The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

You that read this, who have never, perhaps, possessed more than a single consciousness, cannot know what it is to have two or three, much less hundreds. They lived in me and were joyful, each in his own way, to find they had new life. The dead Autarch, whose face I had seen in scarlet ruin a few moments before, now lived again. My eyes and hands were his, I knew the work of the hives of the bees of the House Absolute and the sacredness of them, who steer by the sun and fetch gold of Urth's fertility. I knew his course to the Phoenix Throne, and to the stars, and back. His mind was mine and filled mine with lore whose existence I had never suspected and with the knowledge other minds had brought to this. The phenomenal world seemed dim and vague as a picture sketched in sand over which an errant wind veered and moaned. I could not have concentrated on it if I had wished to, and I had no such wish.

The Citadel of the Autarch is the final book in Gene Wolf's Book of the New Sun series, about the torturer Severian living in a distant future in which the sun is dying. We know, from the first book, that Severian has somehow risen to the office of the Autarch, the leader of the immense leader of the southern part of the world; Citadel tells this final part of the story, though a reader expecting a more traditional story of sword-and-shield conquest, or even of recognizable cause-and-effect logic, might find themselves disappointed. At the end of the third book, The Sword of the Lictor, Severian has discovered that a race of hideous aliens called hierodules has a vested interest in raising him to the office, and that the office holds more than earthly power: by raising him to the level of Autarch, they hope that Severian will be the one who brings the New Sun to the world, reversing the planet's inevitable decline and death.

I felt, a little, that The Sword of the Lictor was strangely ordinary among the Book of the New Sun novels; and speculated that the final book would be stranger and quicker in pace. It was strange to see, then, that most of the first third of The Citadel of the Autarch, finds Severian languishing in a field hospital among the soldiers fighting the Autarch's war against the northern Ascians. Severian passes the time hear listening to stories by several of the prisoners, who have asked him to judge their quality--Wolfe seems to really love a story-within-a-story. The most memorable of these is by a captured Ascian, whose race has been taught only to speak in a combination of a few thousand stock phrases extolling the virtues of their ruling leadership. And yet, the Ascian tells a whole story this way, relying on interpretation by a woman who has learned to understand what lies behind what is said. As Severian notes, most of us only speak with a limited number of phrases and sentences we have picked up from somewhere else; but the paucity of our language conceals a great depth of feeling and experience.

After leaving the hospital, the novel picks up pace, sending Severian off into the battlefield. One of the most memorable moments is Severian's mission to the Last House, a difficult-to-find place where every floor exists at a different point in time. As Severian looks out from the top floor over a sheet of ice--one possible future for his world--the resident, Ash, explains that he has been sent to monitor the past. Time travelers are a big motif in these novels; Severian's android friend Jonas is one, and so are the 20th-century tourists who appear as if ghosts in the Botanic Gardens of the series' first novel. The alien hierodules, and the mysterious figures they represent, can do it, too. And yet all this time travel has not dimmed the urgency of the mission of bringing forth the New Sun; still the common destiny of humanity, and the promise of rebirth, governs the whole logic of the series.

The final sections of the novel are about Severian's ascent to the office of Autarch. The old Autarch, whom Severian met in an earlier novel disguised as a lower official in his own great house, rescues Severian from the war and is badly wounded in the process. Before he dies, he insists that Severian drink from a vial around his neck and drink a little of his blood, which will incorporate his own consciousness into Severian's. This process is reminiscent of the ritual of the alzabo from the second book, by which Severian eats the flesh of his former love Thecla and takes her consciousness in him. But the Autarch, as Severian will be, is the end point of such a process repeated thousands of times, and contains thousands of consciousnesses. Part of Severian's role as Autarch and hero of the New Sun is to take on all these consciousnesses, the literal embodiment of his burden.

The Catholic Wolfe called Severian a "Christian" figure, pointedly distinct from a "Christian figure." It's interesting to think about the way that Severian's role as the Autarch is a kind of Christian story in spirit. As the novel closes, Severian is planning on attempting a vague test administered by the alien hierodules that will either end with the coming of the New Sun or Severian's castration; these images of rebirth and renewal seem deeply rooted in Christian mysteries. And Severian's accretion of consciousness seems to me not so different from Christian ideas of the Holy Spirit, or the language inherent in the term "Son of Man." And of course, you can't forget that in a literal sense, all these people are dead, and Severian offers them an incarnation and rebirth. For Severian to succeed is for the multitude to succeed. In this way, The Book of the New Sun subverts the kind of "chosen one" narratives familiar from fantasy novels, that raise one special figure above the others. One might wonder: "Why Severian?" But in some sense this question becomes moot as Severian becomes a vessel for many people.

I'm sad for this series to be over for me. It has the kind of intense imaginativeness and creativity that I'm always hoping to find in a science fiction book, and which I feel like I rarely find. I'm more convinced now than I was when I started it that these books are true classics, works that expand the notion of what not only genre literature can be, but literature full stop. And I have a greater appreciation for the prose, which touches on the parodic, but is capable of great subtlety and power. (I remember seeing on Twitter that someone said they stopped reading the first book after ten pages because the writing was so bad; I really think that person Did Not Get It.) And though it's a shame to think this story is over, I'm looking forward to checking out some of the other novels that Wolfe wrote set in the same universe.