The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe (1972)

 I can't remember the last time I finished a book, and then started reading it again immediately. This broke that hiatus. I enjoy being challenged intellectually, when I feel there's something to be 'found out'. When the 'challenge' is simply inexplicability, I find it not only uninteresting, but not a challenge - it feels lazy, and the excuses made for it ("a real representation of the unknowability and illogicality of life") bring on a feeling of false "depth". This is not only in the former category, but is impressively so. It is composed of three related novellas. The first, the title novella, takes place on Sainte Anne, one of twin planets, the other called Sainte Croix. The main character is a boy, who is growing up with his brother in his father's house, in a town by a river estuary near the sea called Port-Mimizon. It's a slightly down-at-heel almost pioneer place, quite warm and semi-tropical, but his father's house is much more well-heeled, and the equivalent of a brothel; the "girls" are always round about, in working times and otherwise. This is perhaps the first sign of Wolfe designing a slightly different morality for these worlds, where this aspect is not particularly remarked upon. Nor are other differences in this world that feels a lot like our own: the boys' tutor is a robotic one, but very humanoid in some of its reactions and modes, by name Mr Million. Slaves are traded at a market in the town. The matter-of-factness of the presentation of this gives an insight into the world-creation which is being essayed here. Key moments in this period of the boy's life are pictured - his discovery of his aunt in a distant room of the house, his diagnosis of some of the hitherto unexplainable aspects of Mr Million's teaching. This is also the time that his father first begins to take an interest in him and his brother; they are probably just pre-puberty. His father has more interest in him than his brother - he is singled out to undergo sessions downstairs in his father's study/laboratory. He is drugged and analysed, going through very long (all night long) occasions which almost amount to interrogations. They exhaust him, destabilise him, slabs of time become a blank, but they also bring some fresh points clear: he is not strictly his father's son. He and his brother are genetic replicants, made by his father, of himself. His father is another example of this, made by the man whose face is still represented on Mr Million's headscreen. His aunt is similar, and so on. The revelations come strongly - his father trades/traded in children, there are many clones all around the planet, and scientific experimentation has become allied to exploitation. As he gets older, he begins tentative explorations into female friendship with a local girl, met at the park, by the name of Phaedria. It is with her and his brother that a plan is hatched, on the basis of a rumoured "secret horde" that his father keeps hidden. Once they realise the extent of his father's disinterest in them personally, and he particularly is weighed down with all the drugging and harsh experimentation, he can virtually fulfil a generational repetition and kill his father, carrying on with his supposed extensive resources. At this point we are informed that the plot is being retold by the boy, now man, following a period in prison for this crime. Late in the piece, before the murder is done, the house receives a visit from an anthropologist from Earth via Sainte Croix, Dr Marsch, who has been directed to their address as an old one for a famous theorist, Dr Veil, who developed a hypothesis regarding the aboriginal people of Sainte Anne. This was that they were not wiped out, as previously thought, by the first wave of French colonisation, but instead had such shape-shifting, merging capacities that they replaced the invaders with themselves in the colonialists' skins. First not knowing what the visitor is on about, it is quickly revealed that Dr Veil is in fact the boy's aunt, when Marsch is led to her to ask if she can shed any light. The novella ends with the "boy" now in charge of the denuded, peeling, tired house and wondering if he can continue it in some way. The second novella is called 'A Story' by John V. Marsch, and purports to be a representation of what the anthropologist from the first novella at some unknown point wrote when his imagination was fired from all he discovered about the aboriginal inhabitants of Sainte Anne, known in his anthro-speak as the Annese. It concerns tribal people conducting their lives in the wilds of the planet before colonisation. The light of this world is not sunlight, everything takes place under a different register, a much deeper, bluer one. There is a story of twin brothers, born out in the landscape (there are no houses, just temporary camps), one of whom stays with his mother, the other is drowned when being washed in a nearby river by his grandmother. As a point of crux, it is revealed much later that this brother was not drowned, and was saved from the river, but the two have grown up completely apart and come to very different allegiances in life through the environments in which they were succoured. The landscape is variable, a mereish waterworld low down, a very green midbelt, and stony mountainous areas. A river is dominant through all, and the