So.

I am obviously in mid-plunge into Gene Wolfe’s astonishing “Solar Cycle” a dodecology (thank goodness there are 12 books; I’m having trouble coming up with the proper term for a series of 11) of mind-boggling proportions not just in terms of length but also in terms of wealth of ideas, breadth of narrative scope, variety of characters and everything else one reads good fiction for. It’s staggering. If you and I were having a conversation about it in a diner, that scene would be just like the scene in the Linklater film of “A Scanner Darkly” in which Robert Downey Jr. as Barris tries but fails to verbalize his feelings about Substance D and finally just starts making gestures and noises. “It’s awe-inspiring stuff.”

It’s also really, really hard to talk about without engaging in spoilage. But I will try.

Where New Sun had a vaguely menacing but still magnetic protagonist (I’m talking about Severian—there’s lots of theories out there, though, that maintain he’s not the real protagonist but I’m not going to engage in that level of theorizing here) here we have a much more conventionally engaging one in the person of Silk, a humbler and more conventionally good person who spends most of the Long Sun’s four books very earnestly questioning his motives and his mission, engaging in a constant self-audit that some may find tiresome but is there for very good reasons as he is flung into a cesspool of crime and politics that perfectly mirrors the state of things on Urth at the time the self-contained world that is the Whorl broke off from its parent culture. See, I’m already being annoyingly circumspect trying to avoid spoilers…

...Which brings me to what is most troublesome and yet also amazing about this whole project of Wolfe’s: new heights of reader annoyance are in store. While the vocabulary is nowhere near as complex and allusive as New Sun’s, the narrative is still quite Byzantine, with all of Wolfe’s usual tricks of misdirection, narrative lacunae and this time an unreliable narrator whose identity is not even revealed unless and until the reader decides to move on the the three-volume Book of the Short Sun! And even then… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Is this whole cycle worth reading? Having finished the four volumes of Long Sun and just getting started on Short Sun I’m obviously going to say yes, else I wouldn’t still be slogging through it (really, no matter what kind of completist compulsion you suffer, this will defeat it if you’re not already enjoying it). The attentive reader is completely immersed in not just one but a whole variety of invented worlds and cultures, engaged by the stories and stakes of a vast number of believable and fascinating characters. There is a lot that will play mercelessly on the emotions even as one desperately pages back wondering if you managed somehow to skip an important action scene (Wolfe is famous for leaving stuff like that out—he’s more interested in consequences than in descriptions of fights or flights). A lot of big ideas. A lot of longing.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself when I get to the end of Short Sun. But it will probably be time for NaNoWriMo by then. And I’ll be even more intimidated than usual after experiencing this example of what novels can still do.

(Obviously this review should stand as one of all four books: Nightside of the Long Sun, Lake of the Long Sun, Calde of the Long Sun and Exodus from the Long Sun)

My copy has gone missing! I’m tearing my apartment to bits trying to find it and actually considering just buying another one because I really really want to get back to it!!!