The Ending; Some Spoilers for _Engine Summer_Whorl

Wolfe is kind enough to preserve some ambiguity here. The obvious reading is that their guilds are brother and sister guilds. You may read it otherwise if you choose, but don't think Wolfe is going to open his kimono on this issue at this late date. He's fluttering his fan at you here. One of the things about Engine Summer (referenced later in the Digest) that makes it a minor masterpiece (a Faberge egg, perhaps?) is that we will never and can never know what happened to Rush That Speaks after the story ends. This is, of course, true of every stand-alone novel or story, and Crowley builds that into Rush's tale in a way that is truly poignant, since Rush is both the teller and the subject of the tale. The horror of Asimov's Syndrome is that it means we ultimately find out about the rest of Rush's life, or Severian's, or Hari Seldon's, in a way that tends to trivialize our previous experience of the characters and the milieu.

Well, maybe I should have said is "once the wedding attack theme is introduced," which happens somewhat earlier. My memory of exactly where all these events happen is a little foggy, but frankly, the whole Dorp sequence through to the ending didn't do much for me. The climaxes happen offstage and are too like the climaxes of the previous volumes (yawn, Silk overthrows another bad government; oops, he does it again; yawn, Silk defeats his enemies by a clever trick; etc.) The "dutch" sentence structure was a bit much, too. I found it far more off-putting than the pseudo-Scots that Pig speaks. I don't want to be too negative. This was a series that I enjoyed and have and will again reread. It could certainly have been outstandingly worse. At least Severian didn't turn out to be the Outsider, or (pace Mr. Borski) Silk an inhumu, or Green St. Anne, or any of the other horrors that have been proposed on this list. Dave Lebling aka vizcacha *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.

Another 'I can't quite remember' I'm afraid but is it not said early on that the boy children of condemned prisoners who could stand under a certain bar were taken into the torturers guid and the girl children given to the witches? The ambiguity remains but with the possibility that Merryn and Sev could be biological brother and sister although if so they should not be aware of it. Matthew - catching up, being 1/2 way through RttW *This is WHORL, for discussion of Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun.