Sometimes I read a book and, after finishing it, wonder if I read the same book as all the other reviewers. This is the case with Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun series. The back-cover comments (not by Oprah or by some little back-country magazine but by big-name newspapers and famous SF writers) call Wolfe “the best novelist in America”, and “a national treasure”, and describe the novels as “one of the major SF series of the decade … a bona fide masterpiece”. And I read all four books, with slowly decreasing enthusiasm, and come away rather disappointed, relieved that it’s over and I can read something else.

The series was originally published as four books, but it would make no sense in reading them separately. It is really one 1200-page book, broken up for the sake of reading convenience. (I read the two-volume edition.)

The book is set in an artificial world inside a vast spaceship. Several centuries have passed since the world was created, and by now its inhabitants, both biological and robotic, have forgotten that that’s what their world is. The creators and the gods of the world have mostly withdrawn, and haven’t been seen for decades in the electronic altars of the temples of the world. Technological skills have declined, knowledge and tools partly lost – no new advanced products are manufactured, and old ones are mostly maintained by scavenging parts from totally broken ones.

In this world lives Patera Silk (Patera meaning priest). He’s in charge of a small temple & school complex in a poor part of town. The temple is bought by a crime lord, probably to be razed and replaced with more lucrative buildings. Silk decides to fight for the survival of the temple.

Silk’s story starts out personal and local, but then spirals at increasing speed, as he is enlightened by a god, gets caught up in high-level politics, becomes a prophet and inspires a civil war. All the while learning what his world really is, who the gods really are, and so on.

While I was reading this, I kept feeling that the book is picking up, is about to become interesting, is taking a new turn. But even though it took new turns, they didn’t lead to any real improvement. It was never bad enough to make me give up, but never actually enjoyable either.

The first book was slow; ploddingly so. It starts midday of day 1 and ends in the early hours of day 2, and Silk spends most of that time performing an impromptu burglary, aimed to save his temple. (Somehow that idea makes sense to him.)

At least that book was clear and made sense. The following books set a slightly faster pace, at the expense of clarity. We now see and hear the story from the viewpoints of multiple persons, not just Silk. But far too often, each thread is cut off just before something important happens, and we only hear about it through some half-informed conversation later on. This trick gets repetitive and annoying. There is way too much talk talk talk and too little direct participation in the action. I really wanted to shout at Wolfe: “Show, don’t tell!”

Even worse are all the cases where we are sort of given the facts and then some hours later Silk (or some ultra-perspicacious colleague of his) tells someone else something like “I think you were really his mother, even though no one knew, weren’t you? Here are the clever observations and connections I made. Was I right?” Oh please can you stop showing off your smarts!

The fourth book was probably the weakest of them all. There were more and more unexpected turns, making me feel like I was lost on the sea in a storm. Rushed and confusing. Then suddenly the book was over, and most of the questions he raised were still unanswered.

There are occasional great scenes, but the series as a whole just felt contrived, rambling and lifeless, full of complications for the sake of complications. I don’t understand the point of this series, nor why Wolfe wrote it.

One Amazon reviewer said “If you’re already a Gene Wolfe fan, you may like this series. If this is your first Gene Wolfe series, you may never read his work again after this series.” I guess I might give him another chance, but only after this experience has had a few years to fade in my memory.

Amazon US – parts 1 and 2, parts 3 and 4. Amazon UK – parts 1 and 2, parts 3 and 4.