Raymond St. Elmo's LETTERS FROM A SHIPWRECK IN THE SEA OF SUNS AND MOONS

To a certain degree, I'm still trying to figure out the freaking ocean of words I just swam through, as I contemplate the very unusual and ambiguous Letters From a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons, by Raymond St. Elmo. I mean, I know I had fun shaking my head over the combination of godpunk, sea adventure, star-crossed romance and epistolary interrogation it contained, but did I ever actually figure out what was going on? Enough to write a coherent post about on this here blog? 

Let's find out.

Interviewer: Describe how to kill Typhon.

Oh, there are as many ways to kill a god as there are to destroy a man. Personally my favorite is to melt him down in confusion and despair. 

Readers here who are also readers of Gene Wolfe have already raised their eyebrows at the mention of the ancient Autarch and god-king of the Whorl, but this Typhon is merely (?) a storm god, one of a cargo hold-full of mostly dead and/or forgotten deities being carried aboard the good ship Unicorn from San Francisco, at which point the last of them was collected, to the mysterious and uncharted island of Theodosia.

Typhon could also be our protagonist, cloaked in the body of Clarence St. Elmo*, the blind old sailor rousted out by the unknown Interviewer for purposes unknown but urgent for that entity.** A mad scientist on the island on which Clarence and a few of his crewmates from the Unicorn thinks Clarence is Typhon, anyway. 

Clarence has been adopted, though, not by Typhon, but by the Egyptian god, Thoth, who appears to him with advice and wry commentary in the form, usually, of a sea bird, though occasionally he's got a vaguely human form, shrouded in black.

But all of this is just distraction, as far as the Interviewer is concerned; they claim to have dredged up Clarence to help in a search for two green leatherbound books, one in Etruscan and the other a French translation of the first -- allegedly. As for Clarence... He's just this poet, you know? 

I saw some useful poetic fodder in the situation. It's just my nature. I considered putting seaweed in my hair and appearing to them as my own drowned ghost. The idea made me laugh, then the laugh made me check. I did have seaweed in my hair. Maybe I was my own drowned ghost. The idea scared me so I combed it out with my fingers and headed on.

To arrive at the above situation, shipwrecked and pondering how to approach some other castaways, Clarence first allowed his beloved's father and fierce, ancient aunts to chase him away from her, so very away that he left their hometown of Maidenhead, NJ for San Francisco and thence joined the crew of the Unicorn. Which brought him to a weird island complete with lighthouse, a seminary run by the aforementioned mad scientist, the Master of the Green, and many other features atypical of your standard Robinson Crusoe-esque fare. Like a bunch of gods and ex-gods rampaging around and wreaking havoc. Only some of whom seem to have been along for the ride on the Unicorn. I think. Were there already some feral gods or ex-gods on the island? I never decided for sure.

Meanwhile, back on the voyage, Clarence wrote his beloved K. (all we ever get is this initial, never a name) a series of longing letters which give the novel its title, and the Interviewer has only secured his cooperation by convincing him they have a way of seeing that she gets them, since she didn't in real life? 

Except what is the reality of any of this, here?

While trying to figure all of this out may feel like too much work to some (my own dear personal mother, who spotted this book in our shared ebook library and was intrigued by the title, started it before I did but DNF'd it for this reason), it is a fun exercise for the Wolfe-pilled who actively seek out this sort of thing -- but it's not the only reason to give this book a try! 

There's also the enjoyment of watching perhaps the most ill-advised sea voyage since Ishmael signed on to the Pequod. The Unicorn, we learn, is a perfectly fine ship but its crew mostly abandoned it long before it reached San Francisco; they were terrified of its cargo of statues of forgotten gods, you see. Also, the captain is kind of a freak show. The result is that the ship can attract no kind of competent or experienced crew, so nobody has the first idea what to do when things immediately start going wrong in ways both predictable and un-.

I'm bouncing around in chronology, here, but guess what: so does the novel! It's all part of the puzzle box, one which I'm not sure I've solved yet. Truly, I am not sure I understood this novel. 

But the experience of reading it was fun enough to make me more than willing to try it again sometime. So maybe stay tuned...

*As though we are perhaps meant to wonder if he is not an ancestor of the author of the novel Letters from a Shipwreck in the Sea of Suns and Moons? Except I think "Raymond St. Elmo" is a pseudonym? But who knows. All I could find poking around in the wreckage of the internet was that St. Elmo has written a bunch of other books that seem even weirder than this one. But few biographical details.

**Or entities. Sometimes the Interviewer uses plural pronouns in referring to itself/themselves. And frequently sounds, as does Clarence sometimes, too, like a piece of software or otherwise artificial being.