Will Sargent reviewed Solar Labyrinth by Robert Borski
Review of 'Solar Labyrinth' on 'Storygraph'
4 stars
You have to love that this book exists. At the same time, this book is full of The Wildest Of Wild Ass Guessing, to the point where it becomes clear that the writer is seeing connections using his own constructed name classification scheme.
The really strange thing is that while this book goes into huge efforts to figure out who characters really are, it tries very hard to collapse characters into each other. Paeon, for example -- this is a bit character mentioned by the last Autarch in passing. There's no great reason he has to be Father Inire in disguise, when he could just be, well, Father Inire.
Worth reading as an exercise, but if anything I'd say this book has taught me the limits of reading Wolfe -- it's simply to ambiguous to tell what happens after a certain point, and what Wolfe tells us is that memory …
You have to love that this book exists. At the same time, this book is full of The Wildest Of Wild Ass Guessing, to the point where it becomes clear that the writer is seeing connections using his own constructed name classification scheme.
The really strange thing is that while this book goes into huge efforts to figure out who characters really are, it tries very hard to collapse characters into each other. Paeon, for example -- this is a bit character mentioned by the last Autarch in passing. There's no great reason he has to be Father Inire in disguise, when he could just be, well, Father Inire.
Worth reading as an exercise, but if anything I'd say this book has taught me the limits of reading Wolfe -- it's simply to ambiguous to tell what happens after a certain point, and what Wolfe tells us is that memory is fallible, we are easy confused, our narrators could be lying to us, and it's all just a story anyway.