What I like best about Shadow of the Torturer isn’t its imaginative milieu or generally well-wrought characters; it’s not even the gorgeous prose, the vividness of its imagery, or the arresting story. What really gets me (at least in the beginning) is its tone of youth in Autumn, the gentle cadence of ritual and growth in a dying, quiet world. It’s a perfect example of what I call an “October Book” – thoughtful and heartful and wistful, limning the comfortable architecture of childhood and juxtaposing it against a darkly fascinating outer world of otherness.* I’m not especially compelled by the notion of a Torturer’s Guild, but I’m bowled over by a story of authentic youth within one.
There are scenes and characters here that don’t work for me at all. I was bored by Nessus’ Gardens and bemused by the never-very-persuasive conwoman Agia. At first I was worried: maybe Wolfe had gone astray with Severian’s departure from his Guild. But the tale rings true because dusk comes sooner rather than later, because the exile of its child from his childhood is inevitable; the trials that await Severian outside the City look to be as rich and workaday as those he left (while likely involving swordfights and walkers between the stars). It’s interesting to start this Book of the New Sun sequence years after reading the ripples it created; I was surprised to find Wolfe’s Nessus described as “the City Imperishable,” a phrase familiar from Jay Lake’s Trial of Flowers. Other images and turns of phrase struck me as likely influences for China Miéville and Neil Gaiman. Much as I love those newer writers, however, this stands out. There’s a timelessness, a lived-in resonance to Shadow of the Torturer that qualifies it as a classic.
*If what I’ve read is any indication, Gaiman’s Graveyard Book may be the apotheosis of October.
