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A review by mamimitanaka
The Narrator by Michael Cisco
5.0
A fucking trip from cover to cover. Maybe not as huge a favorite for me as "Animal Money" is, but this is undoubtedly the tighter narrative [har har], and as far as sheer enjoyment goes it's only barely slacking behind the aforementioned novel. This is possibly Cisco at his absolute best when it comes to the sensorium overload he loves equipping his works with - like "Animal Money", so much working beautifully and almost overwhelmingly on a page-by-page basis, this time in service of a much shorter story but one just as dense and rich with imagistic and thematic meat to chew on. The kind of work that demands you to slow down, absorb every sentence thoroughly and get these absolutely brilliant, unique, and totally insane images engraved into your frontal cortex. And the phantasmagoria here is upheld with a backbone just begging to be used more for weird fiction, and after reading this any more would be a tough act to follow - War, because after all what is stranger than mass murder systemized to power incomprehensible hegemonies?
Reading this [along with two of Amos Tutuola's wonderful little novellas back in July] has increasingly made me feel more aware of the umbrage I take with a lot of contemporary worldbuilding, or at least the way many contemporary authors of fantastic fiction utilize worldbuilding as a technique. Far too much over explaining, hyperspecific detail that gets bogged down in the narrative when the time comes to actually tell the story, far too little space to allow both the reader and the author to let their imagination fill in the blanks. This is exactly what Cisco does the opposite of here, and one of the major things that draws me to his work. This isn't worldbuilding, it's more like world painting - Cisco seems to let the world expand out instead of drawing it inwards. Very little is explained, and explanations are kept to the minimum when they exist - the world overflows with detail but it is all natural, nothing is lingered upon, Cisco trusts the reader to simply experience it and draw their own conclusions. Fantasy, which is fantastic, benefits from a lack of handholding, because when we don't have a frame of reference our imaginations run as wild as intended to be for a book like this.
And boy oh boy is there really a lack of frame of reference here, in terms of just how original and how vivid this world is. The settings and landscapes Low and his party travel through are among some of the most alien I've ever encountered in speculative fiction, and the world is so dissimilar to ours in just about everything - human customs, flora and fauna [which all seem to have a direct sensory impact on our human characters], architecture and nature - everything is just so genuinely extraterrestrial and genuinely surreal, and it paints such a vivid picture. There are times when what Cisco is describing is so genuinely foreign that it's nearly impossible to imagine, and I had to scan sentences slowly and continuously to really let it all sink in. This is the kind of surrealism that the early surrealists would be proud of - organic, absolutely painterly prose, crafting something beyond the bounds of traditional human imagination.
The story is also extremely gripping as a narrative and metatext, not only in its progression but how every question it asks [or leaves out] is in service to the greater picture coalescing here. Our plot concerns Low Loom Column [great name], a youth who serves as a "narrator" who is ensigned into the military to serve an oblique war. There's no real explanation for what exactly a "narrator" entails, or why Low is enscripted, nor if Low is even really narrating the story. I won't go too deep into this, because others have said it better than I could, but a big core of this book is asking who actually quite literally controls the narrative when it comes to war, which is in reality a completely arbitrary and meaningless thing, a systemized bloodshed enabled by the powerful against the weak. The repetition of brutal battle scenes and arduous journeys through these nightmarish landscapes, as well as the lack of clarity on any, is why this works - how can one ever really know War? Is there anything more absurd, strange, and terrifying than the fact that our governments can wipe us all out for power, and ensign us into going toward our own destruction? This book portrays war as an actual nightmare, infusing the entire concept with hallucinatory dream-logic, in maybe the most unique take on this type of story I've read yet. And throughout, I felt a genuine kinship with the characters as they trudge toward doom - feeling like a part of their unit, putting myself in the shoes of Low and Jil etc., feeling as overwhelmed and terrified as they are in their spellbinding journey.
I want to say more here but this story is so imagistic, so contained within the experience one has with it, that I don't want to risk spoiling anything even intermittently. But as if I didn't have enough proof already Cisco just continues to absolutely kill it and solidify himself as one of the most inventive sci-fantasy authors working today, and maybe period, and I'm never going to stop shilling him until he's at least tangentially less underrated than he is now. If the idea of "sci-fi Apocalypse Now/Blood Meridian on peyote and a steady dose of Dali" appeals to you then this is something you definitely want to read. 450 some odd pages, and I could have stayed here for twice the length.
