(urth) PF review
David Duffy
David.Duffy at qimr.edu.au
Wed Dec 5 13:38:57 PST 2007
On Wed, 5 Dec 2007, Michael Straight wrote:
> Paul, that's a great review. Thanks for sharing.
>
> And yet one of the commenters at your website offers one of best
> perspectives for reading Wolfe that I have yet seen:
>
> "I suppose Wolfe makes of the reader a priest, and puts him on the
> receiving end in the confessional, and shows him at its most squirmy
> how tough it is to love (and forgive!) thy neighbor, harder far than
> loving God and yet its essential corollary. And thus we can safely
> assume that Wolfe shares our repugnance while simultaneously putting
> it aside in favor of compassion for his character, so essential to a
> believable ? let alone a soulful ? portrayal of him?"
>
Two things I thought about after reading this comment were: C. is
unrepentant, and comments that he cannot offer absolution to others who
are in that state (_Peace_ anyone?); the other is a la _the Power and the
Glory_ etc, that even a bad priest is still efficacious.
I'm not completely happy with the central event in the story, the
time-slips. We have no hints about its nature, whether supernatural or
technological. I have no problem with supernatural/fantastical
displacements providing they don't have disturbing effects on overall
causality ;) ie unhappy young man yearns to slip back in time to the
romantic age of pirates, mysteriously it happens, and today comes back to
tell his story and mourn his lost love. And I don't mind a _By his
Bootstraps_ or even a _New Sun_. But in the latter, I want some kind of a
rationale for my closed timelike curves eg meddling superintelligences ;)
David Duffy.
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