Surebleak
In which Korval acquires a new neighbour.
It’s an evocative name, “World’s End”. There’s the obvious sense in which the place is named, referring to a physical boundary, a place where the world comes to an end, but there are other things it could mean, such as a temporal boundary, a time when a world comes to an end. Sometimes a person’s world can come to an end even though the planet continues untouched. Yulie’s world might have ended when he lost the last of his kin. It might have ended today, if Boss Conrad had been someone other than the person he is.
(And isn’t it interesting how, when he’s talking to Yulie, he’s mostly Pat Rin but sometimes he’s Boss Conrad for a moment or two?)
It’s also interesting to speculate how things might have gone differently if Yulie’s brother hadn’t got himself killed before Boss Conrad showed up, and had been the one handling the negotiation for road access.
I was touched by Pat Rin’s sensitivity to Yulie’s mental/emotional state. He continued to be mostly Pat Rin because Pat Rin…an honest and open person…was able to reach Yulie while Boss Conrad would merely have made things worse.
As was I. It was well written, that whole scene.
A discrepancy in the address. I wonder how it happened. Yulie’s brother Rollie died a year ago and Audrey sent him a letter of explanation.
” Yulie’d been given a big fancy sealed brown envelope, with a return emblem at the top of “Miss Audrey’s Deluxe, Port City, Surebleak.” It wasn’t an address he recognized…”
Rereading this, I can see that someone who had *not* read it would not truly sense the extent of healing the Tree has done. We see that Yulie derives comfort from his feline companions, but that’s barely sufficient to allow him to function at all. But once he begins to eat seeds/fruit from the Tree, he begins to be freed from his debilitating fear and paranoia. Perhaps sometime we’ll learn exactly who he saw riddled with holes . . . or did the story try to indicate it might have been his mother?
Where’s the bit where he sees someone riddled with holes? I was going to have another look and see what I thought, but I can’t find it now.
Well, I paraphrased freely, but when he tried to read the report by the “block clean-up committee” about how they found Rollie’s body, the narrator describes his thoughts: He started to to look at the report, but it wasn’t something kin wanted to see, really, about how many cuts . . . knowing that he’d seen something like that once, entrance wounds and exit wounds—
Maybe he’s just thinking of the damage he himself did to the boys who’d been hunting his cats, but I wondered also whether his mom might have committed suicide.
Oh, I see it now. I missed the bit about “seen something like that once”.
I’m inclined toward it being a reference to the day the boys went after his cats. Accepting the Lance, as I read it, says that Yulie’s mother did commit suicide, but by poison not by shooting. (That’s in the chapter about halfway through where Memit tells Yulie she wants to stay on Surebleak and keep working on his farm. I’m reading a bit ahead of where the blog posts are at, and I got to that chapter yesterday.)