Subject: Review: On Blue's Waters by Gene Wolfe

From: Aaron M. Renn <arenn at urbanophile.com>
Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 17:30:06 +0000

On Blue's Waters by Gene Wolfe
		  Review Copyright (c) 1999 Aaron M. Renn

Conclusion: Recommended

Under the heading "Simply embarrassing that more people don't read Wolfe",
an amazon.com reviewer wrote:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
I looked at my local Barnes and Noble. I drove to a Borders which was over
30 minutes away, betting that Borders would be better than B&N (typically,
it is). I called the two local sci-fi specialty shops to see if they had
it. None of the above had the new Wolfe book. It is terribly
embarrassing. ... What is going on? Is Wolfe too literate for people?
</BLOCKQUOTE>

When I mentioned on the net that I was reading On Blue's Waters as my first
Wolfe novel, I was told, "this is *not* the Gene Wolfe book to start with"
because "It is the fifth volume in a seven-volume series, and quite a lot
of the emotional and intellectual interest of _OBW_ depends on prior
knowledge of the characters and situations as depicted in _The Book of the
Long Sun_."  A couple messages later we discover "Gah, why is _Lake of the
Long Sun_ out of print?"

Well, there you go.

As it turned out, things weren't nearly so bad as I had been told and you
can safely read this without having to have read The Book of the Long Sun
first, though I'm sure that would help.  One of the blurbs on the cover
called Wolfe a "modern-day Homer".  That's probably a good choice for the
cover of this novel, because it is indeed a bit Homeric.  On Blue's Waters
is a rough parallel to The Odyssey.  The Protagonist Horn finds himself
sailing the seas on a quest to bring back the legendary personage of Silk
to be the leader of the humans on the newly settled world Blue.  Along the
way he runs into various magical creatures on islands and such, as well as
other interesting creatures, both human and not.  Silk was apparently the
topic of the previous Book of the Long Sun and references to events in that
series abound.  However, because this book is basically the retelling of a
legend, albeit by one of the participants, the idea that there is a lot of
"common knowledge" that we don't know completely isn't out of line.
Indeed, I found that it added a certain something to the book, especially
since Wolfe is careful to backfill all the material we really need to know.
I just considered the events in Book of the Long Sun a type of hazy and
heroic Elder Days and that worked well for me.

As I said, this story is the retelling of a legend.  Horn, who had
previously chronicled Silk's story as the Book of the Long Sun, already
spread widely throughout Blue (the Illiad?), now sets out to tell his own
tale.  Since he's writing after his adventures, we know he survives them,
and in a sort of foreshadowing technique Wolfe drops numerous glimpses of
what will happen throughout the text.  As with not knowing what happened in
the previous four books, this actually improved rather than degraded the
story as I would have thought.  It's clear that Wolfe knows a whole heckuva
lot more about writing than I do.

This book is literate without being highbrow, intelligent without being
boring, and is a generally solid read.  Based on comments from Wolfe fans,
I was expecting mucho density, but instead I found something that was very
readable while still displaying a great deal of craft.

The main problem I had with it was the relative lack of any type of epic
importance to the quest to go with the writing style.  This quest to find
Silk and various other things is presented as important to the future of
the planet, but I wasn't convinced.  Nor was the planet itself a
particularly interesting place of discovery as you might expect from a
straight-ahead colonization story.  Actually, I pretty much was of the
opinion that Blue would be better off getting put out of its misery, since
the whole place was moderately depressing, IMO.

Wolfe is from Barrington, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago that is just about
the last place I would expect a serious writer to live.  While I said
suburb of Chicago, Barrington is really a suburb of Schaumburg, the major
edge city of the northwest 'burbs.  It's a very upscale town, but is very
disconnected from the city and generally lacking in the same sort of
character as other similarly upscale areas.  For example, the North Shore
is made up of older railroad suburbs full of stately Victorian era homes
and people who make regular train trips into the city to see the opera and
such.  Barrington is full of mostly newer homes, having just enough of a
cutesy downtown to make people feel like they've got more culture than the
surrounding towns.  And full of people who are much more likely to stay in
the 'burbs than visit the city.  The kind of people who told my one friend
that they would never live in a "used house" when he bought his 100 year
old home in Elmhurst.

I kept trying to find some way that my concept of living in Barrington
would be reflected in Wolfe's novel, but I didn't.  Maybe you will.  And
incidentally, if you hate seemingly pointless asides like that one, you'll
despise this novel.  Wolfe is always going off on tangents.