IN GREEN’S JUNGLES - GENE WOLFE

Lots of books get accused of being difficult, Pynchon or Joyce pop directly to mind, but typically when people say that they mean long and perhaps screwed up, time-line-wise. However, Wolfe actually deserves this reputation. This is perhaps one of the most difficult and confusing books I’ve ever read. In some ways, it is unfair to review it as a single volume. It’s the middle part of a trilogy, which is itself part of a longer dodecology, all of which, by every account, can’t really be understood the first time through. To read Wolfe is to reread Wolfe, as the saying goes, and this book very much proves that rule. We continue the story of Horn, on his quest to retrieve Silk from the Long Sun Whorl, a generational star-ship, and bring him to the newly colonized planet of Blue. However, while the last book focused on two main timelines, the beginning of Horn’s journey and after Horn’s return, having “failed,” this book jumps all over the place and seems to involve some sort of time travel and/or astral projection. I suspected that Horn died and was resurrected in the last book and he much more straightforwardly undergoes the same experience in this book. Only when he’s resurrected it seems to be in Silk’s body, though he doesn’t seem to have realized that himself yet. While none of the mysteries of the first book are really answered, we have been given many more. There is much more about the Neighbors, the aliens who lived on Green and Blue before humans arrived and the Inhumi, a vampiric race of shapeshifters. Also, like I said before, Horn/Silk now seems to be able to timetravel and/or astrally project so in addition to ambiguity over who certain characters actually are, now there is ambiguity over where/when the characters actually are. We also get the first (to me, I’m sure if/when I reread there will be other instances I missed) appearance of the Red Sun World. As stated above, the book is part of the grander Solar Cycle that includes the much more famous Book of the New Sun series but so far the references have been oblique. In this book we finally get a return to that world and, hopefully, some more connections in the next book. I’m going to have to read the last book in this series very soon so all the information is fresh in my mind. It’s clear that this book is such a puzzle box and mindfuck it will only be clear after finishing the whole series a few times (and probably not even then, it’s certainly fertile ground for obsessives) so reading the middle volume the first time is mostly just confusing. However, even through all the density and slipperiness you do get the palpable sense that Wolfe knows what he’s doing, that everything is in the book for a reason and that the mysteries are ultimately solvable if you’re willing to look for them. I hope he sticks the landing. 3 Intersellar Whorls