My rating: 2 out of 5 stars
Wandering towards the North and the ongoing war with a broken,
the former torturer Severian nears the end of his journey just to begin another. The Citadel
of the Autarch is the final installment of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun tetralogy
following the exiled torturer Severian’s journey away from the Citadel and how
he returned.
Severian continues his wandering North towards the war when
he finds a dead soldier and brings him back to life using the Claw. They find the Pelerines Camp and are cared
back to health as Severian had picked up a bad fever. While recovering he is selected to judge a
storytelling contest, but before he can render his verdict, he returns the Claw
to the Pelerine alter and is asked by the Camp’s leader to find a holy man
close to the front and save him.
Severian goes, meets the man in his house of multiple time periods, but
the man disappears while Severian is leading him away from the house. Returning to the camp alone, Severian finds
it has been attacked and abandoned.
Finding the new camp, he sees his new friends either dead or with worse injures
than original. Severian wanders again
and falls into an auxiliary cavalry unit and joins an attack on the Ascians but
is injured and saved by the Autarch himself after the battle. The Autarch, the androgynous brothel guide of
Shadow and Vodalus’ agent in the House Absolute in Claw, gives Severian a lift in
his flier which is shot down and tells Severian to eat a piece of him so he can
become the new Autarch. Severian does so
but is captured by Vodalus’ rebel forces which as Agia in the ranks wanting to
kill him. But after joining up with the
Ascian army, Severian is rescued by the green man he saved in Claw via a time
tunnel where Severian meets aliens that as Autarch he’ll be tested to allow man
to return to the stars if he success or neuter him if he fails like the previous
Autarch. Dropped off on a beach,
Severian finds a new Claw of the Conciliator and makes his way back to Nessus
and the Citadel. Using the memories off all
the previous Autarchs, Severian sends the Citadel into an uproar of activity. He returns to his first home in the torturer’s
tower, figures out that Dorcas is his grandmother who died soon after giving
birth to his father who was sent a warning message in Shadow, and has a
philosophical rant about what his position is before being whisked off the
planet to be tested.
This story was engaging up until the Autarch returned to the
story and Severian awful philosophizing began in earnest. Though Wolfe wrapped up several storylines or
wrote things to just end, I really didn’t care because of how much I had disliked
the previous two installments especially Sword.
Severian is an unreliable point-of-view character, which wouldn’t be bad
if he wasn’t the only point-of-view or completely nuts or stupid or whatever
Wolfe decided to have him be in a given chapter. The cosmic philosophizing by the aliens or
Severian’s attempt at it becomes unreadable because I by now don’t care and
just wanted to see the story ended or interesting things happen. Honestly, each story in the storytelling
contest were better stories that this one or the entire tetralogy together.
The Citadel of the
Autarch ends Gene Wolfe’s classic The
Book of the New Sun as well as my interest in anything written by Gene
Wolfe. While this final installment is
better than its immediate predecessor, the series went into a decline right
after the first book. I don’t get the
hype of this fantasy-science fiction “classic” and feel it’s overrated.
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