The Wizard Knight

The Gene Wolfe book is really enjoyable. I love 'fairy tale logic', where the protagonist succeeds by knowing exactly when to be polite and humble, when to be bold, when to lie and when to tell the truth. This is full of that kind of stuff, especially in the beginning when Able is telling everyone he's a knight.

Like everything Gene Wolfe has written, there's layers of cleverness to puzzle through, which is funny because the setting is a divided world, similar to Yggdrasil. He's done his usual tricks: unusual words as clues, having the story related by a narrator that may be lying and has memory problems, stories within stories and revelations about plot twists hundreds of pages before they occur.

The stories within stories is probably my favourite of his devices. It was really effective in Peace and the Book of the New Sun, but he's used it sparingly here. At one point Sir Able of the High Heart, sometimes called 'The Green Knight' loses a duel and tells the winner about how he once challenged a knight to decapitate him and lost that as well. The other knight says it's a preposterous story, but since it's Able we can't be sure. What I do know is it's ripped straight from a Middle English romance called 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. What's cool is the story both illustrates what's happening and alludes to one of the purposes of the book: the romance has been translated JRR Tolkien.

There's a little too much pondering the metaphysics of the created universe, especially when Able is trying to explain why he's done something, or why he can't do something. That's getting on my nerves a little. But apart from that absolutely loving this.