From Publishers Weekly
Nebula and World Fantasy awards-winner Wolfe's new novel-the first half of a massive epic-is a reminder that no one gets called a great writer without being first of all a great storyteller. This wonderful story is narrated by a teenage boy who wanders into a universe of interlocking magical realms. Transformed into a powerful man by an elf queen, he first calls himself a knight, Sir Able of the High Heart, then begins growing into that role. Wolfe doesn't just rearrange the cliches of sword and sorcery fiction; he recreates the genre. Sorcerous knowledge is important to Sir Able's survival, but muscle and steel count for a lot too, while sympathetic curiosity and self-awareness may be even more crucial. Though beautifully told, the novel is not exactly Wolfe Lite; much of the plot underlying the action remains obscure. Able realizes that there's a lot he doesn't comprehend, some of it because knowledge was stolen from him. He must gain (or regain) understanding of the worlds around him and of himself. In this respect, Wolfe's tale somewhat resembles the quest in David Lindsay's visionary masterpiece, A Voyage to Arcturus. Whatever its literary antecedents or its ultimate destination, however, this is a compelling, breathtaking achievement.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Most writers of fantasy or science fiction know how to tell rattling good stories. But Gene Wolfe not only entertains, he invests his work with a complexity and trickiness that place him among the most important American novelists of our time. For more than 40 years he has worked steadily at his art, each new book adding yet one more facet to his ongoing and surprisingly cohesive oeuvre. Within his genre Wolfe's living compeers are few -- Ursula Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, John Crowley -- and, like them, he should enjoy the same rapt attention we afford to Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. Whenever two or three of Wolfe's admirers are gathered together, talk will invariably turn to the conundrums buried within his masterwork, The Book of the New Sun. This four-part novel -- comprising The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch -- depicts a far-future Earth, one in which advanced technology, medieval customs and ancient legends mingle together. Severian, trained to be a professional torturer, travels through this ruined world, going to war and eventually achieving his destiny as the redeemer and new ruler of Urth. Throughout his narrative Severian scrupulously relates just what he sees, but only that, so the reader must puzzle out for himself that the Matachin Towers are abandoned starships, that a beautiful young woman is actually Severian's grandmother, and that virtually none of his traveling companions is quite human. Thrilling adventures abound in the four volumes, but Wolfe's prose always remains serenely, gravely measured, even if its surface smoothness is that of quicksand. These books require an attentive reader to be not only suspicious but downright Sherlockian: Observe, remember everything, then deduce, if you can, the unspoken reality. Is that homunculus actually Severian's brother? Much of Wolfe's subsequent fiction has been set, more or less, in the universe of the New Sun. This isn't true of The Knight, although I suspect that study will reveal it to be a kind of rewriting of Severian's story. But you don't need to know Wolfe's earlier work to be caught up in a novel that blends, imaginatively and briskly, Arthurian ideals, Celtic legends and Norse mythology. Its form, though, is unusual: A long letter, that after the salutation "Dear Ben," starts this way:"You must have stopped wondering what happened to me a long time ago; I know it has been many years. I have the time to write here, and what looks like a good chance to get what I write to where you are, so I am going to try. If I just told everything on a couple of sheets, you would not believe most of it. Hardly any of it, because there are many things that I have trouble with myself. So what I am going to do instead is tell everything. When I have finished, you still may not believe me; but you will know all that I do. In some ways, that is a lot. In others, practically nothing."This is, by the way, a typical Wolfe paragraph, seemingly straightforward but already suggestive. How many years? Where is "here"? That promise to tell everything may look like a pact, but the sentences following remind us that knowing things is not the same as understanding them.One afternoon, as the narrator writes to Ben (his older brother), he left their cabin for a walk in the woods. To make a hiking stick he cut a branch from "a tree that was different from the others," then climbed a hill and took a sip from a spring he found there. After his drink he lay back and stared up at the scudding clouds, amazed to see a castle floating in the sky, and then fell asleep. After awakening, our hero finds himself in a cave by the sea, the home of a witchlike crone who calls him "Able of the High Heart." She also tells him to fashion his new stick into a bow and breaks off a length of thread from her bobbin for its string. His memory, she insists, has been partly erased, and he learns that the Aelf wish him to perform some mysterious service for them.And so Able of the High Heart, formerly a teenage American boy, begins his quest to understand what has happened to him and to fulfill his destiny. As in chivalric romances, he goes forth and encounters noble warriors, monsters, churls, elves, giants, a witch and an ogre, gods and even a fairy queen. This last Able rescues, then carries to a nearby cave, following her directions. "She kept her eyes down as if she were shy, but I knew she was not really shy." She kisses the boy, then tells him: " 'I am Disiri the Mossmaiden, and I have kissed you.'"I could still feel her kiss, and her hair smelled of new-turned earth and sweet smoke." 