dying (similar to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth), is full of wonder and amazement and he tells us all about it in his simple but elegant style:“… authors are so anxious to move their stories forward (however wooden they may be, advancing like market carts with squeaking wheels that are never still, though they go only to dusty villages where the charm of the country is lost and the pleasures of the city will never be found)… The assassin who holds a dagger to his victim’s neck is eager to discuss the whole matter, and at any length the victim or the author may wish. The passionate pair in love’s embrace are at least equally willing to postpone the stabbing, if not more so… In life it is not the same…”I wish I could be there with Severian as he climbs down the steep cliff overhung with a waterfall and embedded with the fossils of earth’s lost architecture, and explores the round metal building that we recognize (but he doesn’t) as a spaceship… I’d love to tell you more and to discuss what it all means (there’s so much symbolism here), but then you’d miss the jaw-dropping, eye-widening, brain-expanding experience for yourself. I’ll just say that what Severian experiences on his journey perfectly captures the essence of excellent speculative fiction — it’s the reason I love SFF.Nobody creates such a sense of wonder and amazement, such truly unique and bizarre ideas, and relates them in such a beautiful way as Gene Wolfe does. I want to spend a lot more time exploring his world.
This is the third book in Gene Wolfe's fantastical, literary-aspiring Book of the New Sun tetralogy, and I won't say much about the cycle in its entirety here (see my reviews of the others for that). While the first book had Severian getting acquainted with Urth and its ways, and the second involved him in various intrigues near the city of Nessus, this is the one where he finally makes it to his posting as jailer/executioner in the provincial city of Thrax. Not surprisingly, circumstances eventually compel him to move on to points further.Compared to Shadow and Claw, this one is more of a road-tripping book, and thus is more episodic in structure. There’s not much going on that really advances the plot, unless you want to read it at an allegorical level, but I enjoyed getting a wider glimpse of the world, which, as you've no doubt figured out by now, is South America in the distant future. There's a cliffside city, an encounter with an old evil high in the mountains, and a strange fortress on a lakeside. Severian battles an Alzabo, one of the creepiest monsters I've come across in fiction in a while. And Wolfe does shed more light on the nature of characters and objects we've met already, such as Dorcas, the Claw, Agia, the Pelerines, the offworlders, and Doctor Talos and Baldanders. The science fiction elements of the story, always in the background, come more to the fore.As before, most significant events are occasions for some philosophical musings from Wolfe, which might get to be tedious for some readers, though I found them interesting. There are thoughts on the meaning of justice, being human versus being animal, and the impossibility of finding utopia without surrendering what drives us to seek it. Wolfe even seems to comment on his own goals as an author.“I fell to thinking about the worlds that circled [other] suns... At first I thought of green skies, blue grass, and all the rest of the childish exotica apt to inflict the mind that conceives of other than Urthly worlds. But, in time, I tired of those puerile ideas and began in their place to think of societies and ways of thought wholly different from our own... worlds where there was no currency but honor... worlds in which the long war between mankind and the beasts was pursued no more...”Sometimes a third book in a fantasy series will derail my interest in continuing it, but I'm pleased to say that that wasn't the case here. Something about the writing feels less fragmentary and more self-assured, too. I've mentioned before that Jonathan Davis is a great audiobook narrator, but I'll say it again.
What do You think about The Sword Of The Lictor (1986)?
There is some seriously funky unreliable narrator shit going on here. Especially in the beginning, lots of details are missing and filled in afterwards in strange ways.Perhaps more funky: that's one of the more interesting parts of the story. I'm wondering why the fuck he's doing this. Beyond that, I'm really bored. But I'm going to push onward. This may wind up being one of those series I read just I've got that under my belt. Classics and all that.Many of the descriptions are vivid and wonderful but I just can't decide if these books are terrible or just too artsy for me. I'm going to have to actually read some criticisms after I finish the next one. Because I want to know what the hell the intent here is.Yeah. I don't... it's kind of a classic wanderers tale type deal but I dunno, maybe it's that there's so little sense of agency in Severian's actions. He just moves from bizarre scene (two headed man dessicated in space-ship, wakes up to be previous king of the world or something) to bizarre scene (pick any scene from the book). Reading these books makes me feel drugged. I need a nap.There's lots of neat things going on - but most are just hints and never really fleshed out enough to make me care.TWO AND A HALF STARSBecause I just don't know.
—Onefinemess
Of the series, I'd have to say this is my favorite. He tosses in a story competition that, like most of Wolfe's stories-within-the-story, appear simply good-natured fun until you think about what's happening and how it relates to the overall story arc. Somehow the action and dialogues that Severian finds himself in are well matched with the deep introspection that strikes when you least expect it, and it's in this volume of the series that the magic of what Wolfe has been weaving starts to gain a life you didn't know it had.
—Jonathan Forisha
Wolfe, being known for his unreliable narrators, has in this series made a small and delightful trick of Severian's perceptions. Our torturer's memory is near eidetic, and so he recalls his experiences with a keenness that we experience as a fading; so many of Severian's experiences he describes as "the best meal" or some such, as if recalling that moment, and being present in it. It was a small delight among many, as Wolfe ties together more bits of the web he's woven, and always in such a way that the reader's attentiveness to various details is richly rewarded.
—Story
