The Sword of the Lictor (The Book of the New Sun)

By the time you get to the third volume of "The Book of the New Sun", you should be used to Severian's philosophical digressions. You will have heard him say many times, either directly or obliquely, that there are contradictions, inaccuracies and mysteries in his account of the events which have led him from the Citadel of Nessus to the Northern city of Thrax.

These ponderous diversions continue in "The Sword of the Lictor", but somehow, in this book, they seem more digestible. This could be because the story contains some old-fashioned scary monsters of a most thrilling kind, and a series of battles where Wolfe shows us he can write an exciting action scene just as well as he can weave a confounding tale with multiple interpretations and a web of literary allusions.

I particularly enjoyed the encounter with the Alzabo, a man-eating monster which absorbs the memories of its prey, then speaks with their voices. The glandular excretions of this creature are the source of the drug which allowed Severian to absorb the memories of his beloved Thecla in "The Claw of the Conciliator".

In addition to the peaks of action and adventure, Severian's quest leads him across multiple cityscapes and wildlands. Old companions are abandoned and new ones encountered... enemies too. The psychedelic inventiveness of his bizarre future world continues to astound.

The saga which has had such a feeling of epic fantasy then takes a further turn into science fiction, when Severian meets three aliens who have been following the progress of his quest. They treat him like some sort of saviour, but at the same time are dismissive of his belief in the seemingly supernatural powers he ascribes to the ancient relic he carries, the Claw of the Conciliator. Then they zoom away in their spaceship.

During this re-read I have been dipping into some of the essays and analysis written about "The Book of the New Sun". There are countless references I have been oblivious to: religious allusions by way of characters who share names with saints; events paralleling biblical episodes; influences from Proust and others. I am aware of Wolfe's debt to Jack Vance's "Dying Earth". which I read last year.

I'm certainly not the only one to muse on the conflict between the rational and the supernatural, or the skeptical versus the credulous. In "The Sword of the Lictor", Severian is the one who is visited by magic. The mad scientist Baldanders and his alien guides are the ones rejecting the now ex-torturer's claims of witnessing and performing miracles. Again it reminds me of one of my favourite quotes, from "The Shadow of the Torturer":

'Certain mystes aver that the real world has been constructed by the human mind, since our ways are governed by the artificial categories into which we place essentially undifferentiated things, things weaker than our words for them.'

As a rationalist, I am on the side of Baldanders and the hierodules (aliens) in opposing base superstition. The world is real, and we are part of it. We can only encounter it and remember it with our minds and our memories... but there are ways we can determine what is all in the mind, and what are the material things our mental images originated from. If we break or falsify the link between the real world and out mental image of it, then we are lost.

Despite the above, I found myself cheering for Severian when it came time for his philosophical dispute with the monstrous Baldanders to be settled by combat.

Gene Wolfe, who came out as an openly Catholic author, would seem to be on the other team - the team believing in magic, miracles, and the divine. But at the end of this volume I continue to feel that he has created a world which reflects my philosophical instincts more vividly.

My five star rating is retained for this volume as it was for the two which preceded it.