The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This isn't a review.
It's a few thoughts inspired by reading The Wizard Knight and discussing it with a few people in an online forum for discussing theology and literature, most of whom were a lot more familiar with the work of Gene Wolfe than I am. I think that in order to write an actual review, one would need to have read the book at least three times.
It's a story about an American boy who goes for a walk and gets lost in the woods. He plucks a branch from a tree of a kind he has never seen before, and finds himself in a different universe. In a cave he meets a woman called Parka who has too many teeth. She gives him a magical bowstring to turn the branch he plucked into a bow, and gives him a new name, Able of the High Heart. He wanders around trying to find his way home, and meets a man, Bold Berthold, who had a younger brother called Able, and assumes that Able of the High Heart is his brother returned, and takes him in and tells him something about the world he is in, Mythgarthr, which has three worlds above it, and three below. In the one immediately below, Aelfrice, Abel meets an Aelf, or Dryad, Disiri, who kisses him, and he falls in love with her. She makes him grow up quickly, and he wanders around Mythgarthr, with occasional excursions to Aelfrice below and Skai above, seeking to become a knight. In a battle with a dragon he acquires a sword, Eterne, which he uses as a knight, serving Arnthor, the King of Celidon, the country he first arrived in, joining an embassy to the country of the giants in the neighbouring kingdom to the north, which likes to enslave humans, and engaging in battles with the cannibals who live on the eastern border, the Osterlings.
I suppose it could be described as a kind of picaresque fantasy. It has some echoes of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass, in the sense that the protagonist encounters a lot of strange magical characters, and in both books, on a first reading, one barely scratches the surface of the story.
Able of the High Heart acquires as pets a talking dog and a talking cat, and some hangers on, including a sailor, a crippled peasant (or an agricultural worker living with disability, if you prefer), an ogre and a couple of Aelf maidens who are into shape shifting.
Among the similarities with Alice in Wonderland are the talking animals and the changes in size. We know that Alice Liddell was about 7 years old when Lewis Carroll (Revd Charles Dodgson) told her the story, and in the story the protagonist who shared her name kept growing and shrinking. Able of the High Heart seems to be about 11 or 12 when he comes to Mythgarthr and Aelfrice, and suddenly becomes a mature adult, whose voice has broken and he no longer fits his clothes. Though he doesn't grow or shrink physically thereafter, he still feels like a boy inside, and often behaves like one too. His pet dog, however, can apparently change size at will.
In reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland one discovers new things on each re-reading, and I think The Wizard Knight is like that too. I would like to be able to reread it in an annotated edition, like The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition.
Some additional comments (may contain spoilers)
My comparison with Alice in Wonderland is because, on a first reading, neither book seems to have an interpretive framework or a goal. There is a series of seemingly unconnected events, which gives them a dreamlike quality. Alice wanders through Wonderland with no definite goal, encountering strange characters who interact with her in various ways. Abel wanders through three worlds and more and develops the vague ambition of becoming a knight. His main goal seems to be to find Disiri again, having fallen in love with her, but very little of what he does seems calculated to achieve that goal.
It is possible, on reflection, to interpret some parts of the story allegorically. The three kingdoms of Mythgarthr that we are told about -- Celidon, inhabited mainly by humans, but with a ruler who is part dragon; the land of the Angrborn (giants) who enslave humans; and the cannibalistic Osterlings -- seem to be engaged in perpetual and inevitable conflict. One could see the giants as an allegory for governments that rely on brute strength and projection of power to cow and defeat their opponents, and perhaps the cannibalistic Osterlings represent capitalism in seeing human beings as merely a resource to exploit. But it would need a second or third reading to test such a thesis.
So my final word is, if you want to read The Wizard Knight, be prepared to read it twice. As soon as you finish it, go back to the beginning and start again, making notes on the characters and events as you go. Then, perhaps after an interval of a few weeks, read it again.
