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. We learn that the narrator, whose name incidentally is Low, is narrating a war. Take for instance the opening paragraphs quoted above. Cisco is a master stylist, who creates dark, twisted, imaginative vistas from the juxtaposition of adjectives. 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. 5)įor 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. Overhead, the sun is lost in a white sky without circumference, above the flashing waters of the city.
The city below me is like a shining, smoking lake, thrusting its troubled glints into my eyes and make them smart. 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. It’s through rags of fast-moving smoke that I first catch sight of Tref. 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. Paul Smith now has his review up as well.Īn army is a horror. This time, we have secretly replaced Jeff VanderMeer’s review space with that of J.M. Michael Cisco’s 2010 novel, The Narrator, is the third book to be reviewed by a weird troika of lit critics (and authors and translators).
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