And understood, at most, 2% of what I read.
I got the basic plot down, that a teenaged boy from America writes to his big brother Ben about being transported to another world, one that is actually seven worlds in which humans inhabit the 4th and middle one, called Mythgarthr. After a little while, he gets transported to the 3rd world, Aelfrice, where Queen Disiri turns him into a full-grown, beefy man. He returns to Mythgarthr and begins his quest to find the legendary sword Eterne, for when he finds it, Disiri, whom he loves greatly, has told him that she will see him again.
Mind you, this is a long, dense tale, and what I just told you is pretty much what they write on the back of the book, so clearly my understanding by the end was somewhat limited.
I didn't bother with the sequel, The Wizard, at the time, but for some reason I made sure to buy not only The Wizard but also my own copy of The Knight before returning to the states. I don't know why. I think that using foreign money makes it feel like you aren't spending anything at all. Also, prior to that, I happened across $170 of Australian money on the street (I kid you not; three $50 bills and one $20 fluttered across the sidewalk one night, so I scooped them up, looked around, saw no one crying over lost cash, and took them myself), so really you could say that God wanted me to buy these books. He also apparently wanted me to buy a Nintendo DS game (Hoshigami Remix), some green tea frappachinos from Starbucks, a blanket, some alcohol for my boxed-wine-guzzling friends, and multiple $3 busrides to and from Circular Quay (where the Opera House is), but that's besides the point. That money was meant for The Knight and The Wizard, I am sure. Call it divine intervention.
Now that I have had a bit more experience with reading, I decided to have another go. This is the primary reason for my lack of book reviews lately: I've been reading these two books since I finished Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire a month ago. I've never been a fast reader, but these two books just take a long time. But I finished them both... finally... and can now report to you what I've observed.
Let me start by saying that this is not a proper review. I am not qualified to give these two books the review that they deserve, nor am I sure if I know anyone who is. As I said, these books are dense, and by that I mean that there's more going on than just the plot. In high school, GoldenPigsy and I read Dante's Divine Comedy (which was not, as the title may suggest, a retelling of Jim Carrey's Bruce Almighty starring Dante from Capcom's Devil May Cry game series). Our teachers informed us that Dante's three poems had four layers of meaning, derived from an old way of interpreting Biblical scriptures:
Literal (what happened?)
In the Second Circle of Hell, Dante watches as famous lovers - like Paris and Helen from the Trojan War - are flung about by tempestuous winds.
Allegorical (meaning behind what happened as it relates to us)
The winds whipping the lustful around like ragdolls represent the chaotic nature of desires of the flesh.
Moral/Tropological (what have we learned today?)
It is wrong to give in to temptation, for lust is as unpredictable and temporary as a storm.
Anagogical (meaning behind what happened as it relates to life beyond our world)
Giving in to sinful desires of the flesh will throw your spiritual life into turmoil. (I'm pretty sure I butchered that, but who really understands anagogical interpretation, anyway?)
In other words, for every scene, there are, in a way, four scenes. Think of them as four different-colored lenses through which you read the text, thus putting Dante and other interpretors of Biblical scripture centuries ahead of their time in terms of fashion.
As it turns out, Gene Wolfe converted to Catholicism upon marrying a Catholic woman, and this heavily influenced his writings. The world represented in The Wizard Knight series will illustrate this point in a moment, but first, allow me to talk a bit more about The Knight.
The Knight is a first-person narrative told in the form of an absurdly long letter written by an American teenager, who takes the name Able in this new world, to his older brother Ben. Able rarely takes the time to properly explain what's going on; in fact, you may turn to the next chapter to find him somewhere else completely, without the slightest bit of detail on how he got there. You'll more or less hear about it later, so that by the time you finish both books, you know the full story. You just have to be patient and trust that Able will explain things later whenever you read a section and say "what the hell?" This also includes several little asides and remarks where he'll mention some character whom you haven't even met yet, like if he talked about some type of sword and said, "ah, yes, Pigsy was always the best with those." If you've never met someone named Pigsy, you can understand why this can be a difficult read for the first time through. He writes these things, obviously, after everything has already happened. The difficulty comes with the fact that Able almost expects you to be in the same position as him: having already experienced everything he talks about.
Anyway this is a story about "Sir Able of the High Heart" and his transformation into the knight he always wanted to be. Initially, The Aelf queen Disiri turns him into a large, hunky man physically, but the remainder of the book is all about him being a knight in more than just his muscles. He learns from a knight named Sir Ravd, he fights bandits, he travels on a ship, he takes up service with a duke, and he travels north - towards the land of the Giants - to hold a mountain pass until winter in service of said duke. When he makes a promise, he keeps it. His love is only for Disiri, and he will not be with any other woman. He strives to be just and fair, just as Sir Ravd was.
The first time I read this, I really didn't get Able as a character. It was my own fault; I misread some things and skimmed over others, so I thought Able brutish and unjust, when in fact he is neither. He's a great character, a good model for other knights. Because, you know, we have so many of them around nowadays. The reason I thought him brutish and unjust during my first read-through was mostly because he can be, um, forceful, when situations call for it. Not overly-violent, mind you, but he asserts himself when needed, and to the unaccustomed eye it can look as though he's just throwing his weight around because he can. Let's just say that you don't see a lot of compassion in his actions; he's not meant to be a Christian example, after all. The human world here has a decidedly Norse flair to it, so think Vikings, not Jesus.
