Michael Cisco – An army is a horror: a festival of unrealities, and entrancing body of hallucinations mutilated with surgical precision

Michael Cisco, The Narrator, Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2010.


“THE NARRATOR—the new novel by Michael Cisco, author of The Traitor and The Divinity Student—is also his most sophisticated. Cisco’s prose, by turns phantasmagorical and exhilarating (reminiscent one moment of Robbe-Grillet, the next of Artaud, with a tinge of Thomas Ligotti, the imaginative virtuosity of Gene Wolfe or M. John Harrison), is like a stark sequence of strong iron bars, brimming with dark ambiance. Combining unmatched craft with masterful storytelling, this is literate fantasy unlike any other, intricate as the most elaborate dream, in which the narrator himself is the most ambiguous thing of all.”

“If William Burroughs was helping Cormac McCarthy rewrite Blood Meridian as dark fantasy, it might look something like this. The Narrator is wonderfully grotesque and slippery book, a meditation on the nature of violence chock-full of palpable, haunting and shocking strangeness.” — Brian Evenson

“Cisco wields words in sweeping, sensual waves, skillfully evoking multiple layers of image and metaphor… a gem of literate dark fantasy, concisely illustrating the power, both light and dark, of words and meaning." —Publisher’s Weekly

“A festival of unrealities, and entrancing body of hallucinations mutilated with surgical precision by a masterful literary maniac.” —Thomas Ligotti

"Michael Cisco’s meticulously imagined new-goth dreamtime is a somberly menacing thing conjured by Borges channeling Kafka channeling Browning that teaches us again and again just how continent the universe really can be. Duck and cover." — Lance Olsen

“Few writers within the realm of nonrealist or "weird" fiction has more right to feel unjustly neglected than Michael Cisco, who over the course of several novels, including his critically acclaimed debut, The Divinity Student, has forged a singular path in creating visionary, phantasmagorical settings, uniquely alienated characters/anti-heroes, and genuinely creepy happenings. Cisco is, at this point, sui generis, and brings a healthy absurdism and dark sense of humor to his fiction as well. Following on his incendiary and utterly stunning The Traitor, Cisco now offers up The Narrator, a novel that would have made my top 10 of the year if I had encountered it soon enough. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the novel has only been reviewed in a handful of places to date.
In the novel, the narrator Low is conscripted as a Narrator (a recorder of events) into an army to fight against the "blackbirds," who possess lighter-than-air armor. But first, our hero must play a waiting game in a city of cannibal queens and uncanny dead things, with priests for both the living and the dead, and the strange remnants of a mighty imperial power that must be avoided at all costs. Once mobilized, Low sets off on a journey that is by turns absurd, surreal, deadly, and one of the great feats of the imagination thus far in this new century - and one that includes scenes and moments I've never experienced in any other work of fiction.”
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“In Michael Cisco’s The Narrator, the narrator Low is conscripted into an army to fight against the “blackbirds,” who possess lighter-than-air armor. But first, our hero must play a waiting game in a city of cannibal queens and uncanny dead things, with priests for both the living and the dead. The Edak, strange remnants of a mighty imperial power, must be avoided at all costs. Once mobilized, he sets off on a journey that is by turns absurd, surreal, deadly, and one of the great feats of the imagination thus far in this new century. The novel is possibly also the most neglected of the year. Michael Cisco, the Amerikan Kafka, deserves your attention.
1—As a Series of Brilliant Scenes, Paragraphs, and Sentences.
I’ve rarely come across so many instances where I was simultaneously in the moment of the novel but also recognizing that I was encountering images, snippets, set-pieces unlike any I’d ever read before. Sleepwalkers that bruise the surface of reality as they glide past, assailants who skim the surface of the water in armor that’s lighter than air, conjurings with unexpected consequences, refugees from an insane asylum who assemble as soldiers. “It’s as if a giant were pushing us along the road, blithering to itself.”
2— As the Nightmare Answer to a Question From a Film. Bonant looms like a cliff out of the water, “projecting suddenly above them, too high to see. It’s like a black egg with an opening in the front—it sweeps toward them, as oblivious to them as a passing god, but the men are suddenly quailing and dizzy. They vomit, collapse clutching their chests and abdomens. Blood drips from their skin, smears their teeth as the gums burst, and they die under the influence of that black ship’s mere proximity.” …And inside, the answer to the riddle of a giant skeleton in the captain’s chair in A—-, “naked with long heavy white limbs. His massive body sits, like a sack of grain, on a marble cenotaph… bleached muscle, wanly shadowed with a lace of veins and arteries.” There are connections that make no sense at all and yet by dint of the power of the imagination and the communicative property of art…make sense. (G + A + MC = absurd heresy)
3—As an Extended Treatise on the Negation of Meaning that Is War. “An army is a horror. It’s a horrible thing.” There are many battle sequences in The Narrator, and they all translate as action without meaning, sometimes so chaotic that even individual action is hard to discern within the movements. As near as is possible in text, Cisco conveys the jerky, roving, incomprehensible experience of men on foot shooting at each other across broken, often hilly ground. The individual meaninglessness of it and the group rationalization of it. (Group rationalization undercut by the lack of an Order from On High later in the novel, which would’ve driven the point home better.) The result is to come close to conveying the derangement required to wage war… while simultaneously demonstrating that the more a writer repeats battle scenes, the more the result becomes boredom and skipping of pages. That the more you invest in too many similar scenes, the more the meaninglessness recedes and the more purposelessness closes in on the reader, until what was pointed before seems like kids playing with rifles in the backyard. To retreat from purposelessness would mean to advance toward tighter editing. But where to cut?
4—As a Series of Experiments in Narration, Eel-Slippery. The narrator of The Narrator may not be the narrator of the entire novel. Where does his narration really begin and end? What to make of the asides between chapters? Of meeting another narrator, who in a sense begins to narrate the tale in a different way. What of the accounts of others, which the narrator narrates by adding notes like “an unhurried, slow inhalation” and “Her voice dropped there.” And “She caressed the air by her knees with stiff old hands, seeming to coax the guillotine blade out of the sparkling air so that I for a moment saw it.” Should we be worried? Should we care?
5—As the Most Surreal Science Fiction Novel Ever. A place that alters all who enter it. Flying things that seem intelligent. A cathedral like a science lab or…something else? The drone of a tower, that can kill. “Those aren’t people. Their guns aren’t guns.”
6—As the Tale of the Ride of the Valkyries, Through the Exploits of Saskia. “Here comes from somewhere behind the asylum, a woman all in armor. She has a short sword with a basket hilt on her right side and a flapped holster on her left hip… A pleasing, and weirdly familiar face. I could say she looks like da Vinci’s ‘Lady with Ermine’ if there had ever been such a thing. Strange thing to think.” If there’s a hero of The Narrator, it is this battle-tested woman who joins the narrator’s army and never falters in her bravery under fire. She’s a deliberate counterpoint to the senselessness of war—an entity with a tactical purpose who brings order by simple focus. “From the window I see Saskia herself darting across the water. The [soldiers] are shooting at her. She zig-zags with astounding speed and in the next moment is right alongside them. She whirls around toward the rear of the boat, gesticulating wildly, then suddenly hurtles back toward us in fantastic back-and-forth curves, her legs pumping.” Saskia is perhaps the only character who remains consistent from beginning to end, and in a sense she gains her own agency as narrator because of it.
7—As an Extended Dream From Which You Will Not Awaken. “In the distance, a white something bobs in the water asleep. It slobbers and mutters… Its slobberings wriggle through the water like black eels. In a vision no one present can see, the ocean turns to fluid mirror, like mirage, where it crashes over the white figure, the mirror froth rolls away across the surface of the water like mercury and Low’s outstretched hand draws the black saliva from the glistening antiseptic mouth of the sleeper to form elegant, calligraphic loops and ornate signatures of unreal sharpness on the reflecting surface. A down of phosphorescent ash spins from them as they move, forming glowing coils that sink into the black below the silver, whirring and snapping like whips. They seem to drag Low’s arm to and fro. Who is narrating this?”
Saskia. Makemin. Low. Nardac. Punkinflake. Thrushchurl. You’ll remember all of them. By the end, the book will be buried in your skull.” - Jeff VanderMeer

“I feel as though I am going towards war, that towers vastly above around and behind its pawns, the enemy soldiers and us. War fashioned the interior. The war story is waiting to be lived again and to make all of us its own characters. We will step into our places while the overture plays a melody of themes that will play out in full and in order later on. It’s magic, because I do what I don’t want to do, and there’s no power that I can feel being brought to bear on me. If a hand had me by the collar, and I were being dragged away, I could struggle. If Makemin or Saskia would only point to me, order the others to catch or kill me, or even only threaten me, I could run. But there is no power here to resist. I simply go along. Hating, and rebelling at heart. Something like the sweeping power of the tides sets everything all too smoothly in motion. I feel war’s unreal presence, like blank mindless insanity shining happily from these rocks, watching us bring ourselves to it, for its delectation. We’re going to kill and die at war’s fiat in this beautiful place, nothing more.
What can I say about Michael Cisco that I have not said before? He remains one of our best and also one of our most underappreciated, and with his newest work, The Narrator, he once again proves how vital his work is. It reads like an ode to the absurdity of war, Low, a studying Narrator at school is drafted into the army despite the relevant excusatory paperwork in a episode of bureaucratic ineptitude worthy of a Kafka novel. Narrators seem to exist to maintain the narratives of people and events, and Low is often referred to as being the one who will tell the story of the war after it is all over. As a result, he has no skill in battle and instead is forced to act as a medic and a translator. He has no intention of serving, but having been “seen” by an Edek, a sort of supernatural blind woman who will know if he deserts, he has no choice but to join up and is unable to flee throughout the novel. He becomes a sort of living casualty of the war, dragged along in its wake while forced to watch his companies become infected by it and die, until he is the only one left.
The war in question seems, at least to this reader, to be completely pointless. The commanding officer, Makemin, seems to flit between an obsessive and overwhelming desire for victory and throwing himself into the proceedings of his divorce that is taking place far away back home. Saskia’s fury is fuelled by desire for revenge, but her recklessness often places her in almost suicidal situations, calling into question her sanity. His only real friend, the mortuary student he meets in the town of Trey, Jil Punkinflake, loses all sense of his mischievous former character, and by the end of the novel has almost become a kind of submissive animal. In fact, due to the low number of people who actually showed up, the group is forced to augment itself with lunatics from an abandoned asylum, making the whole situation only more absurd. All we are told about the war is that it is an attempt to weaken a competing power by destroying one of their allies, but no one seems to know what the war is really about. Those who care about the result like Makemin only seem to want victory for the sake of victory, unaware of what they will actually gain by it. Low, like the reader, seems equally confused by the whole thing and becomes increasingly more important to the war effort despite his best efforts to avoid getting involved. Despite this, he remains powerless and unable to change anything.
The novel evokes the same kind of dreamlike atmosphere of Cisco’s other work, some of the finest scenes seeming almost unreal, such as when the students go grave robbing and find all the corpses have burrowed out of their coffins and joined into a homogeneous mass. His work is so stunningly original, there is nothing else like it out there and this is only reinforced by The Narrator, with ideas like the cannibal queen, the flying anti-gravity bracelet wearing blackbirds, and the final scenes inside the inland’s interior. Branching out from his usual protagonist heavy focus to incorporate more of an ensemble cast also allows Cisco to do more with characterization than in his previous novels, and is very welcome because he creates such interesting characters. The spirit eaters from his previous novel, The Traitor, also make an appearance, alongside his equally unique new concepts. It also goes without saying that his stylization is first rate and his prose is some of best in the business.
The Narrator is a powerful book, but more importantly it is vital. It speaks to the reader about war in the way that the great anti-war novels do, like Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, about both the horror and the absurdity of war. War is the antithesis of all human logic and the ultimate form of nihilism, it creates nothing. In its futility it is so absurd that it is almost comical, something that Celiné understood, and at times Cisco captures perfectly; war is pathetic. From the start Low knows that nothing good will come of the war and he is only proven right. It might be his best novel yet. My favourite novel of the year, if you only buy one book that I recommend for 2010, buy this one.” - Paul Charles Smith

“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.” - Millhouse van Houten

“The Narrator is an illumination of the power of story upon the history of men.
Michael Cisco is one of the best-kept secrets in fantasy and horror. His work is brilliant, evocative and unforgettable. Yet, he’s almost unknown outside of certain circles involving certain handshakes and certain badges and certain secret locations that may or may not include either Thomas Ligotti’s secret bunker on the Isle of Man, or the attic room of H. P. Lovecraft’s house in Providence.
Joining into this secret cabal is quite simple. Purchase one of the brilliant, mind-bending works of surrealist dark fantasy and read it. Do this again, if you have the courage for it.
Case in point: The Narrator, published in black ink upon white paper by Civil Coping Mechanism, an Independent Press, adumbrates and illuminates the power of story upon the history of men. The narrator is, literally, a Narrator, at a Narrator’s College, where he is training to be a Narrator. In this reality, reminiscent of China Mieville’s New Weird Crobuzon except older and far stranger, Narration is important in the flow of everyday life. Picking up the tone and color of everyday reality and reshaping it through the judicious application of Narration preserves the fabric of power structures that keep the world in control.
Unsurprising something happens to throw the whole arrangement akimbo: the Narrator is drafted to fight in a war. The war, being a semi-rational horror, and guided by semi-rational officers drafts, the narrator will now be a Narrator for the war.
What do Narrator’s do, exactly? Flashes and asides reveal the mangled ravings, journalings and dreamings of their work, wherein reality seems to be shaped and reshaped, but whether real comes before the imagery or the imagery before the real is open for discussion in the dense, rewarding text. Early in the novel, the Narrator searches for his assigned unit and further orders in a city that is alien to him, and us. Two religions exist simultaneously, one of life and one of death. The death religion takes center stage, while the Ekhets of the life religion seem to force death upon the world with their knowing gaze.
The novel is perhaps best understood by the cannibal queen. She lives in hiding, away from the crowds, in decadence. She sees the Narrator and invites him to her solitude to alleviate her sorrow with love. She had devoured her husband. At first, this pariah seems to be outcast. Not so; she is embraced by the death cult. She runs and hides not from shame, but from the reverence of the crowd, who would worship her. This early revelation adumbrates the horrors to come. What is an abomination on par with cannibalism more than warfare? It is celebrated by society like the cannibal queen’s horrific act.
I reveal too much. There are wonders to discover more than this. Unforgettable imagery illuminates the manuscript without a single illustration. The festival of the dead, like a grotesque chaos of the battlefields to come, foreshadows with wonder what will later appear in terror. Embalmers’ celebrate their death faith by sewing the dead limbs upon their own bodies, lips upon lips, limbs upon limbs and dance maudlin through the streets. War is at once archaic in it’s musket tactics, like something from a Russian novel, yet more so with the floating irons of the enemies, the mecha-like war machinery of the allies, and the gorgeous fabulism of the world the army crosses in their march of death and dismemberment.
War, destroyer of narrations, brutishly marches onward with a beauty of language that could also undermine the horror of the experiences present, to readers who seek the stark brutality of crime or war literature. But, this is dark fantasy — dark fabulism. If anything, the weakest section of the text — the battle scenes — are weakest not because they aren’t enjoyable, but because they are described too beautifully. The bodies of the dead enemy hovering over the ground with their flying irons, the dismembering brutality of the war machines, the ancient horrors and religious rites, the wounds of the dead and the screams of the dying — all described with a grace that risks alienation from the text. The horrors presented are not given room to be horrible, but are too strange to be truly and genuinely beautiful as a whole. To me and my enjoyment of the text, it creates the quintessential “Grotesque” experience, like staring into the nightmares of Heironomous Bosch while drinking too much absinthe with Jan Svankmeyer and Franz Kafka.
If anything I have said in my description moves you, do consider joining the cabal of afficianados. We are surprisingly few, but always growing, as we are — all of us — evangelists. Prepared to draft any we meet into the text.” - J.M. McDermott


“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.
It's through 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 make them smart. Overhead, the sun is lost in a white sky without circumference, above the flashing waters of the city. (p. 5)
For the past ten years or so, Michael Cisco has been one of "those" authors, writers whose talents are recognized by those in the know, but who have never enjoyed a mass readership. His most recent novel, The Narrator, is perhaps simultaneously his most "accessible" (if such an execrable adjective might be employed here) and his most accomplished and sophisticated work to date. Cisco is a master stylist, who creates dark, twisted, imaginative vistas from the juxtaposition of adjectives. Take for instance the opening paragraphs quoted above. We learn that the narrator, whose name incidentally is Low, is narrating a war. However, we quickly move away from the clichéd "war is hell/horror" motif and into a setting that is strange, full of "fast-moving smoke," with a city being akin to a "shining, smoking lake" while the sky is white. Wherever this setting might be, we're no longer in Kansas, Toto.
Cisco's stories tend to be quite atmospheric, going beyond lush, descriptive landscapes. People too make up an environment and in one early scene, he foreshadows certain thematic (and plot) elements by his portrayal of two segregated and yet complementary religious orders:
A carefully ramified division of labor regulates the operation of the life and death priests. Life priests, urbane, serene, dressed in satiny white and cream gowns, preside at weddings, tend the sick and perform healings when they can; death priests, subdolous and mordant, dressed in shabby subfusc, officiate at funerals, conduct autopsies and embalm bodies, attend to the dying and insane, and cast our even imbibe possessing demons. Life priests are permitted and encouraged to marry; death priests, while not enjoined to celibacy, are forbidden to marry or to bear children... There is no enmity between these two groups of priests, although they are compelled to avoid each other as a rule in order to maintain a pure distinction. When they do meet, a complicated protocol governs the exchange of formalities. In fact, since no one is ever born in the death precincts, all death priests are delivered into this life by life priests of the previous generation. Naturally, all life priests are ushered into whatever dream comes after by the generation of death priests who will bury them in the death district. (pp. 13-14)
In his previous works, Cisco tended to rely more on elements such as this to create the "weirdness" that served as a thematic staple in his stories. Here in The Narrator, at 307 pages his longest work to date, he goes further. Through the character of the Narrator Low, he explores not just the weirdness of the locale and the strangeness (and hell) of war, but the very semantics that underlie our conceptualizations of the world and the medium of language used to express it. Several authors utilize the "unreliable narrator" trope to underscore the hidden undercurrents of the narrative, but Cisco is one of the few authors I have encountered who have attempted to undermine the very narrative structure itself through the creation of a character whose purpose is to tell and retell events until the events are forgotten and what is left becomes Story.
As someone whose original field of study was cultural history, I quickly became intrigued by Cisco's plumbing of the semantic depths that bind together the two main strands of historia, History and Story alike. At first, the war Story took some getting used to; frequently, events felt disjointed and out of sequence. Then a little over halfway into the novel, things become crystallized in an encounter between Low and another narrator:
Makemin is a good narrator. He has his own story, a revenge story, and its power has revived in the men the will to fight. He will get his way. They will fight. They believe him. I failed. I failed as a narrator, because I didn't tell them that I had had to get my pack from where it fell and was tangled in the bracken by the path, and that Makemin was wrong to believe himself alone in the moments after he struck me. (p. 195)
From this point, The Narrator begins to come into its own as a narrative about narratives and the weird interstices that underlie memory, communication, and the symbols embedded in the actions of which we partake and the words we speak. What becomes apparent by the novel's end is not the paramount value of "Truth," but that "truths" can emerge that have little in common with the events that engendered them. I hesitate to say this is the "point" of the story, as I believe Cisco is exploring (and deconstructing) several other points in addition to this one, but certainly this is a key element that I took from The Narrator.
The Narrator is Cisco's most engaging work, as the reader has the trappings of a war/army narrative to grasp as an entry portal. Prior knowledge of his earlier writings is not necessary, although there are a few glimpses here and there that hint at some deeper connection with his earlier tales, although these never intrude upon the narrative core. As stated above, Cisco's descriptive, evocative prose signals the alienation felt by the characters and it is this sense of estrangement that makes this novel a captivating read even for those readers who are not fain to read such narratives. Highly recommended.” - Larry Nolen

“A few years ago I talked about The Traitor by Michael Cisco and some of you even ran out to buy that wonderful short novel. Well, I'm back to tell you about Cisco's follow-up The Narrator, in the hope of getting the same result.
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.” - Nick Mamatas

“Michael Cisco, whose book The Traitor I reviewed here, has another book out! I'm reading it -- slowly, as the time mid-semester is precious and split between editing and everything else I want to do, but I just have to talk about The Narrator.
Short version: please go and buy it. Cisco is one of those writers (lamentably few) who write genuinely unusual things. It's a shame he's not more widely read (although I suspect that many of the folks who insist they want new and unusual really don't), and something that needs to be fixed. So read the book, you won't regret it.
It's a little less aggressively strange than The Traitor, but it drips with the same vivid and visual malaise -- white skies, sick trees, vividly drawn snatches of the landscape otherwise drowned in radiance or fog. The language is half-delirious, and the beginning of the book evokes both Notes From Underground and Felix Krull. Low, the protagonist and a student in the college that prepares Narrators (people who recite events until only words encountering them remain, replacing the actual memory of the event), is not supposed to be drafted -- but he is, due to bureaucratic indifference and incompetence of the college administrators. His panicked efforts to avoid draft reminded me of the desperation with which my high school classmates applied to colleges -- the student status granted the draft deferral, and those who were not lucky enough to get in often faked a variety of psychiatric ailments. Low's efforts brought forth this visceral memory in me, all those boys who didn't want to go to the army because they knew it will forever change them; possibly into people they wouldn't like.
Another piercing recognition came when Low describes the separation of priesthood into white and black -- an Orthodox Christian tradition, where only black priesthood (monks) are allowed to rise to the top of the hierarchy, while the white priesthood (parish priests) are usually married and childed. Cisco takes this separation to the next logical extreme, and Life and Death churches are born, even though the similarity with Orthodox Christianity are quite clear.
Then there's the war itself -- Low as the narrator is supposed to document the story, but he has as much trouble as anyone else guessing the point of it all. The looming unease and the whispered uncertainty of it again reminded me of fear of my classmates of being sent to Afghanistan -- that hushed and unknown conflict fought for no discernible reason. It is always tempting to load the story with perceived meanings of the moment and attribute them to writerly intent -- and frankly, many writers aren't clever enough to hide their intent. Not so in this case, where the intent becomes irrelevant since instead we can have meaning.
And this is really something I love about Cisco's writing -- in all the strangeness, there are always these moments of acute, almost painful recognition and identification. I don't know if yours will be the same as mine, but I'm sure you'll find a few there -- be those in the dreamlike wanderings across strange cities and battles, in the unusual crew Low joins, in the palpable terror of the mysterious Edeks. Cisco writes like no one else, and this book is unlike any other, although filled with echoes of things one remembers and Cisco somehow knows.” - Ekaterina Sedia


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