The Magus, First-Person, & The Greatness of Gene Wolfe

John Fowles’s The Magus long ago caught my eye on some Top 100 Great Novels list because I hoped it would be about a wizard in the Gandalf sense and remained intrigued by the premise when I found out otherwise.  While it is indeed a Great Novel, it’s not about the Istari.  However, as many things do, it got me thinking about Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.

Warning: there is an image at the bottom of this post that spoils many things about both books

Fowles wrote The Magus in the first person.  The narrator, Nicholas Urfe, obviously owes much to Fowles himself — a twentysomething Oxford graduate and TEFL expat living on a small Greek island in the 1950s.  Like any good author — and Fowles is more than just good — he has thought carefully about his narrator: what he knows, how he feels, what he doesn’t know, and how he reacts.  Most of Fowles’s imagination however went into supporting characters — especially the titular sage, Conchis.  If he did not cut them from whole cloth, they nonetheless depart much further from Fowles’s reality than anything about Urfe’s character.  Still, Urfe’s world and subjective experience recognizably remain firmly rooted in our world.  Actually, the author’s, although like most first-person narrators Urfe’s slate is sufficiently blank for the reader to insert himself easily enough.

Severian, the narrator/”author” of The Book of the New Sun…is not like that.  This very departure from the literary baseline will likely be the first dislocation felt by someone picking up New Sun, a snare set for the experienced reader.  Severian speaks with the gravity and authority of a learned man and ruler from a deeply and deceptively alien place, has a discernible personality, has discernible interests and regrets, has performed and undergone extraordinary strange things.  None of these have anything to do with Gene Wolfe or with the reader except in the most oblique manner.  And yet, and yet, Severian is just about as much a dupe as Urfe — and only vaguely aware of it.  Wolfe hits a few false notes.  But the difficulty of the composition permits much more excuse than he needs.

When you’re a hit with the ladies but still get played by powers beyond your comprehension

Aside from the sheer achievement of Wolfe’s fabrication, Severian’s extreme divergence from the reader’s experience actually makes his narrative easier to swallow (something I think Wolfe deliberately leverages for meta-deception).  Instead of rolling your eyes or gritting your teeth at Urfe acting as you would not (he is not very much like Lieutenant Sfoil, to say nothing of my present self), with Severian you just roll with it.  Only to find yourself accepting what old man Conchis would never dare fabricate.  New Sun‘s fantastic setting enables this discombobulation and convoluted reorientation, a power of the genre that Wolfe understands and most fantasy authors do not. (New Sun’s string-pullers are also permitted power far beyond wealth and charisma.)  The Magus strains its realist setting quite past the limits of belief by the end; the dying world of New Sun has no such limits.

The Magus is a great novel, even if — as Fowles acknowledged in his introduction to my edition — somewhat “adolescent”.  But The Book of the New Sun is the greater achievement.

I warned you