'Men I have kissed cannot leave until I send them away.' "Following a night of love-making -- the Queen of the Moss Aelf, we learn, "was a shapechanger, and all her shapes were beautiful" -- Able finds that several years have passed and his own body is now that of a muscular, Conan-like warrior. He also begins to understand that our universe is layered into a half dozen different planes of reality. We live in Mythgarthr, below it lies the Aelf-realm of Aelfrice and above it Skai, the home of the Valfather and the Overcyn. But there are levels below and above these too. Able will visit some of them on the task given him by Disiri: to locate and be worthy of the sword Eterne.Set down so baldly, this précis could fit any number of epic fantasies (and may even recall, loosely, parts of Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court or Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon; there's even a buried allusion to Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions). But what distinguishes The Knight is its technique. Chapters are short and generally move the reader briskly along. Everything extraneous is left out, including detailed description of most battles. On the other hand, Able repeatedly refers ahead to future events. Such forecasting inverts the usual medieval method of alluding to the past history of people, weapons and practices, but enriches Wolfe's narrative with a comparable epic resonance. Thus "I can be all sunny and smiles for a long, long time. But I can rise up like when we fought the Angrborn at the pass. Giants ran from me then and the ones that did not died," or "I never saw it again until I went into Thiazi's Room of Lost Loves."All through the weird adventures -- under the sea and earth, high up on a mysterious tower, down in pools or deep in caves, with time shifts and shape shifts -- the reader keeps wondering: How does all this fit together? Is Bold Berthold really Able's brother? But then what does it mean when the god-like Garsecg appears to become Bold Berthold? Able's servant seems like Cockney comic relief, but why should he be blind in one eye, usually a sign of the Valfather (i.e., Odin, who gave up an eye for knowledge). Why, too, is the cat called Mani, the usual name for the Moon in Norse mythology? And does Lady Idnn bear any relation to Iduna, the goddess of youth? When Able paints his shield green in a chapter called "A Green Knight," are we to remember the story of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"? And is there a reason why the noble Sir Able acts so brutally at times? All good questions, and none of them is wholly answered here. The Knight is, alas, only the long first half of a longer novel that will be completed next year with The Wizard, and the present volume ends with some of Able's quest fulfilled, but very little explained. The good news is that Wolfe claims that the second half of "The Wizard-Knight," as he calls it, is even better than this one. Such announcements usually suggest chutzpah, but in this case it's probably a simple statement of fact.Still, for all its wonders and pleasures, The Knight does possess one egregious irritation -- the pervasive use of "like" as a conjunction. The word has been so employed for centuries in casual talk, but I, for one, wince every time Able says, "like I said." Most of the book's diction is simple, direct and beautiful; the characters all speak colorfully according to their caste or education; and the novel's general tone is slightly somber. So those "likes" really annoy, even if they can be partly excused as attempts to emulate American teen-speak.Oh well. This is still a small cost for so much enjoyment. Aside from its philosophical and cosmological speculations (occasionally reminiscent of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus), one might read The Knight just for its unusual characters. My own favorites are Uri and Baki, a pair of female fire elves, who go around naked and frequently try to tease Able into making love to them. Baki sometimes transforms herself into a shy blonde with big breasts. "Your guilty slave grovels," she tells Able once, with her usual impishness. "She would do anything to please you, Lord, and if you have no notions of your own, she can offer any number of exciting suggestions." Similarly, the dog Gylf can talk just a little (Mani the cat is quite voluble), and so, after seeing his pet grow into a huge engine of destruction during pitched battles, Able eventually says to him, "I want you to tell me what you are." Gylf answers, "Dog." Able protests: "No ordinary dog can do what you do. No ordinary dog can talk, for that matter," and Gylf quickly counters with the firmly asserted "Good dog." You can almost see the canine -- and the Wolfean -- smile. Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Bookmarks Magazine
Critics can't wait for The Wizard, the promised sequel to The Knight. The award-winning Wolfe has written many fantasy books, but this one, full of imagination and panache, is among his best. The story starts with a convincing if unreliable narrator--after all, the protagonist is a boy in a man's body, and can't, to humorous ends, discern motives. At times, Wolfe's foreshadowing may confuse the reader, and the form--a long letter penned to Ben--might not please traditional fantasy fans. Luckily, short, adventure-filled chapters capture the reader's attention. Wolfe, the Washington Post concludes, "not only entertains, he invests his work with a complexity and trickiness that place him among the most important American novelists of our time." To be continued. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.


