The Claw of the Conciliator: Chapter VIII
The Cultellarii
Who exactly is Jonas?
We know almost nothing about him. He appeared as if from nowhere at the gates of Nessus and then we picked up some days later with Severian and Jonas travelling together, seemingly alone, without Dorcas.
But where is Dorcas?
Jonas has a metal arm and, so far, is the only person with such an appendage. What can be made of this?
We’ve already met time travelers and genetically altered humans, both as Exalted and the man apes. We know the world is strange and old, that civilizations have come and gone, that the sun itself is dying out, that humanity has gone to the cosmos, found alien life, and returned home generations later somehow more alien. Or perhaps the alien life is simply these humans who have been gone from the rest of humanity so long.
There’s something of friendship, here, between these two men. We don’t yet understand it and perhaps there’s little to understand beyond the fact that they are both men on the road.
I have made friendships like this. Strong ones, though with surprisingly little durability once the contexts change. My very good friends I made in Europe and Asia have been gone a long time from my life, and while I still follow some of them on social media, we don’t really talk anymore.
Distance may make the heart grow fonder but time has a way of muting that feeling as well.
But Severian, who has been betrayed by people he just met, has pulled Jonas into his life and even paid his way.
There is no guile in Severian, which is often the source of the troubles we’ve seen him experience. And so what does he know about Jonas?
Almost nothing, though he seems to believe—perhaps rightly—that Jonas knows much more than he does about the world.
He, too, knows more or less nothing of the Claw, but he does seem to know a bit about history and why the Autarchs of old transmogrified their soldiers into manbeasts.
And so we come to Abaia and Erebus.
We’ve seen them before, long ago during a dream, as Severian reminds us. This was on the first night after he left the Matachin Tower.
What are these massive creatures that must live in the oceans because theya re too big for the land?
While we’ve spoken a few times of Wolfe’s Catholicism, we haven’t spoken much of his love of SFF.
Imagine, if you will, that you conceive of this epic story of a young torturer going on an adventure across a country where he ends up as the ruler of that same country. You consider all the characters, the relationships, the politics, the historical contexts of this fake future history.
And then, just for fun, you drop two Cthulhu-like monsters in the ocean.
Who simply stare at the land.
As far as we or Severian knows, these massive creatures do not act upon anyone or anything in Urth, but their psychic power is such that there is some kind of impact. Perhaps even the psychic knowledge that these monstrous creatures live out there seemingly without purpose is enough of an impact.
While Wolfe is often discussed as some genius who created this epic fully formed from nothing, with every moment having resonance through the text, with moment A being a prophesy or foreshadowing for event Y, but I think the simple truth is that Wolfe wrote this for fun and was having fun writing it.
And I can feel the way he’s just winging it as he goes, just throwing out ideas and shifting directions because of a whim rather than because he’s following some schematic like an engineer designing a Great and Important Narrative.
So why not put these gigantic Cthulhus out in the ocean where they fill people with dread whenever their thoughts drift that way, but they’re also completely easy to ignore and forget about.
I mean, that’s the kind of fun I like to have when writing.
We even see this love of the genre in the battle with the man apes. Maybe they’re not meant this way, but they remind me of old pulp stories of civilizations of strange humans living under the earth’s surface.
And on top of all that, the genre of The Book of the New Sun is best described as Dying Earth, which is a genre invented by the great pulp writer Jack Vance.
So the interaction with the past is everywhere in here. In some ways, Book of the New Sun is a celebration of the genre even while it reinvents much of it. It’s a wild ride of someone having the time of their life at their keyboard. It’s a love letter to pulp and to high literary writers like Melville but also imbued with his Catholicism.
In short, it’s the kind of book that only Gene Wolfe could write.
And how glad I am that he did.
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