Introduction

This is a novel about human colonists of distant planets and their interaction with the native aliens. SF has many novels like this, but Wolfe does not write his books after the manner of most SF authors. Another writer (let’s call him John Dog) would put the worldbuilding up front: would supply detailed descriptions of his alien world, and its human colony’s technological and social distinctiveness. He would tell his story in a linear way, so as to make these things plain for the reader. John Dog deals, you see, in likeable characters, with whom his readers can identity and for whom they can root. He structures his narrative according to a conventional logic of build-up, crescendo and a bang-bang climax at the end. John Dog assumes you’re interested in the action, in the technology, in the exteriors.

Gene Wolfe is a different sort of beast. If you pick up his novel expecting John Dog satisfactions you will be disappointed. It is not that Wolfe is uninterested in the exteriors – in the technologies that move people from Earth to the twin-planet-system of Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix; in the war the colonists fought when they settled these worlds; in their distinctive society. It is that he is interested in these exteriors only insofar as they illuminate the interiors. The themes of this book are memory; subjectivity and identity; and Wolfe believes – rightly – that the best way to articulate these themes is not in a linear, exteriorized, straightforward way; because (and it is really a very simple point) they are not linear, exteriorized, straightforward things.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus is three separate novellas which, taken together, illuminate one another. Together they constitute an elegant, and often beautiful retelling on one of SF’s oldest tropes: the encounter between human and alien. More specifically, this novel exists in a close relationship with another classic of the genre, Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, sharing with that book not just a fine style and a plangent, exquisite control of mood and atmosphere, but a basic narrative premise. In Bradbury’s novel human colonists on Mars have superseded the aboriginal Martian civilization; but as the humans go about their lives, living through their memories with peculiar intensity, they undergo subtle changes until at the book’s end they realize they are themselves aliens. Wolfe moves his colony planet further away, and works a more subtle set of variations upon his theme: the aliens are humanoids with a reputation for shapeshifting, and it is at the start of the novel unclear whether they have died out entirely, or else somehow replaced the human colonizers.

The first section, ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’ is in the Proustian first-person (its first sentence is a sly remix of the first sentence of A la recherche du temps perdu), and is like Proust a meditation upon the intermittencies of memory. The narrator, sometimes known as ‘Number 5’, tells us about his childhood as the son of an eccentric inventor-scientist and brothel-keeper, living on a French-inflected colony world called Sainte Anne. He and his brother David are educated by a smart robot called Monsieur Million; the narrator’s father conducts a series of strange hypnagogic experiments upon him; he, his brother and a girl become interested in amateur dramatics, committing crime to fund their performances. But the relationship between the scientist and the boy is not father and son; rather they are both clones of a man from an earlier generation (the robot-tutor is an AI-approximation of the same person). The narrator kills his father and goes to prison. Amongst the secondary characters is an anthropologist from Earth called John Marsch, who visits the brothel, and whom the narrator accuses, in a rather desultory way, of being a shapeshifting alien who has taken the form of the earthman.

The second section is presented as if written by Marsch, and might be the sort of thing an alien anthropologist might write to get inside the experience of an aboriginal culture. Or might be a genuine recollection of the aboriginal life by an alien called ‘John Sandwalker’. With its emphasis on the priority of the Dreaming over waking perception, it smacks of Australian aboriginal life – a hunter-gatherer’s search for food in a barren, unforgiving landscape and the predations of a rival aboriginal tribe not above cannibalism.

If the first section is Proustian, and the second anthropological, the third channels Kafka: a military officer sifts through the disordered papers relating to Marsch’s incarceration and interrogation. What is strongly hinted at here is that he is indeed a simulacrum of the original John Marsch, John Sandwalker having impersonated him so thoroughly that he himself believes his own imitation.

These sections appear to be three different things; but they are one. The different characters of the first part turn out to be literally the same person: Maire, Madame, M. Million, the narrator (I have always assumed, though without evidence that all these ‘M’s are deliberate inversions of Wolfe’s initial ‘W’). In the second part Sandwalker cannot kill his evil brother Eastwind because ‘if he dies, something of you dies with him’; the third part is about the eventual and literal interchangeability of the two characters John Marsch and ‘V.R.T’. There seem to be many characters in the book; there are few. What at first blush looks like disconnection and dispersal is, we realize, a kind of symbiosis.

And there is the title. Cerberus is the three-headed guard-dog at the gates of Hell. Why is the novel named after this beast? There are, on the one hand, various canine allusions: the statue that guards the brothel on 666 Saltimbanque; M. Million in his robotic guard duties; the various monstrous, alien predatory animals, tire-tigers and ghoul-bears and the like. Why a guard dog though? Guarding what? The third section ‘V.R.T’ is from the point of view of an officer of the police, one sort of social guardian, though as savage and predatory as any animal (and see how little he likes cats! ‘the officer cursed it … the cat hissed like hot iron dropped into oil’). That Cerberus guarded Hell is also very relevant; for Wolfe fashions his stylish prose and its many beauties into a glimpse of Hell: a dystopian society horizoned by slavery, exploitation, rape, murder and cannibalism. The symbolism of an address like ‘666 Saltimbanque’ may suggest that there is something acrobatic about the bestial number, but that doesn’t stop it being bestial think of the lithe, four-armed monster guarding the money-box. Dogs are pack-beasts, and top-dog uses his teeth to maintain his position, just as Wolfe’s worlds are strictly hierarchical. Dogs may guard; but they can be violent and predatory, and that is the world the novel shows us.

But why five heads? The first section offers a rather self-conscious clue, with David’s snatch of poetry (And thence the dog/with fourfold head’): ‘Old Cerberus has four heads, don’t you know that? The fourth’s her maidenhead, and she’s such a bitch no dog can take it from her.’). The narrator then toys with applying these four terms to the four people in his life: his ‘father’, his ‘aunt’, M. Million and his brother David, with the unspoken notion that the fifth is himself (‘Number 5’). But this is to be too literal-minded. A ‘maidenhead’ is, clearly, a different sort of head to the literal three dogheads. It is a way of talking about the sexual activity, or otherwise, of a woman – and this novel is relentless and indeed rather grim in its portrayal of the sexual exploitation of women, from the whores in section one, to Cassilla in the third, the slave who must sexually service the military officers in addition to her many other duties. A literal head leads to a metaphorical head, which leads, at fifth iteration, to something else again to, in fact, precisely the principle of something-elseness, that which is extra or beyond. So the novel opposes the humans of Sainte Anne and the humans of Sainte Croix with whom they are at war; and opposes the aboriginal hillpeople and the predatory marsh dwellers. But it also includes a fifth kind of lifeform: the shadow children, nonmaterial, where the logic of dreams dissolves precisely the sorts of distinctions that enable us to sort between the first four.

We could put it this way: the three heads of this novel, taken together, generate a fourth quantity: a ‘reading’, or an ‘interpretation.’ To go back to the reading I mentioned earlier: the book is about memory (part 1 is memoir); or about subjectivity (part 2 is a coming-of-age story); and about identity (part 3 parses separate consciousnesses as, precisely, identical identities). It is about these three things together, which is to say ‘what makes us human?’ That the book explores the extent to which things we sometimes take for granted about our inner lives are in fact deeply unsimple. But this fourth head is not the one that bites – the bite belongs to a fifth head, and this one is not canine but lupine, the Wolfe-head. There is something uniquely haunting about this novel, and what haunts is this something extra, this something that is spectrally supererogatory, something hard precisely to place or pin-down. The novel, once read, preys on your mind. It possesses a more-than-John-Doggishness. It is pure Gene Wolfe.

Adam Roberts