Reading the second part of Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun has for me been a dreamlike experience.  I gave up on the first part once because it got too weird, but now that I’m attuned to Wolfe’s style, that is no longer a problem.  Now it works like hypnosis.  A few paragraphs in, and my brain shifts to a different gear: Slow, focused. Dreamlike.

The story takes place at the end of Earth’s life, when the sun is cooling, a setting introduced in Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories.  Everything that could happen has happened, and people are surrounded by monuments from greater times.  The end is coming, or possibly the birth of a better world.

Events follow a jagged path that seems random but at the same time full of meaning.  There are echoes of mythology: Christian, classical, and modern.  And there are events that seem meaningful at first, then turn out not to be.  The protagonist, an exiled torturer, is given a magnificently named sword at the beginning, which he carries through all his adventures.  And then he loses it, and the story continues.  It was just a sword.

A gem that brings dead people back to life is possibly just a gem, or possibly magical.  A boy that shares the torturers name seems to represent something, but we never learn what.  Questions remain unanswered, and what I’m left with afterwards is mostly the feeling that I’ve been through something wonderful, something that resonated deeply with me.  Just like a dream.