Epiphany of the Long Sun

Epiphany of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


A continuation of "The Book of the Long Sun", which I reviewed earlier, this continues the story of a priest become revolutionary.

Gene Wolfe can write character voices. There's a lot of dialogue in these books, and sometimes there's not a lot of tags, like "he said, she said". It's still obvious who's speaking. After a couple words, you know if it's the always polite(politeness so sharp it can be a weapon) Patera Silk, the slang-dealing thief Auk, or the constantly hemming and hedging Patera Remora.

For a book that is so quick to read, I was surprised at how it had me using more words in everyday life. Some books are hard, and they exercise your brain, stretching it to places where it stores those more rarely used words. This book was able to do that without bogging down in parenthetical phrases.

As a book driven mostly by dialogue, some people will be annoyed by some of the voices, the tendency to interrupt, or fail to explain fully a point. Also, the action often happens in the dialogue. Threatening words might connote a raised gun. Of course, if you read the first half, then of course you won't be bothered by those things, so check out the first couple of chapters of the first book before committing to these two books.



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