From Booklist
That national treasure, Gene Wolfe, returns with the first of two novels about a teenage boy who wanders into what may be called Faerie. Remaining a teenager in mind, he finds himself in the mightily thewed body of the classic hero, from Roland to Conan to the protagonists of current quest fantasy. The tension between his consciousness and his new body may be satirically intended, and it certainly leads to satirical effects, but it also achieves much else as the boy-knight wanders about, encountering spells, monsters, evil races, heroic comrades, and lovable (also lovely) shape changers. During his wanderings, readers may occasionally wonder what is happening and, even more, where the story is going. But they will forgive Wolfe, for his wit, erudition, narrative technique, and consummate mastery of the language sweep all before them. Furthermore, serious medievalists will admire Wolfe's skill at scooping tropes out of medieval literature by the double handful and imaginatively blending them in this extraordinary book. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Review
"The Knight ranks among Wolfe's most enjoyable and accessible books, and it leavves the reader eager for the concluding volume. For anyone intimidated by the length and difficulty of some of his earlier books, it can serve as a welcoming entry point to the work of one of the most graceful stylists in the business."


Book Description
A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Abel and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero.

Inside, however, Abel remains a boy, and he must grow in every sense to survive the dangers and delights that lie ahead in encounters with giants, elves, wizards, and dragons. His adventure will conclude in the second volume of The Wizard Knight, The Wizard.

With this new series, Wolfe not only surpasses all the most popular genre writers of the last three decades, he takes on the legends of the past century, in a work that will be favorably compared with the best of J. R. R. Tolkien, E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and
T. H. White. This is a book---and a series---for the ages, from perhaps the greatest living writer in (or outside) the fantasy genre.



About the Author
Gene Wolfe has been called "the finest writer the science fiction world has yet produced" by The Washington Post. A former engineer, he has become one of the most widely praised masters of SF and fantasy. He is the winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Nebula Award, twice, the World Fantasy Award, twice, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, and France's Prix Apollo. His popular successes include the four-volume classic The Book of the New Sun. He and his wife, Rosemary, make their home in Barrington, IL.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
The Knight, the first installment in Gene Wolfe's epic Wizard Knight duology, is a storytelling tour de force narrated by a teenage boy who has been mysteriously transported from modern-day America to a magical realm of interconnected worlds inhabited by elves, giants, and dragons.

After meeting a beautiful elf queen named Disiri and being transformed into a powerful knight, Sir Able of the High Heart (that's the name an old crone gave him) sets out -- armed only with his honor, intelligence, and newfound strength -- on a quest to find a mythical sword guarded by a ferocious dragon.

In a reality saturated with enchantment, the heroic Able is still just a frightened boy inside, struggling to understand the strange world around him. As he learns more about the machinations of the magical realms, he begins to grow into the role of a heroic knight. His code of honor leads him into many adventures -- wrestling an ogre, storming a giant fortress, climbing into the Mountain of Fire to save a friend, etc. -- but his ultimate quest to find the mythical sword and defeat the dragon is never forgotten. Reminiscent of Alan Dean Foster's Journeys of the Catechist saga as well as classics like Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, Wolfe's newest is fantastical fiction at its very best. The Knight is an absolute masterpiece of imagination -- a compelling read for fantasy fans of all ages. Paul Goat Allen

FROM THE PUBLISHER

A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Abel and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero.
Inside, however, Abel remains a boy, and he must grow in every sense to survive the dangers and delights that lie ahead in encounters with giants, elves, wizards, and dragons. His adventure will conclude next year in the second volume of The Wizard Knight, The Wizard.
Gene Wolfe is one of the most widely praised masters of SF and fantasy. He is the winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, the Nebula Award, twice, the World Fantasy Award, twice, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the British Fantasy Award, and France's Prix Apollo. His popular successes include the four-volume classic The Book of the New Sun.
With this new series, Wolfe not only surpasses all the most popular genre writers of the last three decades, he takes on the legends of the past century, in a work that will be favorably compared with the best of J. R. R. Tolkien, E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and T. H. White. This is a book--and a series--for the ages, from perhaps the greatest living writer in (or outside) the fantasy genre.

FROM THE CRITICS

The Washington Post

Most writers of fantasy or science fiction know how to tell rattling good stories. But Gene Wolfe not only entertains, he invests his work with a complexity and trickiness that place him among the most important American novelists of our time. For more than 40 years he has worked steadily at his art, each new book adding yet one more facet to his ongoing and surprisingly cohesive oeuvre. Within his genre Wolfe's living compeers are few -- Ursula Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, John Crowley -- and, like them, he should enjoy the same rapt attention we afford to Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy. — Michael Dirda

Publishers Weekly

Nebula and World Fantasy awards-winner Wolfe's new novel-the first half of a massive epic-is a reminder that no one gets called a great writer without being first of all a great storyteller. This wonderful story is narrated by a teenage boy who wanders into a universe of interlocking magical realms. Transformed into a powerful man by an elf queen, he first calls himself a knight, Sir Able of the High Heart, then begins growing into that role. Wolfe doesn't just rearrange the clich s of sword and sorcery fiction; he recreates the genre. Sorcerous knowledge is important to Sir Able's survival, but muscle and steel count for a lot too, while sympathetic curiosity and self-awareness may be even more crucial. Though beautifully told, the novel is not exactly Wolfe Lite; much of the plot underlying the action remains obscure. Able realizes that there's a lot he doesn't comprehend, some of it because knowledge was stolen from him. He must gain (or regain) understanding of the worlds around him and of himself. In this respect, Wolfe's tale somewhat resembles the quest in David Lindsay's visionary masterpiece, A Voyage to Arcturus. Whatever its literary antecedents or its ultimate destination, however, this is a compelling, breathtaking achievement. (Jan. 6) Forecast: Wolfe is known as a literary and arcane writer, but with a 50,000 first printing, Tor is making a serious effort to relaunch him as a popular author. Blurbs from a raft of big names-Brian Herbert, Tad Williams, Peter Straub and Robin Hobb, among them-drill home the point that this novel is one for both elitists and the masses. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal