Narration sometimes babbles together in such strings that each particular clause loses all meaning and focus, sometimes hiding any emotional response to something that with other phrasing could be emphatic and powerful, powerful and emphatic, but instead drones and continues, continues and drones, unwilling to please the reader in any way even if he or she strives to be pleased by its sentences, and this is Michael Cisco’s “The Traitor.” Being accustomed to sentences like those gaudy ones in Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” guttuggingly human ones like in “Lolita,” those flowing like Ursula LeGuin’s or even just smooth and precise like Gene Wolfe’s, these of “The Traitor” drag, but this dragging impresses toward a novel thoroughly pulled together.

The book has moments of beauty, like when the narrator “stood in the wind on the roof and watched the fires come up, poking up like little flowers here and there, each fire came up like a little rip in my soul, in my chest, torn a little hole and smooched the little tear with firey lips, don’t argue with me I’m telling you how it felt I watched the fires come up and was whipped by cold rain and wind [...]” (143), but its overall style is that of a lengthy monologue from a bitter old man. Its non-character is a blank, and the extent to which this is true is what impresses. He often refers to the story as his own, particularly when it seems that someone else’s story might be taking over: “You’ll get none of their stories from me, this is my story, I won’t presume to speak for them, I won’t profane them by presuming to speak for them, if you want to know who they were from me, I will tell you who they were for me, that’s all anyone can say about anyone else or has any business saying” (134). While it’s true that the story is entirely his own, his motivations are not: he’s only ever pushed by others. His primary motivation is the destruction of the world, and while this disposition comes from his upbringing as a blank–a person who has no feeling or thought or motivation of his own–and thus some drive to make others like him, this motivation itself prevents him from motivation. However, because his primary feature is his blankness, he’s infinitely swayed by others. When two of these others come in direct conflict, he vacillates between them like an infant.

This is the most convincing portion of the novel: his infantile vacillation between two loves. He immediately clings to Wite, a man who destroys others and eats their souls for his own sustenance, sustenance which thrives only to destroy more and more with no particular end goal but destruction itself–Wite, a soul burner, the narrator’s god. Just as immediately, though, he clings to Tzedze, Wite’s sister. He loves both, and because he lacks discretion, he obeys both. Because they are in direct conflict, he tangibly loses both. This response to conflict brings the novel together. The narrator is a blank, and every subtle technique throughout the novel follows this premise.

I find little technique in the book I can use for myself. I read it twice, hoping I could gather something from it to use for myself, but its only motivation is to show me I could potentially go further with characters in science fiction work than I might have thought: science fiction premises can easily permeate throughout a character’s entire being.

Regardless of whether or not I’ve gained much from the book, it does use a few noteworthy techniques. Its premise is that the main character is (and, actually, all the characters he surrounds himself with are) blank, and the limited use of dialogue contributes to this. Direct dialogue is rare, mostly only in moments of extreme stress, and I find this generally distances me from the characters. The book’s premise is to show characters which are as inhuman as they can be, and keeping me from their interactions adds to this. There were times when I’d been reading a lengthy passage of narration ending with a small piece of dialogue, and this dialogue would jump out at me and jar me slightly. That was the only indication that the characters had been talking throughout this narration: apparently, though, the narrator found the particularities of the discussion to be so banal as to not need be mentioned. This distance from the characters induces a kind of need or wanting in my reading, making anything I’m told more believable. Thus, when I’m told again and again that the narrator is blank, because I have little evidence to the contrary, I believe it stronger.

I may be stretching things too thin and departing too far from the text in this next statement, but it follows that in this reading process, I become blank. When I say that I’m devoid of the characters’ interactions with each other and thus am wanting for something from the text, that puts me in the same place as the narrator. I end up clinging to each direct, propaganda-laced statement as a blank.

I doubt that’s something I would use in my own writing, but it’s an impressive technique. It shows an intense dedication to a strict premise.

Let them know, and leave them nothing. Throw them down. A full stop to everyday business, the ruination of the city, that is the only completion that can be hoped for, or that should be hoped for. It’s the only hope that isn’t an obscene hope. A ruined city is the only sort of city I could live in. I could walk to and fro, one place looking much the same as any other, just piles of rubble, and I could meet people int he street and in the ruins, and feel at home with them, when it didn’t matter any more who they were supposed to be. Who we are would also be in ruins, and our language would be ruined and just barely intelligible. They wouldn’t be anybody, that’s how I would resemble them. We would all be at the mercy of the elements, all the same–that’s what I want to bring to every city in the world, I want to see every city in the world ruined like that, every abominable family, church, army, hanging in rags, all those abominable groupings of people smashed to pieces, leaving only the handful of permanently stupefied survivors and debris as far as the eye can see. (118-119)

Perhaps, to some extent, the narration does this. It certainly hasn’t left any resonating effect on me, but within my reading process, I wasn’t anyone–I was at the mercy of the random narration, stupefied and waiting to be told what to do and what to believe.