By Dahl Botterill
It can be difficult to describe Gene Wolfe’s writing to the unfamiliar. It is clever, well-wrought, literary fiction that drips with countless fascinating ideas. There is a fullness to it that refuses to vacate your thoughts when you think you’ve finished with it. It is very much speculative fiction while also completely unlike what one might expect from such a simple description. As you make your way through a Gene Wolfe work, you’ll usually find yourself reading many stories—each character, each perspective, will carry a gravity of its own—but you’ll also be aware of all the stories you’re not being told directly. Wolfe has a way of making even the stories he’s not sharing utterly enthralling. This talent is on particular display in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a collection of three increasingly related novellas that never cease playing with their own interconnectedness.
The first of these stories, sharing the collection’s title, introduces the reader to the twin worlds of Saint Anne and Saint Croix while focusing on the latter, and particularly on a science-obsessed young man growing up in his father’s brothel. This young man—while there are clues dropped as to his proper name, he is only ever directly referred to as Number Five—narrates the tale from a future time and place, looking back on his youth. The tale is told in a manner that assumes some common ground with the reader, and so his world is described in bits and pieces as details become pertinent to the tale being told. It starts on what feels like familiar ground, and it is only by putting those details together that one gradually realizes what Saint Croix and its culture look like. By this point, the reader feels a part of it, discovering the culture’s joys and horrors from within instead of having a basic description doled out at the beginning.
The second story is very different in its structure. “A Story,” by John V. Marsch is perhaps more traditionally told but from an entirely different perspective in a pre-colonized Saint Anne. Its title provides some connection to the previous tale, but it feels more mythological, following the journey of two twins separated at birth and raised in rival communities as fate brings them violently back together just before the arrival of Terran colonizers. The Annese have only been mentioned briefly during the first story, so this new focus seems only tangentially connected (its named author is an anthropologist met by the previous novella’s narrator, Number Five), but it provides some intriguing insight while laying many threads and breadcrumbs that will be picked up later by the reader of V.R.T.
V.R.T. is the final tale Wolfe weaves in this book, and it appears much less organized than its predecessors. Woven achronologically from a multitude of documents and perspectives, and filled with both subtle and dramatic narrative shifts, this is the story that reveals the depth and breadth of the interrelationships found within The Fifth Head of Cerberus and its three novellas. Aspects of earlier stories that seemed inconsequential come into their own when viewed in a new context, and revelations abound. Each of these stories could stand alone if necessary, but the whole is truly greater than the parts themselves.
The most interesting part of all, and the aspect that strikes me as most particular to Gene Wolfe’s writing, is that even when all three stories have concluded, there is a sense of so much more that may have been missed. The reader is trusted to do the heavy lifting, and so all three tales are filled with tiny clues and subtle misdirection that could be easily missed. Different readers may very well pick up on completely different connections and thus come away with varied impressions and conclusions. The result is a book that stays in your head after you’ve finished it, continues to be considered and picked away at in the back reaches of your mind, wondering what you might have missed your first time around and what you might discover if you approached it again. While it is indeed a few smartly written slices of speculative fiction brimming with strange ideas and concepts, The Fifth Head of Cerberus is also a clever bit of mystery that plays its cards so close you may not realize what you’re unravelling until you’re mulling it over afterwards.