Are you tired of Gene Wolfe yet?

Because I'm not, and you're going to have to put with some more posts about him and his work. I finished reading On Blue's Waters the other day while walking back home from the bus stop. Wolfe really knows how to get a hook into the reader and drag him along with the story. This tale picks up a couple decades on from where Exodus from the Long Sun ended. The protagonist of this tale is the writer of the previous account. He writes this one in the first person about himself and his adventures in the past interspersed with accounts of what is happening to him at the time of his writing. It's an interesting device and allows for two plotlines to be set up in parallel and keep the reader intensely interested in both.

Wolfe also leaves very ambiguous whether and to what extent the writer is to be trusted. The "author" himself talks about putting a spin on things to present them in a particular light and has moments of self-loathing for being dishonest about himself, his actions and his motivations. This character is very different from Silk in the previous series. Silk was a good man who was caught up in events and, though imperfect, was an example for those around him and made a lot of very hard decisions that would not be possible for most. This time Horn, our hero, is a decent man who finds himself carried along by events more than Silk was (who shaped them as much as he was pushed by them) and is unable to make what he thinks are the right choices in many of the situations in which he finds himself.

A lot more of this tale is told by implication and insinuation than exposition and it makes it difficult to tease out exactly what happens in certain episodes. The narrative style, while engaging, is also disjointed because it moves back and forth between two very different times and places and does not always pick up right where the previous passage in each vein left off.

Finally, through editorial notes from Horn's sons we know some things about the end of the story that Horn does not know himself while he writes, and it merely serves at this point to add to the uncertainty of the outcomes. I can't wait to finish the story.