It is the set up of the worlds that I found to be the single most fascinating aspect of the series. Mythgarthr, the world of the humans, is the fourth world in a heirarchy of seven. The world above ours is called Skai, which we see above us in the form of clouds, the sun, the moon, the stars, etc. Below us is Aelfrice, whose sky... is us! Trippy? I thought so. When the Aelfs in Aelfrice look up, they see us. There is no sun, but light is supplied by whatever is in Mythgarthr. Below Aelfrice is Muspel (think of the base of a volcano), where dragons dwell, and below that is Nieflheim/Hel. Take a guess who lives there. So, ascending: Hel, Muspel, Aelfrice, Mythgarthr, Skai, Kleos, Elysion. As you go higher and higher, the beings become more and more perfect, meaning that the uppermost world entirely consists of "The Most High God". This guy, a perfect being, decided in the beginning that he wanted to create something, so he made the second world, Kleos. However, since he was perfect, anything different than him must be by definition imperfect, so while the beings of the second world are near perfection - in fact, they are angels - they are not quite perfect themselves. The excess/unwanted materials from the second world were then used to create the third, Skai, and so on and so forth. Skai is where the Overcyns live, who are, essentially, the Norse gods like Thor and Odin (called here Thunor and the Valfather, respectively).
Doesn't that make a little too much sense, theologically speaking? Gods like Thor and Odin (and, I like to think, Zeus, Hera, Apollo, etc.) are one world above us, with angels above them, and The Most High God above everything. So The Most High God is a god over angels, who are gods over the Valfather & Co, who are gods over humans. This makes us gods to the Aelfs, who are gods to dragons, who are gods to whatever lives in Hel, meaning that, while it's okay in The Knight/Wizard to worship the Valfather and pray to him, the one who deserves the most worship is The Most High God. It's like Gene Wolfe found a way, using Catholic/medieval hierarchies, to toss multiple theologies into one, coherent world, and I think that's bloody brilliant.
I can't say it better than GoldenPigsy did in a recent email, though, so I'll let him further explain:
The levels of the world are a conflation of Neo-Platonic Medieval/Catholic cosmology and Norse myth about the levels of the Yggdrasil tree. Mythgarthr is Midgard. Skai is Asgard. Utgard, the giant's castle, in Norse myth is the name of a realm on the same level as Asgard, but separate from it. Nieflheim in Norse mythology is the roots of the Yggdrasil. Muspell -- this will be no surprise to you -- is the fiery realm of dragons.
The upper two are not variations on Norse myth. Kleos is literally what certain Medieval thinkers thought outer space was: a realm of angels. The highest is simply God and nothing else. The way the worlds are stacked is in keeping with the hierarchical structure that Medieval people applied to practically everything. Divine right of kings ring a bell? You have authority the closer you are to God, and the people beneath you look up to you as a model in order to become more like Him. The peasant looks up to the duke who looks up to the king who looks up to the Pope who looks up to God. The son looks up to the father who looks up to etc. etc. In The Wizard Knight, The Valfather is the model for earthly Kings, for fathers and rulers. Thunor (if I remember right) is the model for Knights and sons and retainers. The King is the model for dukes; the Knight is the model for squires. Michael (lol!) the archangel is the model for the Valfather. Who's the model for Michael?
Yeah. There's a few different valid interpretations of what's going on. There's an adventure/fantasy story here, and it's an awesome one, but there's more to it than that.
Wolfe is brain-melting good. Didn't I tell you so?
Yes, Pigsy, you did (several times), and yes, you were right. One of the most brilliant settings I've encountered in a very long time, one that made me think about my own beliefs and how I view the world.
Because the events were related directly by Able himself, sometimes (read: often) you get the feeling that he misinterpreted what he saw. Certainly it's common to feel as though he didn't tell you everything, but this is apparently part of Wolfe's style: narration told by the main character, who is constantly unreliable. If you're looking for a straight-shooting story, this is not it, but if you want something that will make you think, then check this series out. I never thought I'd be glad to have my brain feel as though it was back in high school English class, but there you go. Oftentimes I felt like I needed a pen and a notepad, and I mean that as a compliment, both to the richness of the books and the skill of dear Mr. Wolfe.
And for the record, I was entirely joking when I suggested that they turn the game Too Human into a videogame version of these books. While Too Human could have done well with the basic setting of The Wizard Knight, it goes without saying that the style of the books could not possibly lend to a videogame. I fear that it would turn into the recent Dante's Inferno game, which seemed to have achieved the setting without too much trouble (but a giant Cleopatra who births badguys out of her breasts? Really?), but utterly botched/didn't care about the spirit of the original poem. It'd be kind of like turning The Hunger Games into a videogame, as well. Can you imagine a videogame that actually requires you to hunt down and kill other teenagers? You'd basically be playing Halo 3, and nobody wants that now, do they?
Just this week I got a text from Pilgrim which read, "I just finished The Knight and for the first 100 pages I thought, 'damn this is weird'... Then it got awesome."
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