The Knight is one of those books where Wolfe's flaws overwhelm his gifts. Admittedly, he doesn't start with much. The Knight's premise is one of the hoariest in pulp fantasy: A young boy from our world is teleported to a magical realm and becomes a great hero. If Gene Wolfe's name were not prominently splashed on the title page, no self-respecting fantasy reader would give this book a second look. But Wolfe's authorship immediately raises suspicion that all will not be as it seems.
And, indeed, The Knight shows many Wolfeian trademarks. Take the narrator, a young boy who, within the first few chapters, is miraculously transformed into a muscle-bound knight. It's already interesting enough that the narrator--now calling himself Sir Able--still has the mind of a 10- or 11-year-old boy. But Wolfe adds a few more quirky touches: Able is a rather vicious bully--indeed, something of a fascist; and, more than once, Wolfe suggests that something is not quite right with Able's mind. For one thing, Able's sense of time and continuity is jumbled up. He will pass from describing one scene to another, only to tell us, maybe two chapters later, that oh, by the way, in between those two scenes something significant happened. But there are also hints that Able's mind is actually damaged: that he is, perhaps, a young boy in a coma in our world (or is he just dreaming of a young boy in a coma?).
The other prototypically Wolfeian touch is that the fantasy world Able enters is totally weird. It's composed of seven realms, but each of them runs on different times and intersects each other in ways that don't seem to obey physical laws. Able mostly adventures in the realm of Mythgarthr, which roughly corresponds to the "ordinary" world. But he sometimes passes (through no apparent means) into Aelfrice, the realm of the Aelf; and occasionally into the fiery land of Muspel, which can be seen at the bottom of some volcanoes but that is not, strictly speaking, "beneath" Mythgarthr. (That is, if you dig straight down from Mythgarthr you'll never leave Mythgarthr; but walking into certain caves on Mythgarthr takes you to Muspel.) I think the easiest way to understand these realms is as non-overlapping three-dimensional realms separated by an incredibly small four-dimensional distance (like sheets of paper stacked up); they thus overlap (four-dimensionally), but do not intersect (three-dimensionally).
At any rate, you can see why I was initially interested in The Knight: It has an appealingly weird narrator, who has quirky adventures in an appealingly weird world. In fact, this sounds exactly like the incredibly successful model of The Book of the New Sun.
Unfortunately, The Knight falls well short of that benchmark. The biggest problem is that Able's adventures are just too random, too aimless. Perhaps because Able is mentally unstuck in time, he's a terrible narrator. Events happen abruptly, with no apparent motivation. There are long chapters where people talk in haunted voices about irrelevancies. And Able is too easily sidetracked from his ultimate quest (which is to get a legendary sword). I mean, why the hell did Able have to spend all those goddamned chapters at sea--where, to make things worse, he constantly falls unconscious, gets zapped to Aelfrice, and returns to find himself on deserted islands? Seriously.
Also, I understand that Able is a young boy, but Wolfe really didn't have to write the whole book as though a young boy were writing it. It's not that The Knight is written in a juvenile fashion. Rather, it's that Wolfe feels compelled to write in as casual a tone as possible: e.g., "Well, I wanted to say no. But I knew that he could get one of those boarding axes or something else like that. So I said all right." (That's a real example: p. 116.) There's a lot of pointless filler in that sentence. In fact, there's a lot of pointless filler in this book. Why Wolfe felt the need to cripple his own considerable gifts as a writer, I will never know.
The result is a book that feels dull and reads worse, like some novice fantasy writer's first stab at the art. Now, because this is Wolfe, there's always a chance I'm missing something. But I tried hard with this book, slogging through it for a month and a half, and it just never got better.
(I should note that the story continues in a second book, The Wizard--the two books are supposed to be considered just one novel. The second book is supposed to be more exciting and more structured, but I refuse to subject myself to it.)
Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu 