Customer Reviews

Home Fires

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

One word to sum up this book: disappointing. Perhaps I came it with my expectations raised too high. I had heard of Gene Wolfe from a number of sources, First Things ran an article on him, and a sci fi blog I used to read was named after one of Gene's ideas. When I saw this book on the newish rack at Bookmans, I grabbed it quickly. Here at last was my opportunity to experience an author who has been desciribed as "too difficult, and too religious".

The book hooked me immediately. No ambling prologue introducing the characters and the setting, we are just dumped into the action, in media res. Everything moves quickly, I wanted to keep turning the pages because I knew a new twist was coming soon. And there were many, many twists. It was difficult to keep track of everything that happened, I felt much like Skip must have, bewildered but fascinated. The setting is dystopian, but you can imagine getting there from here without too much trouble. I liked the lawyerly perspective; some of my best friends are lawyers.

Yet, for all that, I got to the end and I didn't like it. Maybe it is because Skip and Chelle are such horrible people. Really everyone is in this grayest of dystopias. Skip strikes me as the best of a bad lot, and that isn't saying much. If I wanted to read about this kind of thing, I could just turn to the news. I suppose my tastes in fiction are thoroughly bourgeois. I really do want evil to be vanquished and love to win out in the end.

I like my scifi hard, and moderately didactic. If, like Wolfe, the author is known to be thoughtfully religious, I like to see how that plays out in the way the story is written. Those things are not present here. I feel that Wolfe wrote the kind of book that critics like, and readers hate. This book is full of artful ambiguity and clever literary devices that will delight bitter and penurious English majors. As a writer, Wolfe is probably better than Pournelle or Powers, in the technical ways such things are understood. But this book failed its primary purpose: to entertain. The story is depressing, and not all that fun to read. The book was challenging in a good way, and thought provoking, but I doubt that I will ever read it again.

A new novel from Gene Wolfe is always a cause for celebration, simply because he is one of science fiction and fantasy's best prose stylists and storytellers. In his latest novel, "Home Fires", Gene Wolfe echoes 1930s to 1950s pulp magazine science fiction in creating scenes and characters reminiscent of it, relying on old tropes pertaining to interstellar war, bringing the dead back to life, and robotics, and still striving to create high literary art (Though those accustomed to modern science fiction, stretching from the New Wave to cyberpunk and beyond, may find his characters and scenes far too quaint and nostalgic for their own tastes.). Wolfe offers a captivating cast of characters, starting with successful attorney Skip Grison, who has almost literally waited a lifetime for the return of his young bride, Army Mastergunner Chelle Sea Blue from the bitterly fought interstellar war between humanity and their alien enemy, the "Os". Chelle Sea Blue has aged only a few months, due to the relativistic effects of interstellar travel; her relatively few months of conflict, on the distant worlds contested between humanity and the Os, have been more than a score of years experienced by Skip back on Earth. Separated now by age as well as by distance, Skip and Chelle try rekindling their romantic ardor via a Caribbean cruise on a wind-powered sailing cruise ship, but Chelle isn't psychologically the same person she was decades ago, leading to unforeseen romantic consequences for both. A voyage marred by spies, terrorists and cyborg killers, with ample, often unexpected, disruptions from Chelle's mother Vanessa Hennessy, who has joined the cruise ship's crew as Virginia Healy, its new social director. Wolfe's tale may seem all too familiar with those acquainted with classic American pulp magazine science fiction, but it's far from routine; instead, he delivers so many twists and turns in the plot that readers will be stunned and delighted with its unexpected ending. Though Wolfe's literary style is quite removed from the almost poetic prose of his "The Book of the Sun", "The Book of the New Sun" and "The Book of the Long Sun" series of novels, "Home Fires" demonstrates anew why he is viewed still by many as one of our finest science fiction and fantasy writers, one still capable of creating high literary art.

Good fiction by Gene Wolfe is about as good as it gets. As is usual with Wolfe, he doesn't beat you over the head with what's he's trying to say, but it's there if you are paying attention. In this case, it's a portrait of the home front during an interstellar war, and a world that seems generally starved of resources, economic opportunity, and freedom. The story alternates between fast action/adventure set forth in third person narration, and passages reflecting the internal observations of the main characters. The reader will quickly become invovled in what's happening to the protagonist, "contract" couple (marriage itself having largely fallen by the wayside in the future) of Skip and Chelle. Owing to the relativistic effects of space travel, Skip is near 50 while his contracta Chelle has aged only two or three years and is still in her 20s. Enjoy the mystery, adventure, spy story, but it's the people that will stay with you after you're done.

