Customer Reviews:
 On Top of the Whorl November 12, 2007
Having just finished one of the two novels in this book, it could be that I'm being premature by offering a review of 'Litany'. However, I'm so besotted with Wolfe's prose that I really can't wait.
I bought `Litany' some time ago and initially found the writing too obtuse and dense to progress beyond the first few pages. I came back to it last week, however, and found that it's one of those books that deserve persistence and, ultimately, offer incredibly rich rewards.
The books are set on the interior of what I guess you'd call a planet-sized tubular colony ship (known as `the whorl'), with the `long sun' acting like a giant solar fluorescent tube up the middle, providing heat and light. The ship has been on its journey for so long that none of the inhabitants remember that their world is artificial. However, this sci-fi setting belies the feverish imagination and literary intelligence that make this book so good.
The style reminds me of 19th Century symbolist paintings - slippery of meaning, stoked by classical allusions, vivid imagery and mythological coda. Indeed, when I read it, I feel that I'm in the world depicted in the bejewelled fantastic paintings of Gustav Moreau. I find myself dreaming of the golden baroque images that Wolfe conjures up in his writing.
As usual, Wolfe plays games with the reader, dropping in clues can easily be missed in the plot and intertextual references that connect with other Wolfe novels (the two-headed god named Pas in the Book of the Long Sun is, it seems, the tyrant Typhon encountered in the Book of the New Sun).
The characterisation is just as slippery: despite being a priest and having a `pure' motivation (saving his neighbourhood church or `manteon'), the protagonist Silk is just as morally ambivalent as most Wolfe `heroes', justifying compromises or capitulation with the criminal Blood in self-serving ways.
Of course, only being one book in, I have no idea of how Silk's story will progress or how all the symbolic threads that are being laid out will come together and resolve themselves. However, I'm enjoying the journey immensely...
Infinite riches in a little room August 22, 2002
12 out of 14 found this review helpful
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room, an everywhere. The Book of the Long Sun is the fullest expression of Donne's sentiment I know of in English prose. Set within the stifling heat of the enclosed whorl, Wolfe's work is more focused than the vast canvas of time and space covered in the Book of the New Sun. There is, however, still plenty of scope for his trademark intense mastery of detail when describing people and places. The character of the central protagonist, Silk, is surely one of the most finely-realised portraits even Mr. Wolfe has managed, and his progress and development through the turbulent events of the novel means by the end his stature has metaphorically and literally cracked the bounds of the world in which he was born. The final postmodern twist will mean you reach the end of the book and will want to go right back to the beginning... but this novel (unlike much of what passes for fantasy these days) will bear (and indeed, requires) multiple re-readings. Read it now!
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