The Narrator, by Michael Cisco
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The Narrator, by Michael Cisco
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“Michael Cisco is of a different kind and league from almost anyone writing today, and The Narrator is Cisco at his startling best.” —CHINA MIEVILLE, author of Perdido Street Station “An extraordinary story of war and the supernatural that combines the creepiness of Alien with the clear-eyed gaze of Full Metal Jacket. Like The Other Side if it included soldiers who could glide over the water, a mysterious tower right out of early David Lynch, and infused with Kafka’s sense of the bizarre. Destined to be a classic.” —JEFF VANDERMEER, author of the Southern Reach trilogy “The Narrator is not a subversive fantasy novel. It eliminates all other fantasy novels and starts the genre anew. You must begin your journey here.” —NICK MAMATAS, author of Move Under Ground and Love is the Law
The Narrator, by Michael Cisco- Amazon Sales Rank: #633833 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-05-12
- Released on: 2015-05-12
- Format: Kindle eBook
About the Author Michael Cisco is the author of The Divinity Student (Buzzcity Press; International Horror Writers Guild Award for best first novel of 1999), The San Veneficio Canon (Prime Books, 2004), The Tyrant (Prime Books, 2004), a contributor to The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases (eds. Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts) and Album Zutique (ed. Jeff VanderMeer), and his work has appeared in Leviathan III and Leviathan IV (ed. Forrest Aguirre). His novel, The Traitor, is published by Prime (2007). Secret Hours, a collection of his Lovecraftian short stories, is published by Mythos Books (2007). In 2009-2010, his stories have appeared in the Phantom ("Mr. Wosslynne"), Black Wings ("Violence, Child of Trust"), Lovecraft Unbound ("Machines of Concrete Light and Dark), Cinnabar's Gnosis: A Tribute to Gustav Meyrink ("Modern Cities Exist Only to be Destroyed"), and Last Drink Bird Head anthologies. Forthcoming works include a story in The Master in the Cafe Morphine: A Tribute to Mikhail Bulgakov ("The Cadaver Is You"), an appearance in The Weird, an omnibus edition of published work from Centipede Press, and a new novel, The Wretch of the Sun, from Ex Occidente Press. His columns and the occasional review can be found at TheModernWord.com. He lives and teaches in New York City.
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful. Avant Army-Horror By Amazon Customer A man named Low is the narrator, and also The Narrator, of The Narrator. But it isn't quite that kind of twisty turny ho-ho I've got you now dumb reader! sort of book. Just as The Traitor was about the rise of the state, The Narrator is about how the state exists via ideo-linguistic concent. Narrators in Cisco's imaginary Europe--there's a da Vinci in this setting at least, along with magic and spirits--tell the stories the wealthy and powerful need everyone else to hear. Competition is pretty fierce actually, and our man Low is a polyglot of significant ability. He'd need to be as the world he navigates and narrates is awash in languages both written and spoken. Indeed, the wealthy often commission the creation of their own alphabets (not fonts, alphabets) from Narrators like Low.And poor Low has been drafted, and his conscription has been cemented by the supernatural gaze of an Edek, a blind remnant of once-great imperial power. Low is not happy. "An army is a horror," is how he decides to start his story, "It's a horrible thing. They say you might change your mind about that when the country is invaded and your people are suffering wrong, but for me this is all just more horror, more army-horror." Not a sentiment one often hears today, but then again today the narrators of contemporary wars don't really concentrate on conflicts between the armed forces of countries that have a rough military parity, do they?Low quickly falls in with a bunch of other people about as well-suited to engage in war as he is. There's Jil Punkinflake, a sort of priest of death and dying, who is actually jovial and fun, as his fantasy name suggests. In any other fantasy novel about war, he'd be the guy singing songs and falling headfirst into buckets for comic relief. There's also Makemin, the brave and resolute commander who definitely deserves a fragging. There's even a kick-butt fantasy heroine with a strong arm and a stronger will. Of course, she also spent a fair amount of time in the lunatic asylum, as one would.Low's forces are hoping that the spirits in a far-flung corner of the land will support their operational goals over those of their enemies. The Narrator and the narrator and Our Narrator run up against the central question of history--what the hell is actually going on, and why are people even bothering to risk their lives doing things like securing a harbor? One is reminded of the only funny thing ever to come out of the mouth of a Maoist: when Zhou Enlai was asked about the historical impact of the French Revolution of 1789, he responded, "It's too early to tell." Well poor Low is right up against it, and as the guy in charge of telling