don wrote: ↑Tue May 14, 2019 7:46 pm
Penseroso wrote: ↑Tue May 14, 2019 7:14 pm
Finished The Narrator by Michael Cisco. Some of the strangest prose I've ever read couched in crazy metafictional ideas about war and the telling of war. This dude is one to keep your eye on for.
That sounds really cool. Could you say some more about it?
The setting is surreal fantasy world that's difficult to find a comparison to, think Planescape Torment meets Warhammer but less gay. The protag is a "Narrator", which I think is someone that uses some kind of language magic that is ostensibly the metafictional aspect of the book (it's left murky, intentionally I believe). It would've been easy for this to devolve into fourth-wall breaking "whoa look I'm a character in a book ain't I self aware" but it works completely in the book's setting. The protag is drafted into a war he doesn't know much about and falls in love with a cannibalistic widow. Most of the book is intentionally confusing episodes that take place in the war interspersed with passages that meditate on the nature of how one understands war.
On the surface level the book is a really fun military SF story. Cisco has the chops to write entertaining fiction but he still pumps it full of "literary" ideas. A lesser author would be hailed as having "unique and vivid worldbuilding" if they employed Cisco's ideas purely for fun alone. Here's a couple of snippets to show off his style:
The armor worn by these Ghuards is worth describing in some detail. It is all or nearly all made of a special paper-light metal, the same kind Wacagan use for their legbands. It’s an uncanny experience seeing the Ghuards in their armor—you begin to wonder if you’ve gone deaf, because, massive as it is, the armor makes almost no noise at all. No thundering footsteps, no clattering. Huge forms sail by you as quiet and easy moving as balloons. The helmets are traditionally moulded to resemble the heads of berserk jackasses, with ears three feet long bolt upright on top them. The eyes are great blind concavities with a slit for each of the occupant’s eyes recessed at their innermost edges, flanking the false-perspective nose ridge—actually a flat trench, not encroaching on the Ghuard’s field of vision. In a perversely-inspired bid for perfect ugliness, the designers had trapezoidal openings cut on either side of the muzzle, and mail jowls hang flabbily out of these. The rest of the false face is a wedge snout with a horrifying if rather nicely-rendered snarl of projecting axe-head shaped teeth. A narrow, shaggy mane of needles runs in a tapering stripe down the rear of the helmet to the small of the back, rippling hypnotically like the scintillation of a wheeling school of fish. When have I ever seen a school of fish wheeling? Those manes must be fantastically expensive and time-consuming to make. The chest, shoulder, and upper arms are plated over with two layers of armor separated by an air layer. There are two sets of hands—proper man-sized ones, in fine and elastic metal gloves, and colossal mechanical gauntlets that can crush a man in their grip. Strips of mail hang down from ledges at the tops of the thighs. From chains affixed to each armored groin dangles a pair of dull metal balls, bigger than a man’s head and dotted with scratch-shined pimples, which clack meditatively together with every stride. The legs are thick pistoned trunks with ponderous hinges at the ankles, and incongruously prim pointed feet. They puff along in swarms of flies—their hindquarters and thighs are caked with excrement, as the Ghuards exhibit a marked disinclination to divest themselves of the armor once they’ve got it on.
There’s a spot I faced as I slept, where a heap of stones receded into a jumble of details I didn’t bother to make sense of at the time, and as I glance at them again I feel a memory come on, a dream of a black-streaked mouth in the stones, that spoke dream talk to me along the wind. I remembered the voice, but not in the way I normally remember voices. I didn’t hear it in recollection, but my memory started making vocalities at me and it was the affect of the voice that it partially imitated; distracted, sexless, neutrally old, talking off at an angle and to itself, but I was meant to overhear. I only overheard it speak. A strong definite sound, but it trembled. It was a death’s bed murmur, words maybe addressed to death, or through it, by a dying speaker.
“If his own train were wrecked, and this were yet no spur, then it would be she and he. Intimate in the half-light. She was the one who started, who hid, like her kind will. There is always more second wind, hidden or trapped in pockets below the earth, or in the trees, or in each other. You spread more whenever you shall sit down to write. That’s the difference between lives; try it, and there shall be some wind to move the death out of your path. Boneless mummified words sifted through your writing fingers will receive and hold the death there, present before you and even trapped. You turn over death and life, passing them back and forth through something like a window, and drive the death sentences through what you did not know ...”