(urth) Random Semi-Literary Thoughts on AEG

[Eric Ortlund]

Finished AEG this morning with that frustrating "interrupted" feeling I always get on a first read of a Wolfe Novel that I'd only been told half the story.  I've been trolling the list and finding many helpful clues; these thoughts are just off-the-cuff throwaway attempts to resolve my own sense of reaching for resolution and not finding it.
 
1) In "The Tree is My Hat," Hanga is evil; in AEG, he appears at least friendly, and in Cassie's dream, he's protecting her from Squiddie god.  But then he eats the tourist from Perth.  Is some reconciliation needed concerning his character between these two works?
 
2) I vaguely remember from "Tree" that there's some part of the island where the main character (Baden [?]) can sense the presence of dead people - might that explain Cassie's smelling Reis' cologne, etc.?  Perhaps someone with a better knowledge of "Tree" can comment.
 
3) I can't get Gideon's statement that it is much harder to go up than down out of my head - it deepens and complicates the novel.  Without it, one might assume Gideon stays immoral throughout the novel; his characterization is flat-out creepy in the first chapter, and he says things about good/evil which I'm sure Wolfe passionately disagrees with.  Reis, for all his similarities to Gideon, seems morally opposite: before he dies, he tells Cassie he really tried to do as much good as he could, something Gideon could never really say (Gideon also keeps working for three or four groups, playing them off each other for his own advantage).
 
Anyway, Gideon is saying that it's much harder to go up in the context of biology on Woldercan, but then he talks about loving Cassie: the meaning seems to shift to Gideon's moral improvement/raising, and that Cassie's doing that.  We get evidence that he's not flat-out evil later on in the book.  But I wonder if his absence toward the end of the novel is meant as a kind of imprisonment within his own intellectual world: having denied any greater good beyond convenience or perspective, he simultaneously can tell Cassie he loves her but doesn't get the kind of connection with her which Reis does; their romance is much less fully realized.  Perhaps that's how we're supposed to think of Gideon: a sly spy who can get what he wants, but is denied the intimacy which the good Reis does.
 
4) I was struck by how the novel comes full circle by the end; Gideon is the evil guest at the beginning, but by the end, we know of a far more evil guest (Squiddie) who, so far as we know, is still there.  And by the end, Gideon is an (evil?) ambassador/guest on Woldercan, a planet which is obviously dangerous too.  I was also struck by how Cassie, leaving to meet him, longs for Reis; she doesn't think, Well, at least I'm getting back to sexy Gideon.  I think the novel is supposed to leave us somewhere in the middle: gains have been made, the cosmos has been (partially) restored, but it is still deeply flawed.  The storm wiped out many of Squiddie's worshippers, but Squiddie is apparently still there.  Woldercan is dangerous, and Earth's ambassador ambiguous; but Cassie is going.  Instead of Earth being invaded by guests, now Earth is sending her own.  I guess I find myself a bit more resolved about things by the end of the novel.
 
5) What's up with Cassie screaming about the devil's son being born during the storm?
 
6) Totally agree that the novel is placing a Lovecraftian cosmology within a larger Christian framework, just as Wizard-Knight does with Norse mythology, etc.
 
7) Someone posted earlier about similarities between AEG and BOTNS; I think similarities like that span across all of Wolfe's works.  A character dying in the sea and yet continuing to exist (Sev., Able, the detective from Oakland), sea monsters who are aliens, etc.  Also, every major Wolfe character seems to hit bottom and flat out despair at some point; Cassie seems to on the island, and Silk, Horn, Able, and Latro all do.  Perhaps recurrences within Wolfe's own consciousness.
 
FWIW.
 
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