"A dream pulling up alongside another dream, each measures the other. The war is up there on the island, where we're going to meet it, but there's no war there, nor could there be. War is dreamlike, but war is a dream ... Where is the war? In the guns and helmets and uniforms? Is it in the rock from which the ore to make the gun was mined, the grass that fed the sheep whose wool went into the uniform, or the sun that lights the battlefield? Not impossible to escape but it tethers as unsubstantially, as lightly, as a dream, the bonds binding me inside. I go on with it; I'm not bound like a prisoner, but like a sleeper. Two men meet, and one will give his life for the other, or they will each try to kill the other, while the day is still blandly unfolding around them. The violence I've already seen has been as random and abrupt as a dream, always ending in death that seems only to become more and more impossible. I always know that I'm no more than one sharp breath from waking. It's a breath I can never manage."
Reading this [along with two of Amos Tutuola's wonderful little novellas back in July] has increasingly made me feel more aware of the umbrage I take with a lot of contemporary worldbuilding, or at least the way many contemporary authors of fantastic fiction utilize worldbuilding as a technique. Far too much over explaining, hyperspecific detail that gets bogged down in the narrative when the time comes to actually tell the story, far too little space to allow both the reader and the author to let their imagination fill in the blanks. This is exactly what Cisco does the opposite of here, and one of the major things that draws me to his work. This isn't worldbuilding, it's more like world painting - Cisco seems to let the world expand out instead of drawing it inwards. Very little is explained, and explanations are kept to the minimum when they exist - the world overflows with detail but it is all natural, nothing is lingered upon, Cisco trusts the reader to simply experience it and draw their own conclusions. Fantasy, which is fantastic, benefits from a lack of handholding, because when we don't have a frame of reference our imaginations run as wild as intended to be for a book like this.
And boy oh boy is there really a lack of frame of reference here, in terms of just how original and how vivid this world is. The settings and landscapes Low and his party travel through are among some of the most alien I've ever encountered in speculative fiction, and the world is so dissimilar to ours in just about everything - human customs, flora and fauna [which all seem to have a direct sensory impact on our human characters], architecture and nature - everything is just so genuinely extraterrestrial and genuinely surreal, and it paints such a vivid picture. There are times when what Cisco is describing is so genuinely foreign that it's nearly impossible to imagine, and I had to scan sentences slowly and continuously to really let it all sink in. This is the kind of surrealism that the early surrealists would be proud of - organic, absolutely painterly prose, crafting something beyond the bounds of traditional human imagination.
The story is also extremely gripping as a narrative and metatext, not only in its progression but how every question it asks [or leaves out] is in service to the greater picture coalescing here. Our plot concerns Low Loom Column [great name], a youth who serves as a "narrator" who is ensigned into the military to serve an oblique war. There's no real explanation for what exactly a "narrator" entails, or why Low is enscripted, nor if Low is even really narrating the story. I won't go too deep into this, because others have said it better than I could, but a big core of this book is asking who actually quite literally controls the narrative when it comes to war, which is in reality a completely arbitrary and meaningless thing, a systemized bloodshed enabled by the powerful against the weak. The repetition of brutal battle scenes and arduous journeys through these nightmarish landscapes, as well as the lack of clarity on any, is why this works - how can one ever really know War? Is there anything more absurd, strange, and terrifying than the fact that our governments can wipe us all out for power, and ensign us into going toward our own destruction? This book portrays war as an actual nightmare, infusing the entire concept with hallucinatory dream-logic, in maybe the most unique take on this type of story I've read yet. And throughout, I felt a genuine kinship with the characters as they trudge toward doom - feeling like a part of their unit, putting myself in the shoes of Low and Jil etc., feeling as overwhelmed and terrified as they are in their spellbinding journey.
I want to say more here but this story is so imagistic, so contained within the experience one has with it, that I don't want to risk spoiling anything even intermittently. But as if I didn't have enough proof already Cisco just continues to absolutely kill it and solidify himself as one of the most inventive sci-fantasy authors working today, and maybe period, and I'm never going to stop shilling him until he's at least tangentially less underrated than he is now. If the idea of "sci-fi Apocalypse Now/Blood Meridian on peyote and a steady dose of Dali" appeals to you then this is something you definitely want to read. 450 some odd pages, and I could have stayed here for twice the length.
"A dream pulling up alongside another dream, each measures the other. The war is up there on the island, where we're going to meet it, but there's no war there, nor could there be. War is dreamlike, but war is a dream ... Where is the war? In the guns and helmets and uniforms? Is it in the rock from which the ore to make the gun was mined, the grass that fed the sheep whose wool went into the uniform, or the sun that lights the battlefield? Not impossible to escape but it tethers as unsubstantially, as lightly, as a dream, the bonds binding me inside. I go on with it; I'm not bound like a prisoner, but like a sleeper. Two men meet, and one will give his life for the other, or they will each try to kill the other, while the day is still blandly unfolding around them. The violence I've already seen has been as random and abrupt as a dream, always ending in death that seems only to become more and more impossible. I always know that I'm no more than one sharp breath from waking. It's a breath I can never manage."