Patera Silk is a young priest in charge of a manteion, that is, a religious school, in the city of Viron. Like all manteions, it has a sacred window where the pateras and materas pray each day one of the gods will show their faces, but such a thing has not happened in living memory. So when Silk receives "enlightenment" while playing a ballgame with the students of the manteion, it's a big deal--though perhaps not as easily believed as the god showing up at the window. The god that appears to Silk is not one of the "Nine," a pantheon with discrete purviews like the Greek or Norse pantheons, but a minor god known as "the Outsider." What does it want with Silk? Perhaps it has something to do with the terrible news that Silk receives later in the day, that the manteion has been sold by the state to a vicious criminal named Blood. With the help of members of the criminal underworld, Silk breaks into Blood's estate, considering going so far as even killing him, if it might save the manteion--a moral choice that the pious Silk makes with shocking coldness. What actually happens, of course, is that Silk becomes drawn deeper into the criminal world of Viron.
Compared to Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, the Book of the Long Sun series, or this first volume at least, is much more ordinary. It felt much closer to me to typical fantasy fare, though much smarter and better written, and with a few of Wolfe's customary bolts of strangeness. (The pantheon of "the Nine" seems shockingly similar to the mythos of the Game of Thrones series, which I will point out came out three years after this book was published.) The two series are set in the same world, but this one is much earlier; the sun that is dying in the time of the torturer Severian is burning white-hot here, so that night never truly falls anywhere on Earth. It feels smaller in scope: there is no quest here, and the action is all contained within the city of Viron. The stakes--the future of the manteion--seem small, though the intervention of the gods presages perhaps that they will get bigger as the books go forward.
What I thought was most interesting about Nightside the Long Sun is how Wolfe's reputation as a Catholic writer shows up here. I knew that about him, but I think you're hard-pressed to find evidence of Wolfe's religious beliefs in the Book of the New Sun. Nightside the Long Sun is explicitly religious in theme. Silk's piety actually puts him outside the bounds of most of Vironese society; much like our world today, most people pay a kind of lip service to religion but don't really believe. That means that the moral choice that Silk makes--that he will do almost anything, including murder, to save the manteion--is inscrutable to most people, criminal or otherwise. "The Outsider," a sensitive reader quickly understands, is actually the Catholic God, who has been pushed out into a marginal place outside the pantheon. No wonder, then, that Silk's mission takes him to a whorehouse--maybe in the next volume he'll visit a tax collector.
Ultimately, Nightside the Long Sun is hardly comparable to the Book of the New Sun stuff, but then again, The Shadow of the Torturer, the first book in that series, doesn't really capture the heights the series eventually achieves. And I will say that I wanted to keep reading when it was over; so much so that I am thinking of breaking my rule and reading the next one before 2027.
