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jackieeh 's review for:
Nineteen Eighty-Three
by David Peace
I...don't really know what happened here. And I was paying a reasonable amount of attention. I'm beginning to suspect, however, that this is the way its supposed to be. The point of this series is not solving "the mystery" (there may even be less of a mystery than I thought--could it be that I was paying less attention all along than I thought I was? is this supposed to be what readers experience? is this why everyone has the same name? is this why everyone knows everything and nothing? gah!), the point of the series, as far as I can tell, is summed up in the epigraph (the first time I can recall Peace doing this, at least with real quotes) of the last part of this book: "Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." --Voltaire.
Does anyone amount to anything, at the end of the day, in this series? All the "good men" are dead by the end, and the series ends not so much because the story is over but because there is no one left to tell it. I wasn't convinced that Peace was doing anything particularly revolutionary with this series until I got to the end. He doesn't do anything really new with characters or pacing or perspective (interesting at best, erratic at worst) and the violence was excessive and the women were pathetic, but if I'm reading this right he gave a quartet an open ending, then that is brave. This thing has less hope that The Wire. I'm not sure if that's a good thing, but it's certainly new.
Does anyone amount to anything, at the end of the day, in this series? All the "good men" are dead by the end, and the series ends not so much because the story is over but because there is no one left to tell it. I wasn't convinced that Peace was doing anything particularly revolutionary with this series until I got to the end. He doesn't do anything really new with characters or pacing or perspective (interesting at best, erratic at worst) and the violence was excessive and the women were pathetic, but if I'm reading this right he gave a quartet an open ending, then that is brave. This thing has less hope that The Wire. I'm not sure if that's a good thing, but it's certainly new.