PEACE

Iorwerth Thomas · 30 Jun 2005, 09:10 · from 2005-June.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: iorweththomas at hotmail.com (Iorwerth Thomas)
Date: Thu Jun 30 09:10:17 2005
Subject: (urth) PEACE
In-Reply-To: <f5238c30506291948557afef2 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F1739FC5B785D0756D4F1E0B9E30 at phx.gbl>

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>

>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.

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...

>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.)

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

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net