The Knight

The Wizard Knight Series, Book One

By: Gene Wolfe

Narrated by: Dan Bittner

From legendary fantasy author Gene Wolfe comes The Knight, the first half of the Wizard Knight duology, now for the first time in audio.

A young man in his teens is transported from our world to a magical realm that contains seven levels of reality. Very quickly transformed by magic into a grown man of heroic proportions, he takes the name Able and sets out on a quest to find the sword that has been promised to him, a sword he will get from a dragon, the one very special blade that will help him fulfill his life ambition to become a knight and a true hero.

Inside, however, Able remains a boy, and he must grow in every sense to survive the dangers and delights that lie ahead in encounters with giants, elves, wizards, and dragons. His adventure will conclude in the second installment of The Wizard Knight, The Wizard.

©2004 Gene Wolfe (P)2018 Macmillan Audio

Confused and loving it!

All I can say is that this was one of the most confusing books I've ever had the pleasure of "reading". Brilliantly written, and wonderful performed, I'll definitely be picking up the sequel.

An old favorite.

A unique adventure like no other. I have read the paper copies several times over the past decade, a series I keep coming back to. Listening to it on here breathed new life into an old favorite for me. Very well done.

Maybe the use drugs played a hand in this

There is a good story world here, but it's described through the telling of a character who may or may not have been using drugs. I understand that he is telling his story through his memoirs but events jump between linear and non-linear times. Places and people come and go seemingly at random. It's like having a dream where the individual parts make sense but put in all together and things start to get a bit weird.
All in all this is the first half of a good story but be prepared to be thoroughly confused at random times.

scattered

the story would be so much better if it wasn't so scattered. The ending was also so sudden.

Great book but robotic, distracting narration

I love this book. I've read it at least four times in print and now I'm on my second listen. I'm braving the Audible version again only because the audiobook format is so convenient, and I have more time to listen (while driving to work or doing dishes or laundry) than to read. The narration is so bad it's puzzling. At first I thought it was a text-to-speech program, but the narrator occasionally tries out different accents for different characters. The pronunciation of the names is consistently bad. The one that I have the hardest time ignoring is Kulili, the goddess of Aelfrice, which the narrator consistently pronounces "Koo Loo Lee." The word "stripling," which Berthold uses to refer to Able, he pronounces "strapling." But the worst part is that the narrator apparently doesn't understand what he's reading. Able's style is colloquial, simple American English, not literary. The narrator will often stress the wrong word in a sentence, changing it to nonsense. If I had not already read the book several times, I would be completely thrown off by this. Wolfe's writing, although extremely rewarding, is difficult enough without this added layer of misdirection in the reading. Sorry, Mr. Bittner, but I wish you had more feeling for the text.