the story of the war he's in for his side without the benefit of hindsight, or any stake in the outcome of the war, or even safety, he's come up a bit short.There are many exciting battles and action scenes in The Narrator--the enemies are called blackbirds because they use lighter-than-air metal wristlets and anklets to fly for short distances. Low's squad is augmented by loonies from the mental hospital, and they're always fun, if unpredictable, in battle. Low is a medic and a translator, so spends a lot of his time observing the fight and then watching his friends die. Then he is given a magic charm that will allow him to lead his team more or less safely past the Lake of Broken Glass--a neverending windstorm of glass shards that swoops around every so often--and ruins proximity to which causes people to sicken and die (radiation?), to finally petition the gods for success. Too bad the whole point of having a narrator around is to have a story for posterity, so nobody really cares what Low thinks or says in the moment. There is even a traditional "meet the enemy and he is us" moment, when Low encounters the narrators from the other side of the war. They don't really know what the hell is going on either.The Narrator is about the dual frustrations of the intellectual in an era of endless conflict--they're smart enough to know what's not going on ("They hate our freedoms!"), but can't get anybody to believe it. There's also no lone intellectual smart enough to know what actually is going on, despite the tendency to speak definitively on historical subjects. Quick, why did the Soviet Union fall? Really? Is that all? Is that the only reason? The only five, the only ten? And anyway, Low isn't half as smart as he'd like to be, or as his troops hoped he would be.One might get the sense that Cisco is "subverting" fantasy tropes here, but of course these days apparently every fantasist in the world gets to make that claim if they do anything other than photocopy The Lord of the Rings and hand it in as their manuscript. But one might say that Cisco is a subverter along the lines of China Mieville rather than the my-elves-are-different crowd. So why is Cisco so obscure while Mieville is popular? Editorial pique, I suppose is most of it. The rest is probably a mix of personal charisma, Fortuna, and Cisco not whipping up enough monsters for the fanboys. Sad, that. If only Bruno Schulz had survived his war experience and launched a great fantasy trilogy, then Cisco would be richer than ten Bolivian Nazis! In another world, perhaps the world of The Narrator, this may have already happened.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Superb Prose By James Oliver Low Loom Column, formerly a student of the College of Narrators, stands gazing out over the city of Tref with the bitter memory of a bungled student exemption from the military conflicting with the draft ticket that lies in his pocket. There is no hope for him beyond fleeing home, back to the mountains, but even that is stripped from him. He is trapped, forced to fight a war he wants no part of, taking his place as the battalion's medic, interpreter, and, of course, the narrator, bound to record the war and repeat the events over and over again.["]An army is a horror. It's a horrible thing. They say you might change your mind about that when the country is invaded and your people are suffering wrong, but for me this is all just more horror, more army-horror.["]The Narrator revolves around war and the army-horror that pervades it. Those first lines give the clearest image of the novel's contents, a brief glimpse of what lies in store as the book progresses. The novel shows these horrors in vivid detail, gives us a first-hand glimpse of the lives that war destroys, how war can infect people like a disease, and the ways in which it might transform a person.But amidst the war, before and between the battles and the march, we are shown a fascinating world enveloped in the strange and wonderful. A world where cannibal queens hide way from eager followers, where corpses burrow from their coffins to join as a single, seething mass, where gravity-defying metals forged into bands and armor allow people to leap and skim across battlefields. Here, an asylum becomes an army, a massive ships sails the seas, destroying everything in its path, blue people and white people live beside humans, sleepwalkers bruise reality as they pass by, and languages can be learned by potion and make those who imbibe choke on words. It is a world that exists in a state both advanced and regressed, separate from our own, but possibly an alternate version. Ministerial Ghuards wear what resembles power armor, forged from that light, gravity-defying metal. Infantry wield small arms and fling grenades via sling. Oddly, transportation seems limited to horse, foot, or ship. Standing cities are rudimentary, stone and wood and down from there, but great metal and enamel cities like in rusting ruins. And somewhere in this world, amidst the technology and the magic, there is an artist named Vinci.