Neil Gaiman’s review of Gene Wolfe’s THE SORCERER’S HOUSE
Discovered at GOODREADS
Caveat: This book is dedicated to me, so I may well be immediately biased in its favour.
It’s an epistolary novel. Very dark, very strange, dislocating and dream-like. An ex-prisoner has inherited (or has he?) an abandoned house, containing a were-fox, a ghostly butler, and, possibly, the contents of the Tarot. Twins occur and reoccur, identities are exchanged, people are not what they appear to be…
I’m loving it, but am reading it only a few pages at a time, to make it last.
…
Right, I finished it. And now, more than anything else, I want to read it again. Some of the twists, yes, I guessed, but the full way the book opens out made me start to reread immediately. I think the book, like the house, is bigger than it first appears.
As a side note, I have a mad theory that you can always find a Wolf in a Gene Wolfe book, and it will always be the key, or a key, to the text. This book does nothing to disprove my theory.
…
Am now rereading. I love the patterns in the book. (I spoke about the tarot earlier: the book consists of two sets of 22 chapters, a doubled set of trumps). I love that a lazy reader would read a book that is not as good as the one that Gene Wolfe wrote, while a reader who is working gets a book that, like the Sorcerer’s House itself, appears small and straightforward, and then grows on the inside.
Gene Wolfe once defined good literature as (I quote from memory) something that can be read with pleasure by an educated reader, and reread with increased pleasure, and this is one of those.
My comment: This is one of my favorite Gene Wolfe books, right after his SHADOW OF THE TORTURER and ON BLUE’S WATER. I have recently reread it, and will probably write up some of my own thoughts in the coming week. For the moment, I will but concur with Mr Gaiman that Mr Wolfe’s definition of good literature matches with C.S. Lewis’ (A NEW THEORY OF CRITICISM) and my own.
I can’t get past The Problem of Susan with Gaiman. His liking Wolfe doesn’t dissuade me from my liking of Wolfe, but his endorsements carry no weight with me either. Wodehouse was adored by many, including some very unpleasant sorts. It doesn’t make Wodehouse bad, but neither does a bad man’s liking of Wodehouse make the bad man good.
First off, Gene Wolfe is a really good man as well as a darned good writer, and the fact that he continued to be of good, normal reputation while living in some of the most crazy places is additional evidence for his levelheadedness and virtue. (And being a Catholic too, which of course doesn’t always win one friends.) Second, his attitude is consistently one of kindness toward other writers and dignity toward his fans or any fans. Third, he’s really an amazing writer, even in books that don’t quite hit my taste, and you never know what he’ll write next. So Wolfe is pretty much beyond anybody’s capacity to puff or belittle.
Meanwhile, Gaiman suffers from certain amounts of bigotry, as many of us also suffer, and being English, his targets are mostly old English stuff. He doesn’t know where to point his gun, but he does still have the power to recognize some beautiful things. For Wolfe to act as his friend and acknowledge his brand of fantasy was kind and shrewd, because when Gaiman lets himself be mythopoeic he isn’t bad at all. It’s when Gaiman fights his better angels that he stinks. So Wolfe calls Gaiman, and Gaiman has the grace to answer, and that’s good. Gaiman being insightful instead of a boring decadent twit is really good.
Gaiman has been going downhill for the last decade or more, as have many of the English sf/f writers of a certain age. If we lose them, it will not just be to the braineater (as we say of sf writers who lose their imagination) but also to a particularly unseelie and banal version of Hell. That would be a great pity.
I really would like to like Neil. I have also read that it was mainly his input that brought the animated Beowulf movie to disgrace and ruin.
I hope that’s not true.