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 and situations unlike any I’d ever read before. Sleepwalkers that bruise the skin of reality, assailants who skim the surface of the water in armor that’s lighter than air, guns that are not guns, conjurings with unexpected consequences, a huge ship “like a black egg,” refugees from an insane asylum who assemble as soldiers. 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. The result is to come close to conveying the derangement required to wage war. “An army is a horror. It’s a horrible thing.”

But the uncanny and the hook of a powerful theme are rarely enough to sustain any novel. The next element at which Cisco excels is in creating characters like Saskia, a woman “all in armor” who “has a short sword with a basket hilt on her right side and a flapped holster on her left hip.” If there’s a hero of The Narrator besides Low, it is this battle-tested woman who 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. Saskia is also 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. (But she’s not alone: Makemin, Nardac, Punkinflake, Thrushchurl. You’ll remember all of them. By the end, the book will be buried in your skull.

What does Cisco layer on top of searing scenes of the uncanny and of war, in the context of unforgettable characters? AThe 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? I think instead we should relax into reading a work of true originality, verve, and intellectual rigor.

First Chapter