Please see review on my blog: Underground Man:

http://undergroundmangeomatt.blogspot... ( )

Let's get the important thing out of the way first: you need to read this book.

The middle part of Wolfe's Solar Cycle (the Books of the New Sun, Long Sun and Short Sun), The Book of the Long Sun may well be the greatest piece of speculative fiction written in the past two decades. It's certainly the most accessible of Wolfe's work I've read to date - with the sole exception, possibly, of his Wizard Knight duology. Yet while in that series it sometimes felt that Wolfe was opting for simplicity and accessibility at the expense of depth, in The Book of the Long Sun Wolfe manages to combine - rather, to fuse - an engaging adventure story (and several other sorts of story whose nature it would probably be better to discover for yourself) with an exploration of issues of faith and morality and a continuing expansion of the mythology and history of the universe first seen in the Book of the New Sun. While I often don't share Wolfe's actual take on these things, it's fascinating to watch him do all this.

Patera Silk is an augur - a member of a religious order called the Chapter - charged with administering to the spiritual needs of the inhabitants of one of the poorest quarters of the city of Viron in which he lives. Yet these are bad times for the Chapter, and for Viron itself. The city is gripped by drought, power is in the hands of the ruthless leaders of the Ayuntamiento, who have overturned the constitution and control the city with fear and military force, no god has appeared at any of the Sacred Windows of the city for decades and - worst of all - there are rumours that the manteion where Silk teaches and preaches is to be sold to a criminal.

While there are certainly strong connections between this book and the New Sun books, I don't feel these are important enough to make any real difference to the order in which potential readers should approach the two. Certainly it would add something to the experience (in particular, it would flesh out the details of one of the background characters in this book), but it simply isn't necessary to have read The Book of The New Sun before attempting this.

In fact, I rather think this series would be an ideal introduction to Wolfe's fiction.

Most of the usual Wolfe tropes are on display: unreliable narrators, mysteries about characters' parentage, games with names and naming conventions and the sort of vocabulary that makes you fear the author has swallowed a dictionary. But above and beyond all that, Wolfe is just an incredible writer, capable of simultaneously juggling a couple of dozen distinctly voiced and motivated characters, neatly laying out the clues for mysteries and plot developments that won't be revealed for another three, four, or five hundred pages, seamlessly weaving together any number of different plot arcs, revealing huge amounts about people and places without ever resorting to obvious exposition, and just simply writing good prose: words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters that you enjoy reading and want to read more of.

Rereading Litany ... now, for what must be the fourth or fifth time (as preparation for what will be my second attempt at the Short Sun books), I was struck particularly by the amount of effort and care that Wolfe has so obviously put in to these books. Wolfe is an author enamored of mysteries and secrets and revelations, but he doesn't cheat: the clues are all firmly in place, almost as soon as the book begins. That a work with so many twists can still be so gripping after several readings is surely a testament to what an impressive achievement this series really is.

Read this book. You won't regret it.

The first two novels of Wolfe's Long Sun sequence. Sublime and profoundly imaginative. Can be read with or without having read his New Sun books. ( )