Shadow & Claw by Gene Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fantastic Conjunctivitis

Wolfe is most often compared to Tolkien and Lewis. However this is regurgitation of marketing hype. There is little in terms of style or symbology to link Wolfe with either. Aside from the genre of fantasy and a clear talent for creative world-building, Wolfe dwells in a very different universe, a universe not all that dissimilar from Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy.

The physical environment of Wolfe's city of Nessus could easily fit into Peake's Gormenghast Castle and vice-versa: A vast, half-ruined, place, unknown except locally to its inhabitants. A gothic labyrinth that harbours all manner of surprises and threats.

Both sets of works play off a background of ancient but incomprehensible tradition that establishes the rigid conditions from which the protagonist must escape. Unlike Severian, Titus knows his forebears, but this difference makes no difference to the comprehensive social discipline and constraint applied to both of them.

Both Titus in Peake and Severian in Wolfe are sympathetic characters who struggle against the bonds of convention to capture some sort of independent identity. Both have only a vague notion of what lies outside the boundaries of the city/castle but they yearn toward it with a clearly erotic drive.

Many of the other characters also are inter-changeable. The Chief Archivist and his assistant in Wolfe could be copies of Peake's Barquentine and the villainous Steerpike. Bellgrove in Peake could be one of Wolfe's Masters.

Peake wrote Gormenghast between 1946 and 1959. It inspired several other works, most notably China Mieville's 2000 steampunk fantasy Perdido Street Station. Wolfe's three (or four) books were written between 1980 and 1983. I have been unable to find any mention of Peake (who died in 1968) by Wolfe or in critical analyses of his work. In a 2014 interview with Wolfe specifically about writers who had influenced him, he makes no mention of Peake (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/52...).

So an interesting case of parallel inspiration or a demonstration of the anxiety of influence? Any views are welcome.

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