/lit/ - Literature

Tonight I finished off my Claw Of The Conciliator reread. It's quite a different volume to the previous: with more explicit detail about Urth's history, the cacogens and the exultants. It also feels like a less static and leisurely volume than Shadow Of The Torturer, with more narrative thrust (I suppose because Severian is now moving towards Thrax) and well as many little episodes, memorable minor characters, intrigues, and set pieces: Executions at Saltus, The Green Man, The Man-apes, The Vodalus/Autarch intrigue, The House Absolute antechamber, Talos' Play and its aftermath, the Cumaean. Particularly, Severian with the man-apes at the Saltus mine would be the most memorable part of the book for its combined sense of gradually increasing panic and weirdness.

I started re-reading Claw Of The Conciliator. I was reminded how much Wolfe has packed into the first fifty pages of this volume:

The variously back-stabbing, superstitious, bloodthirsty and unctuous people of Saltus (the village mindset is portrayed very keenly here indeed), the executions, the green man at the fair, the letter, the cave man-apes at the mine.

An eventful time indeed, after the comparatively static beginning of the last volume.