This means of plotting is an acquired taste, in part because it demands considerable effort to grasp its unity even as it fosters the suspicion that there may be no unity to grasp. Take Occupied City’s most arduous and conspicuously experimental section, where typography alone distinguishes three competing narrative voices: the point at which this offbeat polyphony becomes wearing will depend on your tolerance for the visual contrivance.
One good reason to tolerate it is that the novels Peace produces are uncommonly serious about the nature of the tissues that bind together history, rumor, politics, psychology, community and fiction. At their best, they develop a kind of literary forensics, exhuming histories of violence to probe the necrotized organs of the societies in which that violence erupts. The result is occasionally messy, the evidence often dubious, but Peace wields the scalpel like no one else.
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