Gene Wolfe is best known for books that aren't this one.1
There's a lot to recommend about the guy. Neil Gaiman likes him a lot.2 His writing is lucid but loaded with odd and obscure words. His characters are engaging, even the ciphers and walk-on players. And he tells a solid, compelling story with an interesting and fully developed milieu in a short amount of space.3
And this is a really odd book. It seems superficially like a hero's journey, where a young protagonist is taken out of his village and out on a journey that transforms him into a noble hero, but it's really not. At all.
Every character is up to something and you keep waiting for some big reveal that will explain how nothing is what it seems- and by all means, there are plot twists aplenty- but very little is resolved. And people actually are what they seem, sometimes frustratingly so.
The big climax happens off-stage.4 The bad guy gets his comeuppance, but it's indirect and you just see him getting taken away after-the-fact. The main character gets safely home, but it's not clear what he's learned or what any of it really meant.
And then a brief epilogue, set in the present, makes the whole thing seem like a dark joke.5
It's all a metaphor for the struggle between paganism and Christianity in medieval Europe and it's fine as an allegory because it never gets preachy or takes sides.6 Wolfe consistently confounds expectations, but manages not to yank the reader's chain too obviously.
I don't know why this book works, but it does. Wolfe is an intriguing writer and nobody writes like him. This is my first book by the author and if this is one of his lesser-known, unheralded books, that bodes well for his more acclaimed work.7
I recommend you give the Wolfe man a chance.
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1. Its Wikipedia page is pretty bare-bones (and badly formatted), which is usually a good indication of how much folks care about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_a_Forest
2. In his latest collection, "Trigger Warning," Gaiman even wrote a story that takes place in one of Wolfe's worlds- "A Lunar Labyrinth."
3. The same is true of most 50's and 60's sf paperbacks- their brevity is often their charm. They're the exact opposite of "Game of Thrones"- they effortlessly knock out 1000's of pages' worth of story in a brisk 200 pages. You can devour them like potato chips. Strange that modern fantasy books are getting longer while our attention spans are getting shorter.
4. I HATE to compare this to "Twilight," that's not fair at all, but this is a lot like how right when the climactic action scene arrives in that book- the only time it seems to come to life- the narrator faints and it all happens offscreen. I trust Mr. Wolfe to have his reasons for doing this more than I trust Mrs. Meyer.
5. But it's a good dark joke!
6. It implies that they could and should coexist peacefully. Wolfe is Catholic but this book definitely skews anti-organized religion, which feels appropriate for the story.
7. "Book of the New Sun" is his big-deal literary work, I understand.
-Phony McFakename
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