Home Fires [Hardcover]

Skip has waited very patiently for his wife Chelle to return home from her interstellar military service. Thanks to relativity, it's only been a few years for Chelle. But for Skip, it's been over 20. Being informed that returning servicewomen most want to see their family, Skip contracts with a reanimation company to have Chelle's late mother's personality imprinted into the brain of another woman. Her name is Vanessa, and she and Skip instantly get off to a rough start, because as soon as Skip stops paying the daily fee, Vanessa will "die" again, and to make things worse, Chelle was never told her mother had died. Will Skip and Chelle be able to pick up right where they left off? What exactly is the state of their relationship? How will Chelle react Vanessa, who both is and isn't her mother?

Shortly after Chelle's return, she and Skip embark on a romantic Caribbean cruise. And then the rule breaking begins. Vanessa shows up as the cruise social director, but now she's going by the name Virginia. The ship is attacked by pirates who hope to ransom the wealthy passengers, but thanks to Skip's fast thinking and wealth, a team of mercenaries helps take the ship back. One of Skip's employees from the law firm is with the mercenary team. There is talk of a suicide club. and cyborgs. and aliens that are referred to only as O's. There's an attempted murder. And a bomb. And a woman with mis-matched hands who may harbor a hidden personality, also a man with no hands. Skip has until the ship pulls into port to figure out what's going on and prove himself to Chelle. It's a little noir, a little Agatha Christie, a little PTSD, a little Vanilla Sky, and it all boils down to a guy trying to get through a rough patch with his wife.

And of course, in classic Wolfe fashion, no one is who or what they appear to be, and everyone has secrets. Some people are itching to get those secrets off their chests, others, not so much.

Home Fires is heavy on the dialog, which is a multi-leveled trick. Most, if not all of the world building and characterization is done through fast paced dialog. You'll think these characters are inclined to tell each other the truth. They're not. By telling the story mostly through conversations and keeping emotional descriptions skinny, Wolfe is subtlety inviting you to come to your own conclusions. To mix metaphors, he's giving you just enough rope to get out exactly what you put in.

Not everyone is going to like this book. Home Fires definitely reads like a Wolfe, which means it's slippery and kaleidoscopic and changes under your fingertips. You won't feel in control of anything. At certain points you may not know what's going on.You'll have questions that won't be answered. And that's after you've finished reading it the first time. It's not that Gene Wolfe breaks every rule, it's that the rules just don't apply to him.

Ever see the movie Memento? Home Fires and Wolfe's The Sorcerer's House both remind me a little of that movie, the feeling that things are happening in chronological order, but at the same time they are happening backwards. Again, with the rules not applying.

I'd like to tell you about a specific non-spoilery example of Wolfe's world-building through dialog instead of exposition, because I immediately jumped to a conclusion, which of course turned out to be wrong, and then I felt like a character in the book.

Skip is a high flying attorney, and he has a secretary, who in turn has an assistant, who in turn has a helper. Skip's law firm has what appears to be an old fashioned style "secretary pool", and during a phone conversation the employees in the pool are referred to by first name only, as no one has bothered to learn their last names. My first thought was what kind of a sexist, almost Mad Men-esque future Earth is this? When did Gene Wolfe start writing like Heinlein (who you know I love), to whom female employees are all "girls" and usually helpless assistants? Wolfe is not having a Heinlein moment. This is a future Earth where there are too many people, and not enough jobs. Where companies (and not just Skip's law firm) are compelled by government regulations to hire so many people, even if there is no work for that person to do. This is a future Earth where low unemployment is more important than efficiency, and where resources are so scarce that adults will do anything to get and keep a job, including sitting in a secretarial pool all day waiting for a memo to type.

Or at least that's what I gleaned from snippets of dialog and other verbal interactions.

You know that old saying "you can never step in the same river twice"? Wolfe books are like that river. You can never read the same Wolfe book twice because it will never be the same book again, and you'll never be the same person.

This review was originally published on [...]

I liked this better than An Evil Guest, about as well as The Sorcerer's House, and not as well as Pirate Freedom, to name a few of Wolfe's more recent novels.

Any author worth his or her salt must really hate hearing that the new stuff isn't as good as the old stuff. But after reading all of Wolfe's novels, and rereading most of them, along with nearly all of his anthologized stories, I'm afraid I think it's largely true, with some important exceptions.

I don't know that I could pin down one and only one reason why I think this is so. But I can point to one thing that's increasingly been bothering me about Wolfe's work in recent years. To my ear, it seems as if he's forgetting how to write dialogue. He's lost none of his subtlety or wit, or his broad and exact vocabulary, or his moral seriousness, or his fondness for puzzles (intellectual, physical, or moral), and he remains a master of first-person narrative, but more and more, the way his characters talk in third-person narrative is starting to drive me up the wall.

For one thing, as another reviewer noted, a lot of the characters sound the same or nearly so. One might curse more than other, or another might have an accent, but in a given book, you might hear the same verbal tics or mannerisms from several unrelated characters. (Example: using "only" to start a sentence, in the sense of "but," "however," "except that.") And this without much variation in tone or style.

