As I was starting to take notes for this review of Gene Wolfe’s novel, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), and went back to check on a passage, I would often find that I had missed something and wound up rereading not just that one part but a long or even complete section of this three part novel. At first, it was frustrating to feel that my idea of the story had been so incomplete, but then it became deeply engaging to reread and see how the three sections of the book are so intertwined. That’s part of the allure of reading Wolfe. Each time I go back, I am enthralled by a different aspect of the stories he is telling, but each time I like what I’m reading all the more.
The Fifth Head of Cerberus consists of three thematically related but structurally quite different novellas, and some readers approach each as a separate work. But all three are connected not just by character but also by great themes of colonialism, human identity, memory and story-telling, among others. and, while this may be an unconventional way to put a longer story together, I read it as a single novel, one that I keep going back to because it’s hard to exhaust all the interesting ideas and characters it contains.
The stories share a common setting on the sister planets of Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne where the indigenous population is said to have been killed off by settlers from Earth. “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” the first novella, is a first person narrative by a man we know only as Number Five. As he puts it, he has written this story reviewing his childhood and young manhood, “to disclose myself to myself.” (Kindle edition, p.75) As he says in this closing passage, he is trying to solve the mystery of himself.
The second novella is entitled “A Story by John V. Marsch.” Marsch is a character introduced in the first novella, and this story is a recreation of aboriginal life that offers one version of the fate of early settlers from Earth and gives more insight into the nature of the indigenous peoples, who are also called abos. The third novella, “V.R.T.”, consists of a collection of notebooks and fragments by Marsch and taped interviews with him during his imprisonment. These scattered materials are being read by a young officer who is charged with making a recommendation to his superiors on what should be done with Marsch, who is still a prisoner. Marsch’s notebooks describe a journey he makes to sites important to aboriginal people (sites that form the setting of his “A Story”) in the company of a young abo.
“The Fifth Head of Cerberus” first appeared as an independent novella and, as an autobiographical study by Number Five probes deeply into his strange upbringing. He lived in a large old house with his brother, David, his father, his Aunt Jeannine, a robot named Mr. Million, a few servants and a cadre of “demimondaines.” As Five’s father explains to him, the whorehouse is a profitable enterprise that supports the household, especially the great expense of his father’s laboratory where he performs mysterious experiments. From an early age, David and Five are educated rigorously by Mr. Million and later by their father. In their teenage years, their father has them awakened in the middle of the night for experiments with mind altering drugs. So frequent and intense are these sessions for Five that he gradually finds himself with great gaps in his memory, sometimes lasting for months. That adds to the uncertainty and mystery he feels about himself and also creates questions about the accuracy of this account of his life.
In front of the house, known as Cave Canem (or beware the dog), is a statue of Cerberus, the three-headed dog of Greco-Roman myth that guards the entrance to Hades. The “fifth head” probably refers to Number Five, the other four being the members of his family, including the robot, into whose artificial brain has been transferred the consciousness of Five’s grandfather. Without giving everything away, I can say there is a lot about cloning in this story, but the deeper interest for me is learning of Five’s discoveries about this family. His patchy recollections help him piece together the truth of his upbringing and the eventual realization of what he must do, a realization that leads to his imprisonment.
Into Number Five’s circumscribed world comes a man named John Marsch, an anthropologist from Earth. He has come to interview a Dr. Veil who has formulated a hypothesis about the interactions of humans and indigenous peoples on the sister planets. Number Five has never heard of Dr. Veil, but it turns out that the woman he knows as Aunt Jeannine is that scientist.
While dreams play an important role in this first novella, they are much more prominent in “A Story by John V. Marsch.” This is a radically different narrative of aboriginal life following mostly a journey of a young man named Sandwalker and his twin Eastwind. Yet it quickly brings up the themes of identity and transformation that became important as Number Five explored his world. The twins go their separate ways, and most of the story follows Sandwalker’s point of view. He encounters the Shadow People, a group he perceives as misshapen and assumes to be non-human. One of them, who seems to be a ghost with a transparent body, tells him about the origins of his people. The story he tells is of humans in star-crossing ships who landed with fire and light streaming from their hands. These people communicate soundlessly by thought, and Sandwalker learns to respond to them with his mind alone.
Sandwalker learns about the origins of these misshapen people, the power of mind and the identities of the different groups populating this world, but all that is cut short. They are captured by a group of cannibals known as the marshmen. Sandwalker and the others are trapped in a deep pit of sand they cannot escape, and one or two at a time are taken up to be killed and eaten. Eastwind appears among this group and ultimately helps Sandwalker escape. The fact that Marsch has written this story suggests that he is dramatizing one aspect of Veil’s hypothesis, as described in the first novella. But this story is so embedded in a fictionalized version of how the aboriginal people thought and behaved that it is hard to tell how much is fiction and how much is Marsch’s recounting of stories he has heard from a few surviving aboriginals. As we get into the third story, Marsch’s identity becomes a focal point.
The final story is “V.R.T.” and describes the sporadic effort of a prison officer to make sense out of the disordered writings and taped interviews of a prisoner, whom we soon find out is John Marsch. Some of Marsch’s notes describe his arrest, apparently without cause, and the terrible conditions of his long confinement, often in a narrow cell in which he cannot stand. Another notebook of his describes his meeting a teenage boy who claims to be at least part indigenous. Marsch takes him on a long journey to locate areas of the uninhabited countryside that were important to the aboriginal people and that figure importantly in Sandwalker’s story. The taped interviews are interrogations of prisoner Marsch by authorities who suspect him of lying about his origins and his purpose for being on Sainte Croix.
While it might seem that fitting these three disparate novellas together is a sort of puzzle piece, that is not what draws me to this novel. For one thing, the writing is beautiful and full of subtle observations about the interactions of the characters and the ways in which they view their own lives. There is a profoundly introspective nature of each of the main characters as they try to figure out their lives and their places in the larger universe. The parts of this novel flow together more and more smoothly on successive readings, and the rereading is no chore. As Wolfe once put it: ”My definition of a great story … is: One that can be read with pleasure by a cultivated reader and reread with increasing pleasure.” And that’s a good description of what it’s like to probe more and more deeply into The Fifth Head of Cerberus.
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