It's not useful to classify this book as a mystery, an espionage thriller, a sci-fi fantasy, or a law thriller, although you could do so because the story has elements of each. Wolfe's subtle, complex book is bigger than genre because it is driven by compelling characters and science-based wonderment. (How would interstellar war actually work? What would be the effect on human relationships of time-dilating faster-than-light travel? What is the plausible condition of post-fossil-fuel humanity?) The writing is Wolfe's usual liquid, lonely, gorgeous prose. As I mentioned the story is subtle and complex, and Wolfe is not gratuitous. He trusts his reader and expects rigor. Yet he leaves no loose ends and he rewards you so generously. Give it a second read to catch the many hints you missed and many answers you craved after the first. Give it a second read because it is purely pleasureable. The proud, desolate ending is one of the most poignant moments I ever read because in spite of all of the fantastic elements, this is a very convincing love story. -- EB, 1/10/2012

OK, I picked this up at the library based upon the cover byline.

I've read far more sci-fi than many I think, and this one really left me rather non-plussed at best.

First, there is very little sci-fi in this sci-fi rated work. As someone else mentioned, this is at best a minimalist steam-punkish murder mystery noire, with the barest sci-fi trappings of mentioned star travel.

Not knowing the author's body of work or awards, I was half convinced that this was simply someone who'd managed to get a piece published. I will have to check out his earlier works, which sound as though they were better.

While it was an interesting read, with lots of unusual plot twists and situations, I have to agree that there was a level of discourse amongst the characters that was abstracted to the 3rd degree, and a significant portion which didn't seem to add much to the story.

One instance was wherein after the ship he is booked upon is hijacked, and he make his escape to an unoccupied state room, he uses his cell to contact his office. After having just killed 5-8 men with a submachine gun, his call is blase and discusses an element of the case for the first minute or two. Only after discussing some aspect of the case upon which he is involved, does he mention that the ship has been hihacked and his contracta/wife has also escaped and who's location, and personal well being unknown. Color me naive, however even the most hardened military man, to say nothing of a middle-aged attorney who's never even held a gun, would act like that.

This really is not a sci-fi read as much as what appears to be an attempt at a somewhat bleak noire-ish mystery. And while it was interesting, some of the plotting and final revelations are frankly "B" grade. Its most similar to those B grade horror flicks which just can't seem to -not- use the beat to death cliches and "Look behind the door you just opened" moments.

This book had a lot, and I mean a LOT of good stuff that could have been expanded upon, war with an alien race, mind transference, the existence of star travel (somehow) and a concomittent rationing of energy, modernity with a touch of steampunk, a world at war with aliens and also broken up into 1984 type EU, Sino and North America block who spy upon each other.

Almost none of that was expanded upon, nor did much if any of it even come into play throughout the story.

Even the end game, which had a Sydney Greenstreet type character ( just watching the Bogart with him in it, Across the Pacific?), just ends with him disappearing into the background. Well, actually I have another 20+ pages to finish, so most likely he is some sort of spy.

I think I'd be pretty PO'd if I'd payed $$ for it.

Its worth a read if you really don't have anything else at hand.

Gene Wolfe's newest novel Home Fires reads like a "Best of..." version of life. The story involves reuniting with an unrequited love (who happens to be an intergalactic hero), going on a luxury cruise, and having gunfights with pirates. For all that, portions of the novel are surprisingly dull.

The premise is brilliant: a young woman decides to enlist in an outer-space war and leaves her husband behind. Due to a kink in the space-time continuum, when she returns, he has aged twenty years while she's merely one year older than when she left. Hook or by crook, they decide they have to rekindle their love. That's when hijackers attack their cruise ship, and where the story becomes convoluted with too many twists, back stabbings (literally), and revelations. Long stretches of the story are nearly impossible to follow.

What saves the book is Wolfe's philosophical ruminations as well as the beauty and pathos he invests in his central characters. Perplexing questions of identity are brought up and discussed in detail, as are marriage, military service, and religion. Beyond that, there's a wish for peace; until the wish is fulfilled, Wolfe will keep the Home Fires burning.

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Due to an interstellar military duty, affluent attorney Skip Grison is now two decades older than his contracted paramour Chelle Blue though they were the same age when they met at college. Her time in outer space was months, but years in North America where he waited for his wife to come home from serving in the combat. Skip seeks a special present for his beloved who came home early due to war related injuries; he thinks he may have one. Skip arranges for Chelle and her estranged mother Vanessa, whose essence has been loaded into a new body, to see one another.

Soon after the mother-daughter reunion, Skip takes Chelle and her mom on a cruise that circles the globe. However, the vacation proves anything but relaxing as hijackers, assassins, and others of their ilk come after someone on board with collateral damage acceptable.

This is a terrific science fiction mystery with the whodunit and why-do-it thriller themes up front as the prime thread, and the futuristic SF elements serving as background enhancement. The fast-paced story line grips the reader from the moment Chelle and Skip reunite with her so many years younger than him chronologically but in many ways her military experience makes her seem older than him. Red herrings abound in this exhilarating character driven thriller.

Harriet Klausner