sea is there, but distant. The animals of the landscape are not dissimilar to those of Earth, but with key differences, with some being good eating, others wildly dangerous. There are also a variety of more sentient beings - at least in the minds of the characters, where not only are there peoples from different sectors, but also beings which only appear at certain times, or beings which take on different looks depending on how they're being seen. Trees are sentient, and are deeply valued and respected, as key presences to be pleased and understood. The sky is full of meaningful constellations with 'native' names, who have influence upon events. The whole atmosphere is felt through a spiritual lens, and significances play out in those terms, both harsh and sweet. The other important element, which is related, is that of the psychic and dreaming: many decisions are made because of dreams or visions, dreams are recounted as reasoning, beings are seen differently and tellingly in dreams, merging of reality happens between visions and dreams. The culmination of the piece is in the meeting between the two brothers, the capture of the "surviving" one and his fellow travellers (a crew of humanesque aboriginals and "Shadow Children", wispy-visaged and -bodied, now here, now gone, sometimes harsh fighters, sometimes incomparably weak) by the "rescued" one in a pit near the sea and the river's mouth. Right at the end, after one brother has vanquished the other with the help of a Shadow Child, a strange streak shoots through the sky and something splashes down in the sea near the rivermouth. Beings are standing on the beach speaking an unheard-of language. Going to investigate, the Annese are nonplussed; we recognise the portentous arrival of the first visitors from Earth. The last novella is called V. R. T., and takes place in the main on the sister planet Sainte Croix. It involves a skeleton structure of an officer going through some muddled files in a dispatch box regarding a prisoner. There are various notebooks and journals, as well as loose pages, and a good number of tapes of free conversations and arrest interrogations. These elements are presented as the officer wanders through them, very broadly in some sort of chronological order, but swapping between different parts as his mood takes him. It quickly becomes clear from some of the tapes that Marsch has been detained when he arrived back on Sainte Croix after his time on Sainte Anne, and is suspected of something, possibly anti-government activity. But he is unsure what they are after, and why they don't believe him. His papers are about what happened once he left the house of the boy and his family in the first novella. He recounts being directed to a beggar and his son who claim to be Annese: Marsch is still at this point trying to work out his own theory about possible aboriginal survival. Trenchard and Victor, his son, design a boat journey in the nearby area to convince Marsch that they know what they're talking about, taking him to sacred sites and points of significance. He is convinced enough to set out upon a much longer journey into the interior with Victor (Trenchard is too decrepit to go to those lengths) in the hope of finding a cave in the riverbank in the mountains which may have survivors living in it, as well as possible relics of the 'lost civilisation'. The two of them encounter some of the animals mentioned in the second novella, and a couple of gruesome others, have all sorts of difficulties which are toughly overcome, often by Victor in terms of local understanding, and Marsch in terms of heft. As these documents proceed almost sequentially, there is the feeling of a loss of fulcrum, a gradual change coming over the mind of Marsch. And then a point is reached when he discloses that Victor got too near the edge of a precipice alongside the now deep-valleyed river, and fell to his death. Other documents relate the experiences of Marsch as a prisoner, in very deprived circumstances, and further utterly inhumane ones, attempting to communicate with other prisoners via tapping on pipes, trying to work out where he is, being taken for interrogations, and so on. There is a salutary eventuality about two thirds of the way through these papers, where the voice of the narrator, formerly Marsch, slips over into being that of Victor, and back and forth. A clear reference to Veil's Hypothesis in the sense that it's unclear how much of the prisoner is Marsch original, or, alternately, Victor-overtake. And who knows what the circumstances were. Based on prior evidence, there's no reason to believe that anything untoward occurred - Marsch's stories have not been deceptive. Presumably Victor's shape-shifting spirit had begun to meld itself with Marsch's either before his death (evidenced by the slight shift in angle in Marsch's account) or after it - this exactitude is left uninvestigated. As of course is so much in this piece - one of its major praises is the completeness of the worlds and their norms created, where what's left out is what might easily have been lost information, information never written down, things not considered important in those immediate circumstances. Add this phenomenal attention to detail to extraordinary complexity of vision and concepts, and one can begin to recognise the level of the achievement here. A swim in delicate, dislocating waters.