Shadow of the Torturer by Gene Wolfe A Review

 

The best thing about this book is it uses the typeface from Ace's ERB books.

The reviewer’s bias: I prefer stories with well developed, pleasant characters. I like writing that is clever and witty – entertaining in itself. I prefer first person narratives, or close third person narratives. I dislike thinly disguised fanfic and stories with gaping plot holes.

Dying earth is where science fiction authors go to write fantasy stories. Gene Wolfe’s The Torturer’s Shadow is no exception. It has all the fantasy tropes that you can throw a stone at: a grimdark mood, castles and dungeons, medieval cities, ancient weapons, strange beasts, archaic words and speech patterns, and magic. All of this can be explained as science fiction since the story is set hundreds of millions of years on a decaying, future earth. Things happen. The only thing that hasn’t changed in all those millions of years are the humans. They’re quite familiar.

I did not expect to like this book. Indeed, I had sampled a few pages some time before and didn’t like what I read. But I decided to give it a try since this book is the read along book for February 2022 for the Youtube science fiction channel, Media Death Cult. I found the audio version of the book on Youtube, so I “read” the book that way – at least 2 ½ hours of its total of 9 ½ hours – before I decided that it was too unpleasant and called it a day. The narrator did a great job of reading the story to have kept me engaged that long. I would never have gotten 10 chapters into the book if I had to, you know, actually read the thing.

I had never heard of Gene Wolfe until I read of his death several years ago, and everyone praising him for his unique writing. I guess he was famous before that, but I wasn’t deep enough into SF to have heard of him.

There are several ways to write a story. One can picture a story line that may wave around a bit, but it has a beginning point and an end point. Another style is to have several story lines that slowly converge near the ending into one. A third method is to have a series of broken story lines that when fitted together form one line from beginning to end. Wolfe’s tale struck me more like an elaborate doodle – it meandered, circled on itself, went off into seemingly dead ends, and in general sought to make itself as ornate and it’s meaning as obscure as possible. There are actually several guide books that attempt to explain this story. So, if you like books that puzzle you and don’t mind not knowing what the hell is going on, then Gene Wolfe might be right up your alley. It’s not up mine.

The story, as far as I got, was mostly world building, such as it was – nothing was made very clear about the world. It established a grimdark fantasy mood, with a nondescript first person narrator, an orphan adopted into the guild of torturers. He will, I gather, eventually be too nice to one of the prisoners he is being trained to torture later in the book and he'll be exiled from the guild for that offense, to wander the world for another book or two.

For some reason, The Torturer’s Shadow brought to mind a book by Walter Mores called The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Blue Bear. In many ways the books couldn’t be more different, but I seem to think that they shared one common element – the stories featured strange, absurd scenes and situations. Wolfe’s book, however, is very much darker in tone and seriousness than Mores’. Mores’ Captain Blue Bear was also a much nicer companion. I finished that book.