The Book of the New Sun: science fiction's Ulysses?

First, a confession or two. I know I was meant to read Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates next, but Gene Wolfe arrived first in the post and so I got stuck in; by the time poor old Tim arrived a few days later, I couldn't be prised away. In my ignorance I hadn't realised The Book of the New Sun is actually four novels; my edition was of the first two, The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator, so this post is about those.

My other admission is to trepidation: Wolfe is revered – and I mean seriously revered – by authors from Neil Gaiman to George RR Martin and Ursula Le Guin, both of whom have called The Book of the New Sun a masterpiece. Although not everyone likes it, one extremely detailed essay says "it could be argued that The Book of the New Sun is science fiction's Ulysses". Crikey.

Second: a couple of wonderings. A few of you (JamesWMoar, MaxCairnduff, RobKill, AddisonSteele) had warned me not to tackle Wolfe while I was still reeling from the intense Elizabethan-style English of The Worm Ouroboros (or his "linguistic porridge", as AddisonSteele put it – true, but I do like porridge). I imagined that I'd be glooping along through olde worlde syntax, but Wolfe isn't like that at all. Yes, there's plenty of odd words – "fuligin" for black, "carnifex" for torturer, "destriers", which are sort of super-horses. But I found this all added to the other-ness of the world Wolfe has created; I didn't exactly understand some words until I looked them up but I knew what he meant by them, and I loved his "note on translation" at the end of the first book, when he tells us how he went about "rendering this book - originally composed in a tongue that has not yet achieved existence – into English". Did you warner-offers find it irritating? I really enjoyed it.

Also, while The Shadow of the Torturer won the World fantasy award in 1981 and has the trappings of fantasy (young man, long sword, mysterious destiny), surely it's really science fiction? Set a million years in the future on a world with a dying sun, where the moon is green and irrigated, daylight is red, and "rotting jungles" circle "the waist of the world", it follows the story of Severian, a torturer in the decaying Citadel who shows mercy to a prisoner he's fallen in love with. Rather than being killed for his crime, he's exiled, given an ancient sword (Terminus Est) and sent to the distant city of Thrax. On his way out of the vast urban sprawl of Nessus, his adventures include fighting a duel with a flower (more deadly than it sounds), accidentally stealing the Claw of the Conciliator (a glowing, seemingly magical jewel) from a temple and fishing a girl, Dorcas, out of a lake where the dead are sunk.

The story is recounted by Severian himself from a position in the future. He is, I suspect, brilliantly unreliable; as well as the challenge of picking through his statements, this is a world which Wolfe never explains directly – the reader has to piece its realities together, which is hugely satisfying.

He goes on to perform a couple of executions, meet a mysterious troupe of travelling players, escape underground man-apes who have mutated from their human origins through "eons of struggles in the dark" and take part in a cannibalistic ritual which confers the substance of a dead person's mind to the eater. We even get a bit of Christopher Marlowe. I'd worried that Severian's occupation would mean endless gruesome descriptions of torture, but this isn't the case at all – apart from a leg-peeling, a excoriated dog, and Severian's few beheadings, Wolfe steers clear of the grisly, and manages to make his torturer-hero if not sympathetic, then definitely charismatic. (Unlike Terry Goodkind, who seems to revel in his Mord-Sith's perversions – although mentioning Goodkind in the same blog as Wolfe feels a bit sacrilegious, so apologies for bringing him up.)

I loved Shadow and Claw – was blown away, in fact. The whole thing is dreamlike in quality, unfathomably large in scope, deliciously, slyly puzzling. It's enormous fun picking away at Severian's ideas about the past of his far future Urth, at the mysteries of his companions Jonas (why does he have a mechanical hand?) and Dorcas (was she resurrected?), at what the Claw might actually be – and at how truthful and accurate our narrator, for all his protestations that he remembers "every rattling chain and whistling wind, every sight, smell and taste", really is. "Trust the text implicitly. The answers are in there," Gaiman tells us. Then "do not trust the text farther than you can throw it, if that far. It's tricksy and desperate stuff, and it may go off in your hand at any time." I think a second read is definitely going to be in order; I'm also champing at the bit for the second half to arrive.

What do you think? I suspect you'll mostly be huge fans, but I'd be interested to know why you think The Book of the New Sun isn't better known. Yes, it's acclaimed by fellow SFF authors and is clearly held in huge esteem all over the place – hell, there's even Wolfian scholarship out there – but despite all this I'd still say it hasn't yet made it to the mainstream. Why is that? It's certainly good enough. Could it be the cover (my version has Severian wearing what looks to be a big leather codpiece)? I'd love to know what you think.

Meanwhile, next up is Mr Powers and The Anubis Gates, which I'm taking on holiday (along with New Sun books three and four – would you be interested in a post on those once I'm done?). Can't wait.