Shadow & Claw

I had very mixed feelings about this book. At the beginning, I loved it. I'm a little sad that I went into already knowing the sci-fi background to this fantastic world. I can only imagine how mind-blowing it must be once the pieces start coming together on their own but even still it was so much fun watching the slow reveal. Really, I enjoyed Shadow of the Torturer a lot for both the vivid language and the slow-burn of the puzzle. It's so full of mysteries that I enjoyed solving or not solving as they came along.

Sometimes, the dreamy nature of the prose made me get a bit lost, and I often found myself having to go back and re-read. This didn't necessarily hurt my enjoyment, but I found myself attacking the book with a very analytic bent, and that made it harder to hold on to the story. There is so much to this world that I probably should have read it with a wiki open, but I was afraid of spoilers.

The world is without a doubt the best part of the book. It's intriguing and mystical, but there are layers upon layers for anyone paying attention. I think I really started paying attention when Jonas (probably my favorite character) starts taking stage in the second book. Jonas is a fantastic outside perspective, and his twist is the one that blew me away. I'm hoping he comes back in the next book. In any case, the Wolfe has such a clear concept of a dying Earth that the book deserves to rank in the top of fantasy charts for that alone.

This doesn't make it perfect, at least not for me. My issues come, as they so often do in classic works, with the treatment of women. Actually, with Severian's treatment of women. I started off really liking the guy, torturer or no. He was naïve, yes, but he had a way of thinking and an attitude which read very real to me. His relationship with Thecla is unique, confusing, and tragic. Actually, that can be said of his relationship with Vodalus, his guild, and many of the people he meets on his journey.

However, it can't be said for all of the women, save Thecla. His first foray outside the Citadel, and he meets Agia for whom he has almost uncontrollable lust. Then there's Dorcas, who despite being described as childlike in every way, he also has uninhibited desire for. Dorcas herself is a problem for me in that she just randomly pledges herself to Severian, and neither book explains who she is or why she does this. Hoping that gets clarified later in the series. Then there's Jolenta, whom he essentially rapes while she's unconscious even though he says again and again that he doesn't much like her and prefers Dorcas. He looks at every single woman as an object of desire first. I don't know yet whether to interpret this as an intentional characterization of Wolfe's 1st person narrator or as genuine failure in the treatment of women. Either way, my opinion of Severian kept plummeting as the story went on. I guess this is what happens when you lock a kid in a tower without exposing him to women until puberty, then buy him a prostitute.

Neither book really stands on its own, and I know they were intended to be one gigantic volume, so I think I'll just dive into the next one while I still remember who all the characters are. Maybe a few hundred more pages will either make Severian a better person or at least make one of the women slap some sense into him.