ere is the second volume of The Book of the Short Sun. As foretold, it is not a sequel to the first volume, On Blue's Waters, but the same story continued--a quick glance at my review of Volume One might be helpful at this point. Without a gap or pause for breath, In Green's Jungles takes us further into the story of Horn's search for Patera Silk; and just as before, Horn writes his own story down, back on the planet Blue where he started, about two years after what he claims in his manuscript to be the failure of that search.
He still calls himself Horn, too, but the new book makes it clear that the original Horn died in some fashion partway through his long quest, somewhere in the appalling feverish jungles of the planet called Green, to which he was journeying at the end of Volume One. It also seems that the ghostly Neighbors or Vanished People (intangible presences who resemble the semi-godly aquastors of The Book of the New Sun, and who manifest the long-departed original inhabitants of Blue and Green) have somehow given the dying Horn the body of Silk, himself (it may be) dead.
Clarity is an illusion
It is also moderately clear--though of course the only thing ever really clear in a Gene Wolfe novel is the knowledge that clarity is an illusion--that Horn/Silk may be an inhuma, one of the shape-changing vampires native to Green, whom, like the shape-changing natives in Wolfe's great The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972), gain shape and essence from those who invade their territory (but who did they imitate to become Horn?). Or Horn/Silk may be an aquastor, a ghost of God swimming up and down the corridors of Time.
He is probably not Severian, the terrifying protagonist of The Book of the New Sun, though it is true that--like an aquastor, he visits Urth in spirit though not quite in the flesh--he is mistaken for a torturer from the Matachin Tower where Severian grew up, because of his mien, his clothing and the black sword he conjures out of thin air to replace the staff he has left behind on Blue, where his real body sleeps. The sun of the Urth he visits is red, the sky purplish-black at noon: Severian has not yet returned in glory to wash the planet down in the waters of the white hole, the New Sun.
And so it goes. In Green's Jungles, like its predecessor, tells at least two (or twenty) stories at the same time. One is Horn's hindsight-wise narrative of his own search for Silk, whose godlike wisdom is needed to save Blue from the kinds of strife unmonitored humans get up to. The other is the story of what happens to Horn/Silk at the time he/they are writing down the story of Horn's earlier search. The two stories intertwine constantly, argue with each other, block each other off from natural moments of climax, illuminate each other. There are beginnings, and clamorous middles, but no endings. Endings (though Gene Wolfe novels don't end any more than an Escher drawing ends) are for the final volume, Return to the Whorl, due in a few months. In Green's Jungles is what happens when a cauldron of story stirs but does not pour.
Wolfe's first fully adult hero
Do not, in other words, assume that in any normal manner it is possible to finish reading this blinding, balking, brilliant book, any more than it is possible to finish a dream. "It was night in any case," Horn/Silk says at one point. "Night, or we had far to go."
Both, I would suggest.
We are in the dark middle of a great book, in the rag and bone shop of an edifice to come; and there are many pages to turn before we can begin to know what it is we have learned here. Here, in this middle volume of The Book of the Short Sun, it may be enough to remember a few glowing fragments in the dance.
We can note, for instance, that Horn/Silk is almost certainly Wolfe's first fully adult protagonist. Unlike Severian, Horn not only admits to having a family, but spends in fact much of his time worrying about his children and his absent wife. Many of the characters who meet him in these pages, human and inhumi, think of him as a kind of father; and they call him Father; and indeed he is profoundly fatherly (a characteristic rarely to be found in SF heroes, who are usually sons). Much of In Green's Jungles takes place in communities at war on Blue; much of the book, therefore, is taken up with Horn/Silk's attempts to care for the family-dominated communities he has entered, to sustain their citizens and leaders, to shape the families he meets (and creates) in his wandering. This is father-work.
Songs of many voices
We can also note the populousness of the book. Horn/Silk himself is, of course, legion, and speaks in voices. He is accompanied throughout his journeying by the song of the mermaid he had slept with in the first volume, now hundreds of leagues distant and sea-girt; by the paranormal out-of-body presence of Mucor, who had bedeviled Silk in The Book of the Long Sun; by the bird Oreb, also from the earlier Book, whom Silk had saved from sacrifices thousands of pages ago; by Neighbors and inhumi and great green monsters; and--most important of all--he gains occasional access to the Outsider, the God of the earlier Book, who may be Severian. Who may therefore be Christ.
We can note as well that although nothing ends here, and though everything awaits the revelations to come in the final volume, the pages of In Green's Jungles swarm with a sensation that something is beginning to open. The book is like ice that burns. Here speaks one of the many characters who meet Horn/Silk in this volume, and are helped by him:
"A window!" Valico pointed a trembling finger (I shall never forget this) toward the other side of the sewer. "Look! I can see the stars!"
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia and co-editor of both The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, all Hugo Award winners. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and other places too numerous to list; much of this material has been collected in Strokes: Reviews and Essays 1966-1986 and Look at the Evidence: Reviews and Essays.
