The Book of the Short Sun
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The Book of the Short Sun, by Gene Wolfe.
Back in the 1980s I was blown away by Gene Wolfe’s 4-volume fantasy, The Book of the New Sun. He later wrote a 4-volume sequel, The Book of the Long Sun, and then another 3-volume sequel, The Book of the Short Sun. Volume by volume, over the years I’ve worked my way through Wolfe’s amazing stories and now I’ve finally finished Return to the Whorl, the last volume of The Book of the Short Sun.
In a horribly condensed and uninformative summary, BotNS is set on Earth in the far future; BotLS is set on a generation starship that was launched from the Earth of BotNS; and BotSS is set on a planet settled by colonists from the BotLS ship. But to describe them thusly is to ignore the real reason why these books are so critically acclaimed, which is that Gene Wolfe is an amazing writer. His prose is lush and dense and meandering. He’s been called one of the most literary of science fiction authors. And maybe that’s the problem.
I came away from BotSS relieved that I had finished it, and not eager to reread it any time soon.
One issue I had with BotSS was with its extremely nonlinear nature. It’s told in the form of a journal, written long after the events recounted, but also extensively annotated by the journal’s author with commentary on his current circumstances. The journal writer jumps around all over the place in telling his story. There are flashbacks within flashbacks. Wolfe is playing games with us readers, who have to juggle three or four different time periods at once to keep track of what’s going on. I often lost track and had to struggle on, hoping that Wolfe would provide enough clues that I could figure the scene out without backtracking. It gave me a headache.
Another issue was the language. There was one character, Pig, who spoke in what looked like an almost incomprehensible accent. My guess is that it was supposed to sound like a Highlands Scottish brogue. Reading his dialogue on paper was excruciating. I was glad that he was only present for part of the story; if the entire thing had been written in this character’s accent I would have given up and stopped. And there was the town full of people who talked in a weird Yoda-like syntax. And then there was, thankfully also only present for a few chapters, Patera Remora, the priest with the annoying stammer. Not hard to read, but distracting.
And that’s what I mean when I say that Wolfe’s literariness is the problem. The story isn’t the problem; it’s fascinating. And the prose isn’t the problem; Wolfe still writes the same gorgeous, luscious prose that made me fall in love with BotNS when I was in college. But these damned literary devices don’t in my mind add to the story; instead, they get in the way of the story. Maybe I’m not well-educated enough, not well-read enough, who knows, maybe not well-trained enough in how to read postmodern literature, to appreciate Wolfe’s intricate structuring. Maybe he’s saying something profound about the nature of memory, or about the untrustworthiness of written accounts, or something like that. I don’t know.
In the end, everything wrapped up and all was made right; well, sort of. But it was surreal, and I am sure I didn’t get it in that Wolfe was probably saying several things symbolically and thematically that either went over my head or that I didn’t think hard enough to appreciate. But see, that’s it. I just wanted a good story.