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Return to the Whorl (Book of the Short Sun)

By: Gene Wolfe
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Saint Martin's Press Inc.
ISBN: 031287314X
ISBN-13: 9780312873141
Released: 04 Jun 2001
RRP: £18.99
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

"Fish heads?" Here's a feast - By: Christian McCallister, 18 Aug 2004
General for alll books in "The Book of the Short Sun" ("On Blue's Waters", "In Green's Jungles", "Return to the Whorl"): This third series of books, which are a direct continuation of the books in "The Book of the Long Sun" & a semi-direct continuation of the books of "The Book of the New Sun" is similar in its writing style & tone. When you start to read these books, you feel like you've been thrown into an alien world inhabited by non-alien people with an alien culture. That's what Gene Wolfe has created in these books. He has gone where few authors have dared to go: into the very distant future of Mankind; not a few decades or a few hundred years, but many thousands of years. Frank Herbert, in the "Dune" books, started nine thousand years or so into our future. In Gene Wolfe's books, we don't know how far into the future we've gone, but it's well beyond what Herbert did, as the sun is cooling. The characters in these books are highly developed, three-dimensional, & realistic. The story-line is extremely non-linear, with abrupt shifts in time & setting, along with dream sequences loaded with meaning. It takes a while to get accustomed to that style, & some readers might not like it, but it was worth it for me. The writing is highly descriptive, & one comes away with a feeling of having visited the places described & having known the characters.

One strange note about the series as a whole is that its central character, Horn, gets semi-transformed into Patera Silk, the central character of "The Book of the Long Sun", as the story progresses (or does he?). This series of books also resurrects from "The Book of the Long Sun" one of the most entertaining supporting characters I've ever encountered, Oreb, the semi-intelligent, wise, & highly vocal bird who was the constant companion of Patera Silk & is now the companion of Horn, the new central character. Oreb reminds me of Robert Heinlein's "Buck, the geneticallly-enhanced talking mule who was a companion to Heinlein's near-immortal Lazarus Long.

For "Return to the Whorl": In the most linear (but still not very linear) & least obtuse book of the series, Horn (or is he Patera Silk?) jumps back & forth between the Planet Blue & the spaceship Whorl, searching for Silk (himself?), helping his new friend Pig (whose dialect is initiallly hard to understand but you get used to it), & making his way back to his (Horn's) family. He succeeds at returning to his family, he succeeds at helping Pig regain his sight (and stop being a blind pig!), & he succeeds, in an extremely strange way, at finding Patera Silk. All of the threads get tied together here, from "The Book of the New Sun", "The Book of the Long Sun", & "The Book of the Short Sun". The main character of "The Book of the New Sun" series, Severian the Torturer, even plays a smalll but important part, although he never gets named. The ending leaves the reader wondering if another series is planned, as the opportunity is there (Silk goes back to the Whorl as it readies to head back into deep space), but the tone is wistful, bordering on melancholy, as if Gene Wolfe were saying good-bye to his beloved characters. This is a very obtuse, poetic, complex, & wonderful set of books. It was a challlenge to read, but was well worth it.

More questions than answers - By: Bruce in Brighton, 19 Sep 2002
Can there be any better writer currenly working in this genre? Apparently simple narration which covers the fact that we have an unrerliable narrator who understands as little about what is happening as we do!

All the clues are there to the real "underlying" true story, but it remains tantalisingly out-of-reach - much like real-life!

Is this fantasy or science fiction - much like Clarke's view that any technology sufficently advanced could be mistaken for magic - you are never quite sure whether the character's in Wolfe's universe are simply bewildered by what they see & just explaining an ancient forgotten technology as best they can or are truly experiencing inexplicable phenomena?

The book sometime seem to be more about writing itself & how you tell a story than what is actuallly occurring - so Horn always makes us aware that we are reading sheets of paper which may run out at any time & that he has written this for his beloved wife - but if she is so much in his feelings why has he left her & been unfaithful numerous times, why does he never return to her?

Seen as a truly good man & more like a god by most, Horn is presumably only writing this whole account out of guilt for his own shortcomings with regard to his wife & out of a sense of inadequcy in the face of a baffling universe that he never reallly makes sense of.

But this is just an example of the many open questions left for you to answer - as others have said : this & it's 5 predecessors repay constant re-reading to yeild up alll their secrets - if they ever will?

The Proust of Science Fiction - By: F. Roberts, 19 Jul 2002
It might seem an absurd claim but the only writer to whom Wolfe can seriously be compared is Marcel Proust. I know of no other writer who can combine massive architectural brilliance with the capacity to transform one`s reading of an entire sequence of novels with a single phrase or sentence. This extraordinary series of books, from the New Sun to this, the final part of the Book of the Long Sun, can only be compared to A La Recherche. In this final volume we have to deal with moral seriousness of the highest order, the paradoxes of memory, identity & the reconstruction of the past, the nature of love . . . . this is simply a wonderful & inexhaustable writer.
Extraordinary work - By: , 13 Jan 2002
I can think of two other authors with the same uneasy relationship to fantasy fiction -- Michael Moorcock & M.John Harrison. I think they reflect a habit of questioning, of moral examination, which goes, dare I say it, with some of the best European Catholic writers. Wolfe's work has more in common, I suspect, with certain great South German novelists -- or even Goethe himself -- than it does with Star Wars or even Frederik Pohl. The romantic, philosophical examination has much more in common with the writers Thomas Carlyle admired than with the modernists Leavis admired. Rational romanticism ?
Maybe. But this is beautiful stuff, written to last & to be re-read down the generations. Never underestimate what lurks behind the covers of science fantasy -- sometimes it's pulp rubbish, but sometimes it's as profound as Thomas Mann.
Anyone who gave up on fantasy when Moorcock & Harrison started writing realism can rest assured they'll find quite as much to feed their minds in Gene Wolfe. His personal standard is very high. You don't get much wasteage with Wolfe.
Superb completion of the Short Sun series - By: , 01 Feb 2001
Gene Wolfe is a very difficult author to classify - describing his work as SF or fantasy (with alll the genre implications of those terms) does it a disservice. Return to the Whorl lives up to alll the expectations generated by his excellent series The Book of the Long Sun. This is set in a 'generation starship' travelling from the far-future Earth of Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The Book of the Short Sun, of which RTTW is the third & final section, can be read alone but is best understood in the context set by the previous series.

This is a mature work from a highly sophisticated & devious writer - large themes such as identity, religion, authorship & the futility (or otherwise) of human existence are considered within an intricate maze of intertwined plots. If that sounds complicated & hard-to-read then don't be put off, this is good read as well! Many questions that have been hinted at in Wolfe's previous works are finallly answered here. I won't reveal any plot details, as I think they are best discovered & pieced together by the reader. Highly recommended - start from Nightside the Long Sun (Long Sun book 1) - you won't regret it!