Peace, by Gene Wolfe.
Trade paperback, 1995 edition

Columbus, OH
July 1998

Unforunately it is no longer clear to me how much Wolfe I had read at this point. The first book of his I saw was The Shadow of the Torturer, on the far wall of my junior high school library, near the window facing the inner courtyard no one could go into, or, truth be told, wanted to, given the amount of rain southwest Washington receives during the school year. I was put off by the cover and did not read it. This is just as well as it was certainly over my head then. The first Wolfe book I did read, Pandora by Holly Hollander, several years later, was somewhat disappointing: I had the feeling that something had happened in the background, and because I could not figure out what, the end of the story did not have any logic to me.

In the summer of 1998 I took a trip with Anthony and Elizabeth to a cornfield in Illinois somewhere near Peoria to attend the king of Christian music festivals, Cornerstone. Run by Jesus People USA, the folks at Cornerstone are some of the most enlightened, inquisitive, and passionate Christians I have ever met. I planned on joining their commune for a year, and after I graduated from college bicycled half way there before a bum knee and my thoughts of a woman in Portland turned back.

At the end of the festival Anthony drove me to Peoria to take the train to Chicago and on to D.C. to visit my uncle. On the way I planned to visit a high school friend, Celeste, in Columbus where she was studying clarinet performance. During the train ride to Chicago I saw wild geese in flight across a sky turned green by my yellow sunglasses; I saw a beautiful girl sleeping, curled up on the seats. Perhaps there, under these signs, my black discontent with the world was born: that sense that no two things have any right to share the universe.

But the girl and the train tride to Chicago reminded me of Holly Hollander and I conceived an oddly strong desire to be reminded of what was then happening to me by reading something by the same author. When I missed the bus from Columbus back to Cleveland (Amtrak, either as a function of the vastness of the States or a piteously low demand for passenger rail travel, does not run through many cities but contracts out to Greyhound and other bus companies to carry passengers between those cities and the ones that are on rail lines) I found myself with a whole day to kill and spent it in the library, reading Peace and then at least one volume of the Book of the New Sun.

Anyone who is familiar with Gene Wolfe will realize that even Peace takes more than a single afternoon to read, and I must admit that at the time I was a rather careless reader. I did not realize the most glaring fact, the one hidden most completely in full view; or much of anything else, so what stuck with me was the tone of the book, the language, and the sense of distance at the end, with the tale of the Sidhe, as if he had ended on a suspended chord.

It is these elements that have always attracted me to Wolfe, rather than the intricate puzzles that seem to enthrall his other devotees. Not that I do not appreciate them: with every detail Wolfe’s worlds hold together ever more tightly. But the more the world holds together, as I learned on the train, the more absurd and miraculous it becomes.