nigellicus 's review for:

Shadow and Claw by Gene Wolfe

5.0

adventurous challenging dark mysterious tense

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| Arguably one of the least best covers this series has had, why oh why. Severian the Torturer exiled for letting the woman he loved commit suicide earlier than she was supposed to meanders across Urth taking in the sights and sounds and people, occasionally executing some of them. It's extremely readable and the story has a logic all its own that's far more literary than the usual plot-heavy genre stuff we love so well, and yet under it all it's still a fantasy-type adventure in a Dying Earth setting, it just happens to use symbolism and archaic language a lot and is occasionally ambiguous, which certainly add to the texture of the experience, yet there's a sense that the plot is there, it's just hidden via sleight-of-hand, albeit that could just be the absence of plot-tokens, or rather the plot-tokens are there, their plot significance is left unstated. Anyway, it's great and weird and frustrating and sometimes quite disturbing. I've never had the sense that it's some great puzzle waiting to be solved, and analysis of the symbolism and imagery isn't the same, but it is a sort of exploration of language and imagery and symbolism, which are puzzles of a sort. Do I contradict myself? Perhaps. Or do I? No. Or do I?