The Claw of the Conciliator
by Gene Wolfe
Summary
The second volume of The Book of the New Sun, and it cannot be read first.
Severian is a journeyman of the guild of torturers, exiled from his citadel for showing mercy to a prisoner, travelling north toward the city of Thrax where he is to take up a post as executioner. He carries a sword called Terminus Est and, without having meant to steal it, a gem called the Claw of the Conciliator that appears to raise the dead.
The world he crosses is Urth, so far in the future that the sun is dying, the aristocracy hunt in the ruins of starships, and every technology has become either a relic or a rumour. What looks like magic is machinery nobody can maintain, and Wolfe never once stops to say so.
Here Severian falls in with a troupe of actors, performs in a play that is also a cosmology, meets a man called Jonas who is not a man, descends into a mine full of ape creatures, dines at the rebel Vodalus's table, and eats the flesh of the woman he loved, which gives him her memories and permanently compromises the narration.
Severian tells you on the first page that he has a perfect memory. He is lying, or wrong, or both, and working out which is the whole activity of reading Wolfe.
Around three hundred pages of extremely dense prose, with archaic vocabulary that is real rather than invented. Demanding and, for the right reader, the best thing in the genre.
Historical Context & Significance
The Claw of the Conciliator won the 1981 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was a finalist for the Hugo and the World Fantasy Award.
It is the second of four volumes in The Book of the New Sun, after The Shadow of the Torturer and before The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch, and Gene Wolfe wrote the whole sequence as a single novel that his publisher divided.
Wolfe was an industrial engineer who helped develop the machine that cooks Pringles, edited a trade journal for years, and wrote some of the most demanding fiction the field has produced, built on unreliable narration, Catholic theology and puzzles laid several volumes apart. He is the writer other science fiction writers most often name as the best of them, and he died in 2019.