Review: Peace, by Gene Wolfe

Review: Peace, by Gene Wolfe

by Rich Horton

What to say about Gene Wolfe's Peace? That's a difficult task. The last time I "reviewed" a Wolfe novel my post was called "Random Notes on The Shadow of the Torturer" and I suppose this one might have been called "Random Notes on Peace" except that such a title might easily be misinterpreted. This review comes from my recent reread of the book. I won't reiterate what I have said before about Gene Wolfe, but I will leave this link to my obituary for him.

Peace (1975) is narrated in the first person by Alden Dennis Weer, an old man living in a huge rambling house somewhere in the Midwest. (Feels like northwestern Illinois to me, actually.) But almost everything I just wrote is in question, including the word "person". Not to mention "house", and "narrated" and "old" ... The novel's somewhat famous opening sentence reads "The elm tree planted by Eleanor Bold, the judge's daughter, fell last night." We learn later that Eleanor Bold planted trees on the graves of her friends, and there is an old legend that when a tree planted on one's grave falls, the ghost of the person in the grave is released. One assumes, then, that the elm tree that has just fallen was planted on Weer's grave -- which tells us too that this narration is likely decades if not more after Weer's death, which gives another spooky glow to the book.

So -- and this, I think, is all but inarguable, especially as Wolfe himself confirmed it -- Alden Dennis Weer -- called "Den" (as in "den of the wolf"?) -- tells the many stories in this intricate book after his death, as he wanders through the nearly endless sequence of rooms in his "house". His house, of course, is a sort of memory palace. It is also, a passage late in the novel suggests, co-extant with his skull -- and his skull may be in the hands of a far future archaeologist. I will say that on first reading I missed much about this novel, but I did realize that Weer must be dead. (However, I say "all but inarguable" because I have found people who disagree that Weer is dead.)

Weer tells us his life story, then, from the vantage point of his house -- but this house is as I said a sort of memory palace, containing a vast series of rooms based on rooms from his past -- rooms in his grandmother's house, his Aunt Olivia's house, his apartment later in life, his office at work, doctors' offices, and so on. His narrative moves back and forth through time. He tells us he has suffered a stroke, and indeed he visits, in his memory, a couple of doctors for advice.

His first visit to a doctor's office there are four other people in the waiting room -- all people we will meet again in this novel: Margaret Lorn, Ted Singer, Abel Green, and Sherry Gold. It being a waiting room, there are magazines (Life, Look, Today's Health, and Water World.) Weer says "There is (as a matter of fact) a whole pile of Lifes before me, and I play the old game of trying to arrange them chronologically without looking at the dates, and lose." On first reading that meant nothing to me but on rereading its significance is obvious -- and certainly (among other things) it reflects the structure of the novel. Note too what the Nurse says of the four people in the waiting room, all younger than Alden Weer, when Alden says he must see the doctor, as he is dying. "All these people are ahead of you." Are they -- and some of them are much younger than Den -- all going to die before he does?

Over the course of five long chapters, Alden Dennis Weer tells his life story -- or some of it. At first glance it appears a discursive account of the childhood -- and later adulthood -- of a man living in a small Midwestern town, in the early 20th Century, extending by the end of his life to about the time of writing of the novel. Alden grows up with his parents until about the age of 9, then with his Aunt Olivia, his parents having spent several years in Europe. He goes to college, and at some time gets a job in the orange juice factory founded by Olivia's husband -- and in time takes over management of the factory. We see details of small town life, of working in the factory, of a couple of Den's ultimately not terribly successful love affairs ... 

We also hear numerous stories. Stories told by Aunt Olivia, by her three suitors and by the fourth man (Julius Smart) who ends up marrying her. Fairy stories, particularly from Andrew Lang's Green Fairy Book, which Alden receives as a gift when a boy. Stories about books. Stories about carnivals. Stories about a mysterious Chinese egg. And lots of stories about death.

There are also a great many lacunae. Very few of the stories actually come to an end, certainly including stories Weer tells about himself. There is essentially no information about his life in the couple of decades after he leaves college. We hear nothing about his father. We don't learn why he never married Margaret Lorn, whom he was in love with in high school. We don't learn much about Aunt Olivia's death, except that she was run over by a car. We don't know why Alden's leg is injured. We don't know who some people who seem to be very important, such as Doris, actually are. 

The closer we look, however, we do see how many people close to Den have died. Bobby Black, who fell down the stairs at age 5 in an accident seemingly caused by Alden. Aunt Olivia. Lois Arbuthnot. A co-worker at the juice factory who was locked in a freezer. Doris. Mr. Tilly. Julius Smart. Alden's parents. And in the end, the question arises -- with how many of these deaths was Alden Dennis Weer directly involved?

Definitive answers are hard to come by. Weer was nowhere near Mr. Tilly nor Doris, for example, when they died. What evidence there is points to someone else causing Olivia's death. Alden was only 5 when Bobby Black was injured. But darkness pervades the book, and the Alden Dennis Weer who tells us the story does not seem a happy man, nor a happy ghost. 

Peace is a book that I will need to read again to make more progress comprehending what really happens. But every reading is a joy -- it is mysterious, fascinating, dark but beautiful, and very rereadable. The depths in this novel may be endless -- but they are fruitfully deep. It is a book with a very high reputation among Wolfe aficionados, but in many ways it is not a well-known novel, perhaps partly because of its ambiguous genre status. Most of Wolfe's novels are unambigously, indeed exuberantly, SF or Fantasy, but this novel can be read as general fiction, and even when it is read as a ghost story it does not otherwise (in any overt way) depart from mainstream traditions. It may still be a novel that needs to find its true audience. But it is a book that you ought to try.