The Shadow of the Torturer

A high fantasy book that thinks it's a lot smarter than it actually is. Horses are “destriers” - an archaic word that refers to a slightly hardier, slightly speedier horse. Do we ever see the horses get hardier or speedier? Is it important to the plot at any time? No. The man could have just said “horse”. But the man doesn't want to say “horse”. That would be too easy.

I have a writer/editor friend who calls these things “$1 words”. A $1 word is a word that is needlessly fancy. She picked it up when I used “ventilation unit” instead of “air conditioner” in one of my sci-fi stories (because, you know, THE FUTURE). $1 words can be very cheap shortcut worldbuilding (just like Capitalizing Common Words - the Wall, the Citadel, the Stone of Stonelineness).

Wolfe doesn't use $1 words. He uses $5 words. $10 words. This man pours a lot of money into these words. It's not a “cloak”, it's a “capote”. It's not a “boat”, it's a “dhow”. Never, at any point, do these words seem to be needed. Not for the subtle nuances of their extremely archaic definitions (the dhow does not seem to particularly dhowy - and I should know, I live part-time in Zanzibar, where all we do is sail dhows, I tell ya!). Not even for the meta (maybe it's a dhow because this far future setting has mixed up, jumbled cultures, so East African words get used?).

But then, I realized, it's not the content of the words that matters. It's not the meta. It's the meta-meta. It's the fact that he's using them that matters - for him, for us. He's trying to either impress or mock his readers and, either way, it's tedious and silly. I rolled my ocular orbitals. Oh, I mean EYES. Sorry! Too fancy for ya? Well, you know, I do have a PhD in Being Obnoxious.

The setting and setup seemed promising: a far future Earth (“Urth”), which seems to have devolved into a, er, Euro-centric Medieval high fantasy culture. Also, the sun is a massive red cooling giant, so I guess it's End Times. Protagonist is a thoughtful ass-kicker who gets kicked out of the Guild of Torturers because he helps a foxy lady prisoner commit suicide. Thus begins his Quest. A quest, I should note, that goes nowhere interesting, fast.

I was a little leery of the torturer guild business, especially with the foxy lady prisoner, since I worried it'd become dressed-up torture porn. Thankfully, Wolfe skirts around anything too gruesome, objectified, or eroticized. The torture guild stuff in the first third of the book is very restrained; in fact, this is perhaps the best part of the book, because the culture of the guild is so intriguing. They're kind of a combination fussy monastic order/hangman's club.

That said, my relief at Wolfe not going all torture porny quickly evaporated, since, once outside the guild, Protagonist seems to meet only buxom bombshells who - AND I KID YOU NOT - get their dresses torn open at the boobs. And get slapped by him. And are basically not actually female people, but rather walking pairs of boobs. The way that Protagonist describes each woman he encounters also becomes very old, very fast: luscious, lush, voluptuous, pleasant, bladdy blah. YOU ARE BORING ME, GENE WOLFE.

This is the first in the series. Maybe, by the end of the series, there'll be a plot. Maybe.

And, oh yeah, because this led me astray: no, this is not like Frank Herbert's Dune. Dune is Baroque far future space majesty. This is just dumb.