Soldier of Arete

Alas.  According to multiple sources Gene Wolfe has died at the age of 87 in his Illinois home.

I’ve been on a mini-binge of Gene’s books lately, mostly recently Home Fires, and I think the mini-binge will have to continue.

I admired Gene’s plain, clear style, which was an ideal surface beneath which to hide the machinations of his unreliable narrators, and to gracefully unwind his diabolically complicated plots.

(Not that all his unreliable narrators were deliberately trying to deceive.  Some just weren’t very bright, or had limited access to information.  One was dead.  Latro in the Soldier series lost his memory every time he went to sleep.  The point was that, for whatever reason, readers couldn’t fully trust the stories they were being told, and had to navigate Wolfe’s terrain with eyes open, just as his narrators did.)

And sometimes the readers were better informed than the characters were.  If you were paying attention, you’d know that Patera Silk in the Long Sun series had been enlightened by the God of Abraham.  Silk consorts with publicans and sinners, has a relationship with a prostitute, Hyacinth, and has an obligation to save the world, or at any rate the Whorl.  But he manages to sideslip the fate that is intended for him, marries Hyacinth, and slip-slides away to, apparently, live happily ever after.

Gene became a Catholic in order to wed Rosemary, but he must have had an unconventional view of his own religion.  The Long Sun books could be read as a long allegory of the Gnostic Heresy, for example.  (Not that this should deter you from reading the books, which are Gene’s masterpiece, as far as I’m concerned.)

In person Gene was amiable and erudite and willing to be amusing, though he also had a steely temper that would sometimes flare (though I never witnessed it in person).   He’d fought in Korea and also boxed— Gene and I once compared our boxing scars.  (Well, mine weren’t boxing scars, they were inflicted by a martial artist wearing boxing gloves, so they should count..)  Gene got his scars during the same bout, and so had I (though in my case it was supposed to be practice).

And Gene could be inspiring, sometimes when he wasn’t intending to be.  During a convention panel about workshops, when listening to Gene, the entire plot of Aristoi unfolded in my head, as if I were Patera Silk being enlightened by the Outsider.  I have no memory of what Gene was saying, except that I’m pretty sure he wasn’t talking about Aristoi.

Harlan Ellison said of Gene that he was “engaged in the holy chore of writing every other author under the table.”  A chore at which he succeeded, and mightily.