["]It's through the rags of fast-moving smoke that I first catch sight of Tref. I'm standing in the pass, to one side of the pumice road, looking down from my perch on the massed roots of some dusty old cork oaks. The city below me is like a shining, smoking lake, thrusting its troubled glints into my eyes and making them smart. Overhead, the sun is lost in a white sky without circumference, above the flashing waters of the city.["]Cisco displays a great talent for description that pricks at the imagination and summons imagery that is, if not relatable, vivid and effective. The above quote is a good example and the first of these descriptions in the novel. The scene itself may not be recognizable, but anyone who has traveled on a hot summer day and seen the false pools of water shimmering on the highway in the distance should be able to relate.Cisco's descriptive quality is consistent, a standard that is never dropped and often amazing. He is able to paint a world that is beautiful and disturbing and ugly at the same time. The scene that best shows this involves the arrival of the Ministerial Ghuards, which begins in an almost glorious light--they are supposed to be looked upon in awe, the best units the Alak have to offer--and then the description continues, gradually devolving into a horrific display. They are revealed to be covered in their own excrement and surrounded by swarms of flies due to their refusal to divest themselves of their armor.How war transforms a person, what it does to change them, is a large part of the novel. Many of the characters, the ones that share part of the spotlight, at least, are changed by the end, be that the end of the novel or the end of their lives. The best example of this, and certainly the character most changed, is Jil Punkinflake, a student of the embalming college in Tref, who befriends Low and is eventually caught by and conscripted into the battalion. When introduced, Jil is happy, energetic, and friendly. He is a nice guy, taking in Low, feeding him and showing him around the city as our narrator waits for his marching orders. The war transforms him slowly, but surely until he is nothing like the Jil we met back at the beginning of the novel. One can almost tell exactly when he becomes infected by the war, when he turns from shaking coward to something more crazed and angry. His infatuation with Saskia, a fierce warrior woman freed from the asylum and conscripted, no doubt aids in the transformation. And by the end, he is little more than a cowed dog at Saskia's side, responding immediately her demands and occasionally pulling at the leash, his anger and jealousy painfully evident and damaging.The bulk of the story is a long, stuttered march that takes the battalion across land and sea. It pauses for battle, stalls in cities and towns to await further orders, and slogs on. The battles are reduced to Low's periods of consciousness, those moments when he is aware of his actions and surroundings, but they are confused, bloody, and quickly finished. There are no moments of glory in the narrator's eyes, just reckless, suicidal actions and more army-horror. The cities are given over to the bulk of the surreal moments, a short break that allows the book to abandon itself to the odd and fantastic. None of the occupations can match Tref for description or length of time occupied, which might explain why the city has a dreamlike quality to it that the subsequent occupations seem to lack. And, of course, the battalion slogs on toward death and madness and the horror of war in all its nightmarish glory.The Narrator is not an easy read. Pay it less attention than it deserves and you are bound to be tripped up, confused, and too lost to continue without going back. It is a rewarding challenge and well worth the effort. Cisco is a superb writer, able to spin a story that stimulates the imagination, snags the attention, and leaves the reader swimming in that amazing, unique prose of his. Highly recommended.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful. Unreadable By D. R. Martz This story is full of run-on sentences of the supposedly 'artful' form, along with cognitive dissonance both intended and inadvertent. Also lots of irritating contradictions (He left the room. I couldn't keep my eyes off him.). The story lacks a discernible plot and ends like there are five chapters missing. The author goes into great detail with non-interpretive description (colors, forms, metaphors, without telling the reader what the item is), and fails at a key trait of masterful story-telling -- providing a beautiful skeleton of description so the reader can imagine the rest. The work is probably 60% abstract description. The author relies upon magic in several places, but apparently forgot that the better fantasy books have magic that complies with rules and limits (a system). Magic that just pops up randomly is useless in terms of heightening tension or solving crises. There are lots of irrelevant digressions. The tale reads like random babbling, a chain of barely-related dreams, or a horrible experience had under the influence of drugs and poorly remembered. I finished this dreadful book only because I multi-tasked (treadmill and waiting for auto-repair), a method I usually reserve for long non-fiction.
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