For another, many of the characters seem to spend a lot of time doing what I'd call "talking about talking," instead of just talking. Rather than just say something, they say what they think they're going to say; then they say what they're saying; then later, they remind someone else of what they said and announce that now they're going to say something else. It just doesn't sound like believable human conversation to me sometimes. Perhaps this is some obscure Wolfean trick, some post-postmodern alienating literary device, but I don't think so, and if I did, I still wouldn't think it worked.

I first started noticing this kind of problematic dialogue in the Book of the Long Sun, though, curiously, it didn't seem to be an issue in either the earlier Book of the New Sun or the later Book of the Short Sun. There was a fair bit of it in the Wizard Knight books, and way too much in An Evil Guest. It wasn't too bad in Home Fires, and the short first-person chapters in Skip's voice were free of it altogether. In fact, this seems to be something that Wolfe only does when he's writing in third person, and I guess that's one reason I love so many of his first-person books (New Sun, the Soldier series, etc.) and am often less enthusiastic about the others.

But of course this is all personal taste, and maybe it's only a small minority of cranks like me who are bothered by stuff like this. If it doesn't bother you, don't let my review put you off. I still consider Wolfe a major American novelist, and I still buy every Wolfe book when it's published; but as the ancients used to say, even Homer nods off now and then. Wolfe can do, and has done, better than this.

Before Chelle left Earth to fight in the war against the alien Os, she contracted (entered into a civil marriage) with Skip. If she returned, more than twenty years would have passed for Skip but only a few years for her: Skip would be a successful, rich lawyer, and she'd be his beautiful, young contracta. Fast forward to the start of Home Fires, the latest novel by all-round genius Gene Wolfe: Skip is indeed a rich, successful partner in his law firm, and Chelle returns to Earth, still young and beautiful but physically and mentally affected by war's traumatic experiences. To help welcome his contracta home, Skip sets up a meeting with her estranged and (more importantly) dead mother, arranging to have her brain scan uploaded into a new body. When Skip and Chelle go on a cruise to rekindle their relationship, Chelle's mother shows up on the ship under an assumed name, and a complicated plot involving mistaken identities, spies, hijackers and cyborgs gets underway...

Home Fires is a good novel, but falls far short of what Gene Wolfe is capable of at his best. Part of the problem is that the vast majority of the story is told from the perspective of Skip Grissom, and Skip happens to be the least interesting component of this tale. A successful lawyer, he approaches his renewed relationship with Chelle and their wild adventures on the cruise in a very rational, almost distant way. Because of his cerebral approach and understated way of describing things, it feels as if there's a filter between the reader and the novel's events that mutes much of their impact, unfortunately making Home Fires more bland than it could have been. Here's a story in which a traumatized soldier returns home from interstellar war, her mother is improbably returned to life, their cruise ship gets hijacked, numerous other wild adventures occur -- and it occasionally feels as if you're reading a deposition rather than the exciting SF story this could have been.

This is partly because Home Fires is filled with puzzles within puzzles, and you never quite know or understand everything that's going on. Large chunks of dialogue consist of Skip or someone else patiently explaining how they figured out one particular mystery -- why someone did something, or what someone else's real identity may be, and so on. You can almost imagine the lawyer pacing back and forth, deliberately leading the members of the jury through his reasoning as he makes his case. As a result, the story sometimes feels too contrived: everything keeps getting explained after the fact, giving you the feeling you missed too much before and need the brilliant lawyer to unwrap it for you. Fortunately, Gene Wolfe softens the impact of this cross-examination style by following each chapter by a shorter "Reflections" sub-chapter featuring Skip's private thoughts, which adds a more personal touch to the novel.

Home Fires has a complex and interesting plot that expands in scope as more details are revealed. As is usually the case with Gene Wolfe, he offers more hints than explicit descriptions of his characters and especially his novel's setting, in this case a resource-depleted future Earth split into at least three large political entities. Wolfe is also a master at forcing his readers to dig a little deeper to realize how poignant some of the issues and events of his stories are. If you take a step back (or as the case may be, a step forward) to consider Home Fires a bit more deeply, you'll see that there's a lot of emotion roiling under the apparent calmness of the narration. Unfortunately, this technique didn't work as well for me this time as it did with past novels by this author, leading me to rank Home Fires towards the bottom of Gene Wolfe's impressive bibliography.

Regardless, even a minor Gene Wolfe is still a major event. As usual, there's a lot of food for discussion here, and enough hidden or implied material to fill a much larger novel than Home Fires' relatively modest 300 pages. Despite not working 100% for me, it still had my head spinning several times and kept me considering and re-considering elements of the story for days. Wolfe's most recent novels have all ranged from good to great, but I can't help but hope that, with his next work, he'll reach the truly mind-bending ranges of his older classics again.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 16 reviews  3.7 out of 5 stars