The Knight, by Gene Wolfe
Jan. 12th, 2005 08:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienWolfe is ... hard. He specializes in convoluted timelines, elaborate framing devices, unreliable narrators, and obscure vocabulary. Maybe one reason I keep buying his books is just a stubborn refusal to admit that I'm not smart enough to read this stuff. There are other reasons: the scenery is vivid and strange; even the minor characters are quirky and distinct; the ride is entertaining even if I'm not always sure where we're going or, when we get there, where it is and how we got here. And I can always hope that I'll make more sense of it on subsequent readings, if I ever get the backlog under control.
Compared to the New Sun and Short Sun books, Knight seems relatively straightforward. At one level, it looks like a standard wish-fulfillment quest fantasy: an adolescent boy strays into a fantasy world, becomes a knight, and wanders around the landscape collecting equipment and oddball companions and getting lost a lot, while growing up. Only this is Wolfe, so it isn't quite that simple. Many of the standard Wolfean tropes are there; tricks with time, memory and identity; characters who wander in and out of the story, living their own lives; casual allusions to things that haven't happened yet. For a world populated with archetypes, the society has a surprising amount of depth. Knights squabble and brawl among themselves; just about everybody is class- and status-conscious in a way one doesn't often see in modern fantasy, and the hero doesn't get an honorary patent of nobility for being American born, but has to live with what people think of him for being a tradesman's son. He also isn't automatically the best at everything; he gets some superpowers, but he has to work at his knightly skills and gets hurt more than once in the process.
Knight is only half the story. It does have a satisfying climax, but I'm rather glad I waited to read it until I had Wizard in hand.
Compared to the New Sun and Short Sun books, Knight seems relatively straightforward. At one level, it looks like a standard wish-fulfillment quest fantasy: an adolescent boy strays into a fantasy world, becomes a knight, and wanders around the landscape collecting equipment and oddball companions and getting lost a lot, while growing up. Only this is Wolfe, so it isn't quite that simple. Many of the standard Wolfean tropes are there; tricks with time, memory and identity; characters who wander in and out of the story, living their own lives; casual allusions to things that haven't happened yet. For a world populated with archetypes, the society has a surprising amount of depth. Knights squabble and brawl among themselves; just about everybody is class- and status-conscious in a way one doesn't often see in modern fantasy, and the hero doesn't get an honorary patent of nobility for being American born, but has to live with what people think of him for being a tradesman's son. He also isn't automatically the best at everything; he gets some superpowers, but he has to work at his knightly skills and gets hurt more than once in the process.
Knight is only half the story. It does have a satisfying climax, but I'm rather glad I waited to read it until I had Wizard in hand.
