his may be the end. We may have reached the end of our long intimacy with Severian and Silk and Horn and Horn-and-Silk, with Urth and Blue and Green, with New Sun and Long Sun and Short Sun. Or maybe not. But this we can say: that a very long story, which Gene Wolfe has been telling since 1980, is done for now.
The Book of the Short Sun is now complete; its three volumes make up together one indissoluble whole. In reviews of the first two installments--On Blue's Waters and In Green's Jungles--I provided a very brief summary of some backstory elements relevant to readers of Short Sun.
The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) is the "confession" of Severian the Lame, autarch of Urth, who has saved his planet by sanctioning the insertion of a white hole into our dying Sol, rejuvenating it and those humans and others who survive the new Flood caused by the sun's convulsive rebirth. In Return to the Whorl, Silk/Horn visits Urth more than once, traversing something like the corridors traversed by aquastors and other supernal beings in the first trilogy. On Urth, which he knows only as the Red Sun Whorl, he meets the young Severian, who is never named. (We now know that The Short Sun ends and the The New Sun begins at about the same time.) On Urth, Silk/Horn conducts his business of doing right and healing and discovering the truth and telling it. He does not heal Severian.
The Book of the Long Sun (1993-96) is set exclusively in the Long Sun Whorl, a vast generation starship launched from Urth hundreds of years earlier, and now at rest at its first port of call, a solar system whose sun--which is not a fluorescent tube hundreds of miles long--is "short," and whose main planets, Blue and Green, must now be colonized. Through the story of Patera Silk, The Long Sun depicts something of the traumatic process by which the Whorl's inhabitants are prepared, sometimes forcibly, to leave. Silk must organize this eviction, for the God bullies of Whorl have ordered him to do so. For four long volumes he struggles with himself, with his fellow sentients, and with the pantheon (comprised of an ancient tyrant of Urth and his offspring, who manifest Themselves through computer monitors, and possess men and birds too). In the end he succeeds, though he is left behind in the crumbling Whorl.
The Greatness of Goodness
In a review some years ago of The Long Sun, I described Silk as "one of the most luminously good figures in 20th century literature." That goodness only intensifies in The Book of the Short Sun; at points toward the end of Return to the Whorl, that goodness becomes almost literally painful for the reader to confront, for by the end of this final volume it has become clear at last that Horn--who in earlier volumes had left Blue to bring the Patera down from the Whorl to save his children--has become truly enfolded in Silk. Silk may be a Moses without the terribilita, for he loves his fellow sapients too deeply for rage, but he is as terrifying to encounter as Michelangelo's hard-born in granite. Even in the pages of a work of fiction, it is hard for us to witness the growth into full stretch of a saint.
The creation of a figure so terrifyingly good he must be called a saint is something new in the work of Gene Wolfe--it is perhaps something new to science fiction--it is, wherever one looks in the literature of the world, rare.
Here is Hoof, one of Horn's children, who has taken over from his father for a few chapters the task of writing the Book. Silk/Horn and Oreb (the talking chough occasionally possessed by Scylla, one of the Whorl Gods) and Hoof and others (for the story is intensely complicated at this late point) are on Urth. Silk is with a boy who wants to show him his dog, Triskele. The boy tells Silk that he will not put him into the book he is going to write one day (it will be The Book of the New Sun) because "No one would believe you."
That, too, is how Hoof sees his Father:
Father was good. That is the hard part to explain to everyone ... how scary he could be, and things moving themselves and the Vanished People coming down the street ... that is what you have to remember if you want to understand.
If somebody frightens people, everybody thinks he has to be bad. But when you were around Father you were practically always scared to death, scared that he might really find out one day the way you were and do something about it. ... He loved everybody, and until you meet somebody like him, you will never know how scary that was.
Much that seems obdurately interminable in the book--for instance, the long conversations Silk launches into with characters new to him and to us, in order to discover them--may be understood, on a second or third reading, as a palsy that necessarily infects the telling of story when that story concerns the earning of genuine goodness. For goodness may be defined as paying attention to others, in order to love them more deeply. Paying attention is laborious; and it may be that Wolfe has been too unrelenting, now and then, in his determination to show Silk earning his discoveries.
A Complex Yet Rewarding Finish
Both The Book of the Long Sun and The Book of the Short Sun have moments when you could just scream. After all, you (and I) are not saints. But as much as a fictional character can be real in our minds, we know that Silk, on the other hand, is indeed good. And that goodness is in the details. Being a saint, and reading about being a saint, are not a free lunch.
So be warned.
And then begin. There is much to struggle with--the learnings of Silk; the dozens of different dialects and accents spoken by the huge cast, all meticulously rendered, for everyone wants to talk to Silk, all of them want to save their souls; Wolfe's refusal to unpack in easy terms a tale which is inherently difficult to tell--and there is a sense that the Book is told in a darkness (one main figure is blind almost until the end) that will not lift.
But it lifts. The story of Return to the Whorl is too complicated to relate, but it lifts, there is light at the end. The many men and women and others whom we meet become beautiful under the light of Silk's learning how to know them. We are told the secret of the vampire inhumu, whom Silk also loves. We are reunited with much we had thought lost: salt and seawrack and flowering gardens. By spending something like his life (but of course he has been something like dead for most of the trilogy) Horn succeeds in his quest and bids us farewell. He has brought seed back to Blue, and the planet will flourish. He has brought Silk back, or it is the other way round: for they write each other ("We are but the paper," says one of them) as though Horn were dreaming Silk, or Silk dreaming Horn, or the Outsider God were dreaming both, as the Increate dreams Severian. They become the Book. Or the other way round. Return to the Whorl and its siblings are hard books to read. But they pay and pay. The Book of the Short Sun is a good book to read, though hard. It is a great novel. It is becoming to grapple with this Book.
his may be the end. We may have reached the end of our long intimacy with Severian and Silk and Horn and Horn-and-Silk, with Urth and Blue and Green, with New Sun and Long Sun and Short Sun. Or maybe not. But this we can say: that a very long story, which Gene Wolfe has been telling since 1980, is done for now.
