The Book isn't quite The Divine Comedy in four bumper parts instead of only three. So let us call it The Book for short, and spend some time in praise of the new Dante. For The Book of the New Sun, all 400,000 grave and polished words of it, is far greater than the sum of its parts. Maybe now we can forget The Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator and The Sword of the Lictor (all separately reviewed in Book World over the past three years), and forget this title, which is confusingly interchangeable with those that misrepresent its three predecessors, and from now on think only of the novel as a whole, under the continuing subtitle which defines it as such. WITH The Citadel of the Autarch, we have the fourth and and final volume of Gene Wolfe's superb long science fiction novel, The Book of the New Sun.
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