Name Forthcoming: Review: The Traitor, Michael Cisco

I am dying. I sit in a cell, waiting for my execution.
My jailors are kind and would give me everything I ask, they would not hurt me.

They would execute me, but my illness will do it for them, so instead they are kind and request if there's anything I would want.

My illness is my execution. I am dying, but this is not the sum total of my being.

I have only strength for this and when it is done, I will be done.

This writing is my strength.

I have only strength for this, to tell of Wite.

This is my account of Wite and who he was and what he is.
But this is not Wite's story. I could never tell his story. There is only one who can and I am not he.
This is only the account of my experience with Wite, no more no less, and when it is done I will be done.

I will tell you of spirit eaters and soul burners.

Of the Alaks, of my countrymen and of the apostates.

I will tell you of Tzdze and I will tell you of Nophta.

I will tell you of the mountain, I will tell you of Wite.

Self-made blurb which I thought might be necessary, because the back blurb to the book itself gave me a totally wrong impression of what I was going to read.

The text above at the very least captures the tone and stylistic approach of the novella if nothing else.

It's a little self indulgent and maybe a little expansive of me but I did try to keep it honest and in the vein of the story as I read it. I usually enjoy penning my own blurb but this was rather more fun than what I'm used to. I have a feeling that this novella is one of those that will loom larger the further I get away from it.

Needless to say, none of this is in the story verbatim. Or rather, alot of it is, but it's spread far and wide over the course of its narrative.

What we have is an endless monologue that over its rambling course becomes more and more unhinged and repetitive the more the narrator spirals into a kind of desperate mania, a fixed obsession with giving as complete an account as possible, to try and give every facet of the purpose that has given rise to the account, the ideas and reasons for its existence, or at least, allegedly. Because as readily becomes apparent the longer you read. The narrator is highly unreliable:

p 97

"There's no end to the adjustments I can make in hindsight, and no value to them. I have little to say, but I'll say it over and over to keep it in view. If only to keep my attention fixed. Will you follow my every word, or will you skip a few here and there, and more and more often?"

A direct adressing of the reader, casting aspersion on any veracity to be found in the account of an unreliable narrator.

This little bit of text shows that Cisco is aware of the dangers of presenting a narrative such as this to an audience that likely has had no clear idea of how this story would go and how it would present itself, an audience that is maybe expecting a rather more traditional story and that likely, won't read it in its full, rambling nature.

p98

"Who is reading me? I won't ask that seriously yet. I prefer this way, not knowing what I'm doing, not giving shape to things or refusing to."

Again, completely against the norm. Post modernism in full flow. A writer writing for himself while experimenting without restraint, going outside of convention.

Unconventional is all well and good and it has its moments of sheer enlightened brilliance and more on that later but, for a compulsive reader, and I mean specifically someone who needs to read every sentence in a book and to have that sentence stretch, connected to the rest of the paragraph, be rooted safely, inextricably, amongst all the other sentences; conventional, there were definitely some things that rubbed me the wrong way.

For one, as should be apparent by the self-made blurb, there's alot of repitition.

It seriously got on my nerves, mostly due to that compulsion of having to read absolutely everything.

But it also added a level of anxiety to the protagonist's writings, the repetition adding a level of forceful cadence that underlined and bolded every other thought, description or justification.
The quality of the writing and the mode of delivery is rather unique. It's a success if all you're looking for is a novella that truly stands out.

The story, however, is a boring block of continuous misery, unhinged and experimental. Shades of nihilism and misanthropy a la Sartre and the unreliability of a Gene Wolfe narrator coupled with a very light lens of grimdark fantasy on a seemingly bare-bones story that hinges more on tortured character-, and I hesitate here to state character development because it seems to me that there is no progression in Noptha's character. This is likely a side product of a text written in the final miseries of a haunted man's life where everything is coloured by pain and anxiety- than any kind of actual plot.

The first person narrative is given to us from the deathbed account of a man whose time is running out. This gives Cisco the writer's conceit of repetition and grammatical errors adding to a text's alleged veracity.

The man, in a neutered, emotionless way, remembers in a few leaps and bounds, his life from his earliest remembered infancy, from the time of his being apart and being different, to his discovery of being soulless and becoming apostate and Spirit-Eater, to his fateful encounter with a Soul Burner named Wite. From this point on, the narrative becomes laden with an almost malign sort of self-recriminating introspection hinting at something awful yet to come.

It's not exactly fun to read although as remarked before, there are flashed of brilliance. moments that, for me, make the book stand out.

Oddly then, I don't have much to say about it. not much to remark on. And though the final parts of the book do give food for thought I'm not going to say much about that either as the book seems to encourage an introspective response in its reader. A personal tale, coming into its own only because of the reader. Personal, and yet, it ranges far.

It's certainly a unique book and though I doubted more than a little during the read itself over whether it was worth it to continue, I'm very glad that I did.
There was actual encouragement for this in the book as Nophta repeats time and again throughout his account to hold off judgement until it is done. That we can not yet judge until we know the full story.

And here, now that I do, I find that I have no judgement to give.

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Some random ideas. Possible spoilers in tow.

With quotation. Because quotation is a servicable substite for wit; Oscar Wilde

The concept of being 'blank' or soulless speaks to a common fear: The fear of being unaccepted, unliked because we are different, we stand apart from society. But here, where the concept of soulless is an accepted phenomenon, this isolation is not up to us it comes from outside, bestowed on is. It gives this isolation meaning, a reason. A loneliness that becomes special, almost ordained, because we are unique. A reason for our being apart. We have no soul. Suffering becomes the crutch and the very horizon itself.
And with pain, comes talent; a gift, a power.

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"- people wasting their time running crazily from place to place, getting more and more frantic until they're prepared to shove people out into traffic, trample them underfoot, so desperate are they to get to whatever trivia they have to do, and this can only produce more of the same hysteria. A round of ordinary business, buying a few articles here and there, is an exhausting task, and you stagger back through your door four hours later as if you'd just been in a fistfight."

Seems awfully familiar. Like looking into a mirror.

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The economy of suffering