Litany of the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe

“Enlightenment came to Patera Silk on the ball court; nothing could ever be the same again.”

The opening line of Litany of the Long Sun (the first half of The Book of the Long Sun) by Gene Wolfe.

I’ve often heard writers wonder where they should start their story (and I’ve seen many stories that were started in the wrong place). There could be no question of that here: if your character is going to experience enlightenment, where else could you start but at that moment? And notice the “could”—not “would”—after the semicolon. How could anything be the same?

The line immediately teaches the reader an important lesson about reading this book, and that is, that it means what it says. If the book says “enlightenment,” it doesn’t mean “insight” or “understanding” or that some puzzle that had been nagging the character was suddenly clear, at least not in the quotidian sense. It means enlightenment, full-blown, head-on revelation. The first paragraph continues:

“When he talked about it afterward, whispering to himself in the silent hours of the night as was his custom—and once when he told Maytera Marble, who was also Maytera Rose—he said that it was as though someone who had always been behind him and standing (as it were) at both his shoulders had, after so many years of pregnant silence, begun to whisper into both his ears.”

The lesson about the text meaning what it says comes in handy in trying to puzzle out that bit about Maytera Marble also being Maytera Rose, though on this point, as on so many others, the book will take its time about making such obscure meanings clear. That literalness on the text’s part contrasts with Patera Silk’s use of the image of a person standing behind him to describe his experience of the enlightenment. The idea that the whispering is heard in both his ears also suggests the manner in which such an experience must be overwhelming and perhaps bewildering.

At this point, given the repetition of “Maytera” and the forms of the names, the reader also begins to guess that Maytera, and perhaps also by extension Patera, are not names but titles. And the very concept of enlightenment has already created the sense or expectation of some sort of religious context, which the notion of titles would also reinforce.

The paragraph concludes:

“The bigger boys had scored again, Patera Silk recalled, and Horn was reaching for an easy catch when those voices began and all that had been hidden was displayed.”

We are grounded again in the circumstances of his enlightenment experience, which, we’re reminded, occurred on a ball court. We may not know what the game is, but the references to scoring and an easy catch are clear.

And that last phrase: “and all that had been hidden was displayed.” What reader could resist such a promise?

Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris.

“When my mother died she left the farm to my brother, Cassis, the fortune in the wine cellar to my sister, Reine-Claude, and to me, the youngest, her album and a two-liter jar containing a single black Périgord truffle, large as a tennis ball, suspended in sunflower oil, that, when uncorked, still releases the rich dank perfume of the forest floor. A fairly unequal distribution of riches, but then Mother was a force of nature, bestowing her favors as she pleased, leaving no insight as to the workings of her peculiar logic.

“And as Cassis always said, I was the favorite.”

The opening lines of Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris.

Perhaps there is some sort of lesson here for me as a reader: here’s an opening whose style and strategy I generally find very appealing, but which in this case doesn’t work for me—and that response was characteristic of my experience of the entire book.

We’ve got a strong narrative voice that dives right into its tale; we’ve got hints of complicated family relationships and longstanding tensions; we’ve got an indication of another strong character, Mother, in the offing; we’ve got the odd and potentially charming detail of the truffle; and we’ve got the inversion in which an album and a fungus become the appropriate legacy for the favorite child while the less-favored must make do with property and a valuable wine collection.

Really, this is the kind of thing that should be catnip for me.

And yet, it instead had the effect of making me wary, putting me on my guard. It strikes me as being a bit too pat, too facile; it seems to be trying too hard to seduce me. And so it inspires resistance. Perhaps this was the response that the author hoped to inspire; after all, much of the novel is concerned with both resistance (the narrator’s against the authority of her mother) and the Resistance (of occupied France during World War II). But I doubt it.

As I say, my response to the novel as a whole was much the same. It features elements that I found appealing, especially a refreshingly astringent narrator and an unsentimental view of childhood. Yet overall I didn’t find it as engaging as I’d hoped I would. The foreshadowing is laid on rather thick, and the dark whimsicality is clunky rather than creepily charming. The book alternates between two narratives, one historical and the other contemporary, and its need to withhold information about the historical tale for purposes of climactic revelation is handled rather ham-fistedly, with the narrator petulantly complaining that she must tell the story in her own way.

All in all, a book by which I felt more manipulated than engaged.

Blindness by José Saramago

“The amber light came on. Two of the cars ahead accelerated before the red light appeared. At the pedestrian crossing the sign of a green man lit up. The people who were waiting began to cross the road, stepping on the white stripes painted on the black surface of the asphalt, there is nothing less like a zebra, however, that is what it is called.”

The opening lines of Blindness by José Saramago, as translated by Giovanni Pontiero.

Can one imagine anything more orderly and regular than the flow of traffic at a controlled intersection? Think of the time-lapsed films we’ve all seen, the metronomic stop-go, stop-go of the traffic even more evident when accelerated, pulsing regularly as the day and night advance around it. What better opening could there be for a novel about the breakdown of human organizations and systems?

The first light shown is amber—the caution light. As the novel will show, there will always be some people who will try to take advantage of these transitional periods; rather than exercise caution, rather than abide by the agreed-upon rules, they will rush ahead to try and “get theirs.” By constantly trying to push the limits for their own advantage, these selfish beings may overwhelm a system that is based on agreement and cooperation.

But here at the beginning, at least, the regulatory system is robust enough to handle the work required of it, and the pedestrians cross in their turn when the signal to do so appears. All these regulatory signals, by the by, being visual cues, so that when the titular blindness strikes a few moments later, the long breakdown of system and order will begin.

But first the novel pauses, as it will often do, for a brief aside about language, remarking the oddness of referring to crosswalks as “zebras,” but then simply declaring it part of the order of things and moving on, reminding us that in language everything is called what it is because “that is what it is called.” Language is the great and perhaps original example of an order imposed arbitrarily on the world by humans, functioning in a particular way simply because we all agree it will do so. Green means go, red means stop, and white stripes mark road crossings only because we all agree that it is so.

(And where does “zebra” come from, anyway? Is there any language or culture that truly refers to crosswalks as zebras? As an American, I am unfamiliar with the term. Is it a Portuguese thing? A European thing? Or did the author create it out of whole cloth?)

And then in the next paragraph, the long, slow unraveling of the social order begins.