PC Reading List

Ah, Palicrovol, will you not learn that mercy is as good as the person to whom the mercy is given? You spared Asineth, who should have died; now you will not spare Orem Scanthips, called Banningside, whose good heart should be born a hundred thousand times upon the earth. Are you like Asineth? Will you learn all your lessons backward?

  The problem that these addresses create is that it is hard to tell, throughout most of the book, who is actually making these addresses.  Who is telling us the story?  While it is not too difficult to hazard a guess (there are clues early on), there is enough about these addresses that are accusing that it becomes a little distracting.  To make matters more difficult,  there are often mentioned, in these addresses, events to which we are not yet privy.  That is a nice sort of foreshadowing, on the one hand, but it can begin to wear the reader down just a little.  And of course, about halfway through the novel we realize that our narrator is not even telling us events witnessed first hand, at least for much of the time.  Rather, many of the events are being retold by the narrator, relating tales told by Orem.   The question of the reliability of the narrator, then, has to be gnawing at the back of the reader's brain.

What these addresses do manage to do is to show us, all along, that the character we are made to sympathize with, Orem, is going to be in imminent danger when we reach the end of the narrative.  That is actually a very nice effect.  What is more troubling, though, is that the danger (and, to a lesser degree, the build up of tension) is never quite resolved.   We are left with a big question mark at the end.  That doesn't bother me too much, really.  In fact, I kind of like the lack of clear answer that we have, because it perhaps warns us that we've been looking at the wrong question.  What I like less, though, is the feeling at the end of the book that we've also been watching the wrong career, and that Palicrovol is the one we should have cared about (even though the narrative doesn't allow us to, really).  That part is rather troubling, and the lack of resolution in the only life story that we can really care about in the book leaves me a little frustrated.

In fact, it makes me feel rather depressed, and that the book ends on a pessimistic note.  That is sad, in one sense, because there is a potentially beautiful and profound message to the lack of resolution.  However, it misses the mark, for me, not because of the ambiguity, but because of the complete lack of empathy I feel for the character who the story has, at the end of the day, "been all about."

On the other hand, if one is to take the ending to mean that we are all, in one sense, Palicrovol, reading the Orem story with some hope that we will begin to sympathize with him, then the book seems to work very well.  One way or another, Orem is the character to sympathize with, and finding out at the end that he is simply a footnote in Palicrovol's story leaves me a little unsatisfied.