Gene Wolfe

A Borrowed Man: a new science fiction novel, from Gene Wolfe, the celebrated author of the Book of the New Sun series. It is perhaps a hundred years in the future, our civilization is gone, and another is in place in North America, but it retains many familiar things and structures. Although the population is now small, there is advanced technology, there are robots, and there are clones. E. A. Smithe is a borrowed person. He is a clone who lives on a third-tier shelf in a public library, and his personality is an uploaded recording of a deceased mystery writer. Smithe is a piece of property, not a legal human. A wealthy patron, Colette Coldbrook, takes him from the library because he is the surviving personality of the author of Murder on Mars. A physical copy of that book was in the possession of her murdered father, and it contains an important secret, the key to immense family wealth. It is lost, and Colette is afraid of the police. She borrows Smithe to help her find the book and to find out what the secret is. And then the plot gets complicated.

A Borrowed Man

Bryan Alexander

I read A Borrowed Man honor of Gene Wolfe's passing last month.

If anyone else had written this novel, I'd commend them for nicely mixing together two genres. A Borrowed Man is one part mystery, one part science fiction. We follow a mystery writer (well, his clone) as he is hired (actually, borrowed, hence the title) to solve one mystery, which then yields others. This draws from classic American private eye stories, complete with wisecracking thugs, interrogations, beat-downs, escapes, a Macguffin, and the plots ultimately explained in a very satisfactory way. 

At the same time we follow our clone narrator into the future, a high tech world with flying cars, ubiquitous screens, plenty of robots, consumer-grade atomic power plants, underpopulation (143), public pornography, a new calendar system (232), and, of course, cloning. Cloned authors can be checked out of libraries. The United States is now the Continental Government. And yet enough of our present world persists to make things credible: bus stations, inter-library loan, bad family portraits. Through this classic sf trope (present-day-ish person enters the future) Wolfe sketches out a fascinating world... and more I don't want to say, because of spoilers.

So a good novel. It's very well written, the plots reveal themselves neatly, some action appears, as do several romances. Fortunes are reversed. Shadowy character details resolve. But because this is a Gene Wolfe story there's a lot more going on that merely combining two genres and doing it well.

For one, A Borrowed Man's world is one that's much darker than I think most reviewers have caught. From the second page we're informed that our narrator is a human being defined as subhuman, facing torture if he doesn't obey orders (115) and being burned alive if he fails to perform (9, 222). Reclone women appear in publicly screened porn videos, and seem to be raped (141). Nobody protests at this Fourth Industrial Revolution form of slavery. Meanwhile, characters repeatedly come across "old ruined towns" and "starved-looking children in rags" (144); is this a result of whatever mysteriously depopulated the world? The world's nations have experienced a decline in skills and knowledge, along with experiencing a legitimation crisis (273). "Defective" people are terrified of being found out. Police and criminals are equally terrifying and hard to tell apart. And the solutions to several mysteries are brutal.

We are also in the hands of a narrator who doesn't tell us everything, a classic Wolfe figure. We rarely see how characters react to him, even when he appears in public covered in blood. He explicitly and implicitly hides his thoughts and plans from other people, including the reader. The first and second paragraphs are a game played with the author, challenging us to continue. We know Smithe has been shaped by mental condition to not do certain things, and to speak in a very formal style.

Wolfe stretches our imagination into surreal territory several times, nearly making me consider it a fantasy. How reclone authors actually fit in libraries isn't quite clear. They sound like books, with multiple shelves, yet they also inhabit apartments with common areas. Are the libraries actually vast buildings, something like tenements, or is some spacetime warping going on? (That would fit a key plot theme) Also - ahem, (view spoiler)[getting into the accessible alien world is described in very dreamlike, un-hard-science-fiction ways, as if the plot had slid sideways. Is this just an effect of Clarke's Law? (Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.) (hide spoiler)]

Various references stir my curiosity. Our narrator is known as "E.A.", which naturally makes me think of Poe, relevant here as one of detective fiction's founders. His first name, Ern, is a homophone for "urn," a fitting link given the character's promised fate (ashes), as well as his cultural status (holding a dead thing, a writer's memories). There's a fine Clark Ashton Smith poem quoted, which suggests that our hero is a victor in imagination only, which sounds about right (285). The new United States is run by a Continental authority, which suggests Hammett's Continental Op, which does make sense for how Smithe proceeds. I'm not sure what to make of all of the C's: Coldbrook, Colette, Conrad.

Let me turn to the end. (view spoiler)[On the one hand, there is a lot of narrative satisfaction. A bad guy gets his, sidekicks are rewarded, the main mysteries are revealed, and our hero escapes termination. Smithe finally writes... the book we read. Yet the world of reclones remains, and the broader world is untouched. Smithe is still trapped in the third tier. He reconnects briefly with beloved Arabella, then leaves her for good. Humanity has made an extraordinary breakthrough by creating a bridge to a new world - and Smithe literally closes the door on it. He ensures that a murderer - Colette, a parricide - goes free.

John Clute says this: one might almost be able to say this is the saddest story I have ever heard, even though A Borrowed Man, which tells a tale out of the old age of the author of Peace (1975), may not be quite the most adamantly terminal novel Gene Wolfe has ever written... A Borrowed Man does not escape from prison through doors; it is a prison upon which the doors have shut.... a trap without exit.I feel much of this as well. (hide spoiler)]

At the same time this novel is a song in praise of books and their writers, despite its many messages of dread. A book holds the key to many of the story's mysteries. People can still turn to libraries for help. A writer solves riddles. Books are gateways. 

I'd put A Borrowed Man in the second rank of Wolfe's books. Four and a half stars, nudged to five because RIP.

A Borrowed Man

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