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Gene Wolfe'sIn Green's Jungles is the second volume, afterOn Blue's Waters, of his ambitious SF trilogy,The Book of the Short Sun. It is again narrated by Horn, who has embarked on a quest from his home on the planet Blue in search of the heroic leader Patera Silk. Now Horn's identity has become ambiguous, a complex question embedded in the story, whose telling is itself complex, shifting from place to place, present to past. Horn recalls visiting the Whorl, the enormous spacecraft in orbit that brought the settlers from Urth, and going thence to the planet Green, home of the blood-drinking alien inhumi. There, he led aband of mercenary soldiers, answered to the name of Rajan, and later became the ruler of a city state. He has also encountered the mysterious aliens, the Neighbors, who once inhabited both Blue and Green. He remembers a visit to Nessus, on Urth. At some point, he died. His personality now seemingly inhabits a different body, so that even his sons do not recognize him. And people mistake him for Silk, to whom he now bears a remarkable resemblance. In Green's Jungles is Wolfe's major new fiction,The Book of the Short Sun, building toward a strange and seductive climax. "Wolfe's narrative glows, rich and seductive as ever."--Kirkus Reviews… (more)
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I have to admit that I believe I liked the previous book slightly more - in this volume I found the newly-introduced concept of psychic(?) travel between planets to be far-fetched, in
ALso, I really wanted more of the planet Green. The narrator, at one point, admits that he believes he has failed to make the horrors of Green come alive for his reader - and, unfortunately, I felt that it was true. 'Dreams' and passing mentions weren't really enough, I felt.
Still, these are slight criticisms of what is overall, still an extremely impressive work, and one I would definitely recommend.
The reader might be misled by the title of this book into thinking that we are going to have an adventure on Green. Instead, we visit Green at different points in the narrative. The means by which this happens is open to debate, for we move between Green and Blue by some supernatural means rather than via the agency of a lander from the generation starship The Whorl, which still remains the focus of discussion and speculation. Sometimes, we travel even further afield, visiting Urth itself and the city of Nessus. At other times, we are engaged in a war between two more of the cities of Blue, a war in which Horn claims to have no influence, but everyone seems to ignore that and take orders from him.
If you have got this far in Gene Wolfe's Solar Cycle without realising that there are distinctly strange things happening, then you probably haven't been paying attention. If you have stuck with it this far, then you may well have given yourself up to the flow of story-telling and have ceased to look for narrative causality. The writing more than makes up for this; Wolfe's prose is simple yet exquisite, and carries the reader through any difficulties they may have with mere comprehension.