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A review by taitmckenzie
The Narrator by Michael Cisco
4.0
"The Narrator" belongs to the same genre of the New Weird as Vandermeer's "City of Saints and Madmen," Bishop's "The Etched City," and Harrison's "Viriconium" (although less the Vandermeer as that work does not have an extant war subplot). These works typically present solitary narrators wandering through psychogeographic, urban environments encountering, well, weird imagery, all of which I should like. However, the urban environments are always a little too normal feeling (they could be the dark corners of any real city), and the imagery is never quite weird enough for my tastes. And beyond this there is often an underdevelopment of theme, lack of plot, and flat characterization not driven by internal, emotional conflict—these later issues being what, I think, ultimately defines the works–both in why they feel weird, but also why they don't satisfy me as stories.
Cisco's book suffers from some of these same issues—the urban exploration at the beginning evokes a morbid atmosphere, but by no means a weird one. The novel eventually does break out some excellently strange images, but only in the last third to a quarter once the characters reach the 'interior.' But beyond the vague theme/plot of 'warfare is bad' there is no real cohesive plot movement or significance to the conflict. What are the two sides after? Who knows. Who cares? Likewise with the character of Low, who doesn't want to fight in a war and occasionally thinks of a girl he left behind but only barely knew—but there is no clear, personal or deeply felt connection between him as a character and these motivations, nor is this conflict resolved or not through a thematic connection.
What is left, then, is the weird imagery. In "The Narrator" this comes so late as to not quite justify the lead-up. The sinister and hallucinatory purpose of the cemetery in the interior is really quite unique, and excellently written, but it also raised a question for me: how do flat characters realistically react to weird imagery from within an already weird world that does not explicitly state what is or is not normal? Clearly Low and the other soldiers have strong reactions to what they—this is not the acceptance found in Magical Realism—but it's a lot harder to gauge if they should be reacting, and what impact that would have on us, the reader.
Comparing the New Weird to Magical Realism may actually help understand what Cisco is trying to do, as both genres attempt to use non-real imagery and incidents to grapple with the psychological impossibility of understanding the cultural impact of such social traumas as warfare or colonialism, etc. But where Magical Realism deliteralizes and attempts t explain these horrors by putting them on a continuum with the accepted magical, the New Weird achieves the opposite effect of making reality itself unreal in the face of the inexplicable. Or at least that is part of the effect achieved in "The Narrator" regardless what else it accomplishes as a story or as an example of its genre.
Cisco's book suffers from some of these same issues—the urban exploration at the beginning evokes a morbid atmosphere, but by no means a weird one. The novel eventually does break out some excellently strange images, but only in the last third to a quarter once the characters reach the 'interior.' But beyond the vague theme/plot of 'warfare is bad' there is no real cohesive plot movement or significance to the conflict. What are the two sides after? Who knows. Who cares? Likewise with the character of Low, who doesn't want to fight in a war and occasionally thinks of a girl he left behind but only barely knew—but there is no clear, personal or deeply felt connection between him as a character and these motivations, nor is this conflict resolved or not through a thematic connection.
What is left, then, is the weird imagery. In "The Narrator" this comes so late as to not quite justify the lead-up. The sinister and hallucinatory purpose of the cemetery in the interior is really quite unique, and excellently written, but it also raised a question for me: how do flat characters realistically react to weird imagery from within an already weird world that does not explicitly state what is or is not normal? Clearly Low and the other soldiers have strong reactions to what they—this is not the acceptance found in Magical Realism—but it's a lot harder to gauge if they should be reacting, and what impact that would have on us, the reader.
Comparing the New Weird to Magical Realism may actually help understand what Cisco is trying to do, as both genres attempt to use non-real imagery and incidents to grapple with the psychological impossibility of understanding the cultural impact of such social traumas as warfare or colonialism, etc. But where Magical Realism deliteralizes and attempts t explain these horrors by putting them on a continuum with the accepted magical, the New Weird achieves the opposite effect of making reality itself unreal in the face of the inexplicable. Or at least that is part of the effect achieved in "The Narrator" regardless what else it accomplishes as a story or as an example of its genre.