 | Shadow and Claw (Fantasy Masterworks 1) by Gene Wolfe (Orion Millennium, £7.99, 603pages, B-format paperback; this edition published 23 March 2000.) Millennium has opted to commence its "Fantasy Masterworks"series with this omnibus of the first two volumes of Gene Wolfe'sThe Book of the New Sun; and the choice can't be faulted.It could be objected that The Book is in fact Science Fiction,that its purported miracles and atmosphere of the Fantastic aresimply an overlay for events and phenomena scientifically rationalised;but underlying all such rationalisations is Wolfe's Catholic faith,the implied presence of God and His Servants (known in the textas the Increate and the Hierodules), so that the supernaturalis still invoked at some ultimate level. Call this work ScienceFantasy; the important fact is the renewed availability in Britainof this seminal epic, in a handsome and very readable edition.The remainder of The Book follows from Millennium in December,under the title Sword and Citadel. Shadow and Claw contains The Shadow of the Torturer(1980) and The Claw of the Conciliator (1981), which betweenthem won several awards, including a Nebula; they are the firsthalf of the autobiography of the last true Autarch of the Commonwealthof Urth, Severian, variously nicknamed the Great, the Lame, andthe Torturer. In superb introspective prose Severian tells ofhis early life as an apprentice and then journeyman Torturer inthe Citadel of the vast metropolis of Nessus, the Commonwealth'sancient, seething, polluted capital. The Autarch now rules onlysome sections of South America; his domains are threatened onland by the totalitarian Ascians (read Americans) and from thesea by the monstrous beings loyal to the Other lords, Erebus andAbaia; above, the Sun is red and wan, steadily losing light andheat. Salvation must be found; Severian has been chosen by higherpowers to succeed to the Autarchy, repel the Ascians, and bringa New Sun that will renew the habitability of Urth. How this translationoccurs, despite and because of Severian's nature as a Torturer,is the paradoxical, labyrinthine, allegorical, and numinous burdenof The Book of the New Sun. Severian has more or less perfect recall; by the time of his assumptionof the throne he has assimilated the experiences and wisdom ofhis predecessors; his narration is thus complexly memorious, circlingconstantly back to earlier events, and filled with meditativedigressions reflecting the content of many lives. On his questacross the diverse landscapes of the Commonwealth, he carriesa brown book, tales from which he quotes from time to time, relatingin miniature the essence of his own career; and the stories ofothers, companions and enemies, are interwoven with his at manypoints. Severian becomes by degrees, through his intense tellingof himself and those he encounters, the Epitome of Urth, a summaryof her peoples and potentials, fit to carry his world's petitionfor a New Sun to cosmic courts of appeal. The texture this processlends The Book of the New Sun is astonishingly rich, apoetic intricacy surpassing that of Wolfe's more obvious models,Robert Graves' I, Claudius and Jack Vance's The DyingEarth. Meaning wells up miraculously at the text's every turn;rereadings are intensely rewarding; The Book is a splendidtriumph of the novelist's craft, perhaps the greatest SF and Fantasyhave produced. The gist of the narrative of Shadow and Claw is thus: inthe impenetrable urban maze of Nessus, the young Severian, learningand then practicing the macabre craft of his ancient guild, issubject to significant encounters, incidents, and visions. Heis saved from death by an undine; he in turn saves the rebel leader,Vodalus; he falls in love with an aristocratic prisoner, Thecla,one of Vodalus' allies; he spares her torment by permitting hersuicide; he is exiled; he wanders Nessus, acquiring and losingcompanions, all of whom are not what they seem; he visits theLake of the Dead; he fights a duel requiring venomous alien flowersas weapons; he leaves Nessus on a mission to become Lictor ofthe provincial town of Thrax. Thus the content of The Shadowof the Torturer: picaresque, seemingly disjointed, but withmythic and sacred echoes abounding, and the incessant intimationof connections between events superficially quite unrelated. Andbeyond the city gates, this continues. At the start of The Claw of the Conciliator, Severian remembersthe conclusion of the previous volume as a dream; and this setsthe tone for his travels through the countryside, which involve:a venture into realms subterranean, where Morlocks lurk; an audiencewith Vodalus in his full regalia as Liege of Leaves, a counterfeitRobin Hood; a visit to the Autarch's Palace, which is ingeniouslyinvisible; a second audience, with the deceptive Autarch himself;the performance of a play that eerily prophesies Severian's andthe Commonwealth's future course; another encounter with the undine;and a séance in a ruined town that summons forth Severian'sown spirit. The unifying understructure of the rambling epic becomesslowly clearer; momentous developments offstage are subtly implied;initial assumptions are deftly inverted. As The Claw ends,the sense is stronger than ever that Severian is far more thanhe himself can ever know. While all of this has been going on, Urth herself has emergedwith consummate vividness, one of speculative fiction's most completeand resonant locales. Antiquity is everywhere, in the archaictinge of Wolfe's prose, in his magnificent descriptions of cyclopeanruins and maze-like environments, in his evocation of institutionsand customs ossified into unquestioning ritual. For Urth is notsimply a world of the far future, and The Book of the New Sunis not merely the record of an adventure in that world; rather,they are fantastically intricate summations of all the worldsand books that have preceded them, all the imaginary milieux andheroic narratives that SF and Fantasy produced before them. AsSeverian Epitomises Urth, his Book epitomises the genresit combines and celebrates. It is a Masterwork indeed.  Review by Nick Gevers. Nick also writes about Wolfe in Ultans Library: an online journal for Gene Wolfe Studies, and more of Nick's reviews are online at Parsec. 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