The calibre of the villagers being lined up for this militia makes this a highly unlikely plan, even before the initial meeting, in the Inn, takes place with two interlopers, one a charcoal burner named Gil, who is an old friend and ally of Wat, and the other the local witch, Mother Cloot.
The Abbe of the village tries to raise a militia to challenge Wat, in the naive hope that, if confronted by a show of force, he will leave the area. The village is plagued by a footpad, a wild, dangerous raider named Wat, who begins the story by putting an arrow through the neck of a pedlar, whose body is discovered outside the village. Mark, an orphan aged somewhere between fourteen and fifteen, is apprenticed to Gloin, the weaver. It is set in medieval times, in what would, many centuries later, become Czechoslovakia, in an unnamed village not far from St Agnes Fountain, of ‘Good King Wencleslas’ fame. The Devil in a Forest is as simple and straightforward a work as Gene Wolfe has ever produced, with no apparent understory to be teased out by careful reading.
#Gene wolfe king under the mountain series#
I was much older, and much more practiced in reading Wolfe, before I bought it again, in the Orb series of reissues. It was not the best of circumstances in which to concentrate, and I did not keep the book all that long. A somewhat mangled Manchester office bleared onto the coach, and I curled up with headphones on, cassette tapes and this ‘new’ Gene Wolfe. I remember reading it on a Sunday coach journey, an office weekend down south somewhere, pegged around a Staff vs Partners cricket match at the Senior Partner’s cricket club, and a marquee buffet/disco in the evening. Needless to say, I was vastly disappointed. It’s a historical adventure and, like the later Pandora by Holly Hollander, is best regarded as a ‘juvenile’, seemingly aimed at a younger audience than those usually devoted to our Master of Trickery. This is neither SF nor Fantasy, the consummate mingling of which is one of the many marks of the New Sun series. I first read it as a successor to that defining tetraology, not realising that it was a predecessor, and a book of radically different scope and ambition. The Devil in a Forest was first published in Britain as part of the wave of enthusiasm for all Gene Wolfe’s books that followed hard on the appearance of The Book of the New Sun quartet.
Rumpole of the Bailey: s01 e06 – Rumpole and the Heavy Brigade.Lost Opportunities and Wasted Potential: Thriller.The Prisoner Audio Adventures: s01 e01 – Departure & Arrival.
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