Book Review - Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
Published by: Orb Books
Publication Date: 1972
Format: Paperback, 252 Pages
Rating: ★
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The sister planets of Saint Anne and Saint Croix were founded by French colonists, long since gone, but their influence can still be felt along the streets of Saint Anne. At 666 Saltimbanque Street is a house that the gentlemen of Port-Mimizon are known to frequent. High up in this house lives a young boy and his brother David. Behind the barred windows they can hear the clients down in the garden and up on the rooftop, surrounded by orange trees. Though it is their father and the woman, Madame, they find far more intriguing. One day the boy is brought to his father's study and told he will be called Number Five and visit him nightly to run tests. Previously Number Five and his brother David were taught by Mr. Million, a robot that acted as nanny and tutor, drilling the kids in science and rhetoric and often taking them to the library and slave market. Now that Number Five is older he will also start to pull his weight around the house, they all have their work cut out, his father keeps the girls clean, and now Number Five will be acting as gatekeeper for the brothel. But it's the tests his father puts Number Five through that are destroying him. He suffers immensely and has long blackouts, sometimes lasting months. Number Five finally realizes that he must kill his father, only this has implications for one of their clients. John V. Marsch is an anthropologist who was working on Saint Croix, searching for the lost Annese, the aboriginals of the planet. He came to the house on Saltimbanque Street in search of Dr. Aubrey Veil to ask about Veil's Hypothesis, wherein the doctor posited that the aboriginals could mimic the settlers so completely that they killed them and took their place. Dr. Veil is in fact Number Five's aunt and the Madame of the brothel and this means Marsch often visits resulting in him being arrested for the murder Number Five commits. While stuck in prison Marsch chronicles his imprisonment and his research on Saint Croix. He even assembles a story about the early aboriginals. Yet how could a man born on Earth know so much about a culture that has moved into the back of beyond if it even exists? The answer might lie in Veil's Hyposthesis and the young man, V.R.T., who claimed to be half-aboriginal and whom Marsch hired to take him out into the wilderness for years. In a future world where cloning is possible does it seem that far-fetched that shapeshifters could exist too?

There are books that people go back to and read over and over again because they feel like they keep missing something the last time they read it. They feel that the book hides new discoveries that will be revealed to them one day if they are patient enough and work for it. While I am a proponent of rereading a book on the other hand if the book is elliptical and dense and just too much work to read it the first time I think it is the definition of insanity to attempt to read it again. And that is how I feel about The Fifth Head of Cerberus. It's dreamlike, it's dense, and whatever it was trying to tell me, well, I don't care to find out because reading every single line in this book was painful. I finished it. I did that much at least. But I just don't get it. Because while the structure of the three connecting novellas initially works, what increasingly annoyed me was that this book felt less and less like something written with an audience in mind and more and more like a writing experiment that Gene Wolfe did to entertain himself. I'm all for experimentation in writing, but at the end of the day you still have to be able make it intelligible. The elliptical writing that purposefully omits details, jumping around in the timeline without reason, and then not bothering to write full sentences, and randomly changing the narrative voice, this does not make me a happy camper. And as for the "dreamquest".... If I had wanted to read bad origin myths like I was forced to read as a freshman in high school where a lady was trying to have sex with a worm but it turns out it was a stick, well I would have gone back and read that book again, you know, for nostalgia. I would not have chosen this. In fairness, Gene Wolfe perfectly aped that style of writing so on one level it succeeds, on another it just drove me crazy. Plus there are so many big moral issues handled in such a clumsy manner. We have cloning, slavery, sex work, and all of it is just part of the world and not really a problem. Well, to me it was a problem. When the only woman of power is a famous doctor who ends up working as a madame and all the other women are sex slaves to men we have issues. But issues that I will not delve further into because I will never pick up this book again to peal back the layers of the onion as it were.