Urth Net
This week in Google Alerts: review of _The Knight_
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He later trades a baby for a dog, offers to kill a youth in order to get a moment alone with Disiri, and “raises a hand” when some woman tries to speak. It seems clear, then, that Able is a bastard. The reader receives no confirmation of this, as all the other characters treat Able is a hero. Women fall in love with him, and his social superiors find him a bold, forthright specimen of manhood. What you get is a heroic story that doesn’t recognize it has an anti-hero at its core.
At this point one begins to wonder if The Knight is a parody of the genre from one of its most gifted practitioners. Only if it’s irony, it’s so dry and deadpan it becomes impossible to detect. At which point, is it even funny? (Says the guy who doesn’t get it.) It may be necessary to give Wolfe the benefit of the doubt: The Knight fails as a straight-forward fantasy narrative. It’s tediously aimless, never addressing its most interesting elements while focusing on a dead theme, chivalry. But if it is ironic, it’s stealthily brilliant. But that suspense — does Wolfe recognize how big an asshole Able is? ? soon became the novel’s one draw.
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But so much of these later jumps begin to feel just like gaps. Able is obsessed with Disiri the elf. His love for her motivates everything he does, so much so that motives and decisions do not even exist for him. There is only the action that will bring him closer to Disiri. We see the results of this obsession, but never its cause. Sure, Able tells you he loves Disiri above everything, but the reader never believes it because they never experience it. Again there is a disturbing disjunction between the reported Able and the actual Able, and the narrative never reconciles the two.
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Inconsistencies like this — in plot scale, logic, and character — are what make The Knight so maddening. Even if these aren’t mistakes, they’re distracting enough to be counted as such. I do believe Gene Wolfe is a good writer. You’d just never know it from The Knight. Able is a teenage boy, and not a particularly bright one. Generally, Wolfe adheres to this non-literary voice. But sometimes it breaks. Leaving aside obviously incongruous word choices like “purling” to describe a stream, you can see flashes of a genuine lyricism which Able is completely incapable of. These aren’t questions of diction or sophistication, but an artfulness or eloquence of feeling which does not strike me as coming from Able.
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What I’ve described is an ambivalence that’s pulling the book in two different directions. One thing turns out to be two things at once, which comes off as a headache-inducing double image rather than complexity. There’s Able and Gene Wolfe’s competing voices. There’s something troubling about the main character. The narrative wants to be epic myth and fish out of water story. Ambivalence is the symptom, but the root cause is ambiguity. Readers can handle cognitive dissonance only if the book trains them to. If not, there’s only indeterminacy.
gwern
http://www.gwern.net