Skip to main content

Never underestimate a Wolfe

I love fantasy books - but I'm not very fond of those tomes set in strange worlds inhabited by elves, dwarves and orcs. (Depite my wording, I make an exception for The Lord of the Rings, which is unique.) What I really love is fantasy set in the real world - where something isn't quite right. It can develop into wholesale mayhem, including many of those elements of swords and sorcery, but it's strongly anchored in the world as we know it. For me, this makes the story much more exciting.

You might think the master of this kind of writing is Neil Gaiman - and he is my second favourite writer in the genre. But there's one man who is Obi Wan to Gaiman's Skywalker. That's Gene Wolfe.

If I'm honest, I'm not a fan of all his books. He writes books set on other worlds, like the hugely popular Book of the New Sun series, which really don't interest me. But his short stories are great - and when he does a real world fantasy, it is absolutely stunning. Although Wolfe is almost 80, he's still producing his best work, as I've discovered in his newly released The Sorcerer's House. This book is brilliant, there's no other word for it.

Wolfe does himself no favour by framing the book as a series of letters. It's difficult to get real involvement this way. (Having said that, one of the most famous fantasy books ever, Dracula, is a series of letters.) But it works so well here, admittedly by having the vast bulk of the letters from the main protagonist, and so acting as a first person narrative.

What Wolfe does best is to throw the protagonist (and the reader) into a situation where you think 'What the hell is going on?' Sometimes, as in his masterpiece There are Doors, he can sustain this uncertainty through most of the book. In The Sorcerer's House things become a little more obvious earlier on - but even so, Wolfe keeps throwing in new characters, new situations that continue to combine mystery and delight. If you don't know this kind of writing but are familiar with cult TV, he does in stories what Buffy creator Joss Whedon does on the screen - but ten times better.

There are some flaws. Although a reasonable sized book, it's just too short. It could be twice the length to really allow some of the characters who only currently get a bit part to develop. And then there's the ending. Wolfe fans will know that endings are his weakness. Here he does manage to end the book satisfactorily, but it still is a slight let-down compared with the brilliance of the rest.

Run, don't walk, to your nearest book store and get The Sorcerer's House. It's here at Amazon.co.uk and here at Amazon.com.
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you  

Comments

  1. Excellent blog but as a huge fan of the Books of the New Sun, I have to correct you - the books are set on a far future Earth, not on other worlds. It's one of the things I love about that series - that gradually this becomes apparent, and you realise that the lost histories all around are those of what was once South America.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Apologies, Sara - I was mentally conjoining the New Sun book with the Green's Jungles/Blue's Waters etc books. However the New Sun books still aren't in apparently normal, here and now Earth, which is how I like my fantasy.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5.  However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope