Subject: (urth) PEACE

From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 19:48:35 +0000

I just finished PEACE (and Watchmen, but everyone is still tired from
discussing that the last time 'round, so I'll forbear, aside from
noting that it appears to me to be far from clear whether the Pirates
tale applies to Rorschach or Ozymandias or the owl-dude) and I am a
bit confused.

My central confusion is over master-narrative:  which do I apply to
render meaning out of the shifting, kaleidoscopic pieces and fragments
of stories and anecdotes and ruminations?  I've narrowed it down to
two possibilities.

One, I take the taoist Tale of the Jade Pillow, and the whole book is
simply Den's imaging whilst his Aunt negotiates for the Egg (or
earlier.) This makes the book fairly straightforward, with none of the
more exotic possibilities I've seen mentioned in the archives, such as
Weer-as-mass-murderer, Weer-as-dead-narrator (which I didn't notice at
all.), Weer-as-single-murderer... etc.  That counts against it, but
Wolfe can write reasonable simple tales (Ex. There Are Doors struck me
as fairly simple, at least as compared against the Sun tales).

Two, I home in on the tale of the pharmacist, Julius Smart.  Weer
himself says that Smart is the central character when he is recounting
the tale of the alchemist^H^H^Hpharmacist, even though he appears only
obliquely in most of the novel.  This is, I sense, a vastly more
interesting avenue of approach. Weer early on claims that he will be
utterly honest- excepting that he will be omitting things.
Obviously something is being hidden, since we do not see anything that
would account for the inordinate importance Weer places on Smart
otherwise (assuming that we reject the Pillow hypothesis, since dreams
are but a variant of lies, which renders null Weer's promise not to
lie, to only omit.)
What exactly I am at a loss to say.  I have a vague intuition that
there was something less than licit about Weer's sudden restoration to
wealth (he mentions at least twice that the family fortune was lost,
and that he was poor in his fifties, but became even more wealthy than
ever in his sixties; why he does not say.), and this may be connected,
but there is no 'smoking pocket knife', to twist a phrase. Has anyone
else thought along these lines and hunted down a more satisfactory
conclusion?

Salaam,
~Maru

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From: Roy C. Lackey <rclackey at stic.net>
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 22:30:40 +0000

all.),<<

This is old hat, but the first sentence of the book lets you know Weer is
dead. That is, you know he's dead if you remember Mrs. Porter's hobby and
that her maiden name was Bold. There was a big discussion about PEACE here
during the last four months of 2000.

[snip]

conclusion?<<

Weer became personally wealthy when Smart died and left the juice plant to
him. There is no reason to suppose that Smart's death was other than of
natural causes. And, just to maintain my penchant for pedantry, Weer was "a
poor man at forty, and a very rich one at fifty". You can find a timeline
for PEACE here, but be forewarned that I am biased about it. <g>

http://www.siriusfiction.com/peacetimeline.html

Salaam, indeed
-Roy

---

From: Iorwerth Thomas <iorweththomas at hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Jun 2005 09:10:17 +0000

It's been close to a year since I last read it (and I think I need to do so 
again) so take the following with a pinch of salt...

>From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>

>all.), Weer-as-single-murderer... etc.

I did get the impression that he may have been the one who committed the 
prank leading to the death of the guy at the factory, but I'm not clear on 
why I did so...

>are but a variant of lies, which renders null Weer's promise not to

I have to admit that the pharmacist sequence confused the hell out of me.  I 
have next to no idea what to make of it.  Help would be welcome.

Some other things that bother me:

The faces outside the window of the house early on: who could they be?

Visiting his grandfather for Christmas: 'Old Nick' referred to instead of 
'Saint Nick'. Is this his grandfather actually referring to Satan, or have I 
just got hung up on a colloquialism? (Or does the 'Fantasy Masterworks' 
edition have a misprint?  Wouldn't be the first time...)

Several of the segments carry a strong sense of something having lingered 
too long somwhere, beyond when it should have left - mainly the 
'Necronomicon' excerpt and the story of the Sidhe.  I keep thinking that it 
implies that, whatever he did or didn't do, Weer is unwilling to leave
i) the memories of his now-dead town  (obvious)
ii) his now-dead town in a more literal sense (probably wrong)

I have a half-assed theory that he's hallucinating the whole thing as he 
expires from a stroke (or, if I rely strongly on the necronomicon bit, he's 
doing so while stuck inside his own decaying corpse, rather like the dead in 
'Dr Bloodmoney'), but there's almost certainly something in the text that 
rules that out.

I'll try and track down that discussion, I think.  And reread the damn book, 
when I have time.

Iorwerth