(urth) The Distant Suns of Gene Wolfe

[Michael Straight]

On 5/29/07, Craig Brewer <cnbrewer at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I'm curious what you might mention as valuable and
> worthwhile when trying to convince people to read
> Wolfe. I say this only partly to ask what you feel
> this reviewer omits. But it's also because I've had
> trouble myself summarizing all that I find compelling
> about him when suggesting that others read him.

That's why this kind of review kinda bothers me, because I feel
somewhat at a loss myself to put my finger on why Wolfe is my favorite
writer.  I'll give it a try.  I'd welcome anyone else trying to
articulate "Why is Wolfe great?" or even just "Why I love Wolfe,"
especially geared toward people who haven't read him before.

Beauty to start with.  Wolfe is like one of those actors who could
read aloud from the phone book and have you on the edge of your seat.
Remember the scene where Auk explains to Silk how his needler works?
You've seen technology info-dumps a million times, and there's
certainly nothing new about an electromagnetic railgun, but passage is
a marvel of simplicity - it uses no scientific jargon but explains the
scientific principles involved in a way a child could understand, and
at the same time is very convincingly Auk's voice and perspective.

The last chapter of Soldier of Arete is like a jewel: in the sheer
beauty of Pindar's prose; in density—so much is said with so few
words; and in flashes of light—every other sentence illuminating whole
chapters of what has come before (or will come after).

And it's not just beautiful language, but beautiful events - the
Sidhe's dwindling flock of birds, Severian's matter-of-fact charity to
the Green Man, Marble's sacrifice for her adopted grand-daughter.
Wolfe's writing is full of these wonderful moments.

One aspect of that beauty is Wolfe's ability to suggest rather than
tell. His ability to plant these subtle bombs in the text that will
later explode into something weird or wonderful or both.  I'll never
forget the moment I noticed the significance of the elm tree falling
at the beginning of Peace.

Or the way he can so casually pull the rug out from under you. As when
Nadan mentions that he's gone back and changed stuff in the diary
you've been reading.

Wolfe's ability to make convincing a certain kind of miraculous wonder
is right up there with Tolkein.  He does this wonderful thing in the
New Sun books where you start out thinking you're reading a fantasy
novel.  But then he subtly convinces you that all these marvels you're
seeing have a scientific explanation.  And then once you've realized
that this is the sort of story where miracles don't happen, he shows
you one.  And so it seems like a genuine miracle, not just another bit
of fantasy magic.

I think that the games Wolfe plays with narrative voice offer a lot of
insight into the way we really know things, particularly for people
like me interested in issues of faith.  You're never going to to have
a third-person omniscient account of what happened to Silk or Severian
or Latro. No one ever knows things like that, even though we tell
ourselves those sorts of stories all the time. I think the Outsider is
real, not because Wolfe told me so, but because I believe Horn and
Nettle and their children.

I've also mentioned before that I think reading Wolfe's books is a
good school in the virtue that C.S. Lewis called "Preferring the
Given." Wolfe is constantly setting you up to expect a certain kind of
story, making think you're going to see, and want to see, certain
events.  Then he turns the corner and shows you something completely
different, gives you a very different story.  If you cling to your
expectations, you'll be frustrated and miss the good thing that's in
front of you because it's not the imagined good you were expecting.
Real life is like that a lot.

I also think Wolfe has a lot of interesting exploration of the meaning
and responsibilities of power.  His protagonists are, in general,
mightier than their foes, and their conflicts are often more about
struggling with the responsibility of strength than struggling against
the limitations of weakness.

Wolfe is able to depict Goodness, Kindness, Strangeness, Evil in ways
that seem very genuine and insightful to me.  I'd try to elaborate,
but then I'd never finish this.

And of course Wolfe is very intellectually stimulating.  For those
that enjoy that kind of reading, Wolfe is enormously fun and
satisfying.  (But, as I said in another post, let's not kid ourselves
and think that our taste for that kind of thing makes us somehow
better than people who don't care for it.)

Rostrum