REVIEW: The Escher Man by T.R. Napper
Last Updated on September 15, 2024
We return to T.R. Napper’s wider neon-soaked cyberpunk future in the stand-alone novel, The Escher Man (Titan, 17th September), a brutally barnstorming, mind-bending tale of revenge, memory manipulation, and the downtrodden sticking their middle fingers up at the world order.
Endel “Endgame” Ebbinghaus is a cartel enforcer in Macau, cashing cheques and breaking necks as required by his terrifying boss, Mr. Long. He’s a violent man, but he’s also a family man, and with this being his last day on the job, it’s time for him to get out. But in a world where control goes beyond a contract and into the deepest kind of manipulation possible–your memories–getting out from under the thumb of one of the most vicious men in Asia is not going to be simple, or painless, or without a very tall stack of mangled bodies piling up.
The Escher Man is an exciting approach to storytelling. Amongst the things you’d expect in a cyberpunk novel–plenty of grit, snark, technology, violence, and political commentary–Napper takes you into a world of Chinese military and cultural occupation forced on the most culturally diverse region on earth, Asia, as China becomes the premier military power on the planet. Napper’s lived experience and research into the nuances of Asia bring a world to life that feels real and possible and utterly fucking terrifying. In The Escher Man you aren’t just in a non-descript, American-style city with Kanji lettering on the signs–you are in the cultural melting pot of future Asia in every way.
Against this backdrop, the story structure uses the manipulation of memory heavily, in a way that I haven’t enjoyed (outside of Napper’s other works) this much since watching Guy Pearce in Memento. I have long loved the way Napper plays with the theme of memory in the universe he’s built. It’s a consistent theme throughout his works, such as Neon Leviathan, 36 Streets, and Ghost of a Neon God–whether it plays a key role like it does in The Escher Man or it’s in the background of a story with a different primary theme. Memory (its ownership, manipulation, damage, monetisation, criminalisation, and loss) can be a really tricky theme to construct a story around. I think it can go wrong in so many ways. In The Escher Man, Napper has delivered this core structural theme of the story perfectly.
Endel’s memory has been overwritten and re-written time and time again (to protect his criminal overlords from Endel’s likely eventual capture and interrogation) to the point where he’s at the juncture of becoming a mindless drone of instant violence. He’s become almost a parody of a gangster hitman living hard. A daily wake up note from the version of himself who went to sleep the night before helps guide you, the reader, through Endel’s story. I loved the way spirits of memory showed up and impacted Endel’s daily world view, how the memories shifted and changed as they were impacted by his waking hours and the work of Mr. Long. The further we got in, and the more complex Endel’s moves to achieve his goal, the more this aspect of the book appealed to me.
Napper’s cyberpunk voice is on point. Endel and the supporting cast are brutal, savagely damaged humans doing horrible things to meet their own ends, but there is always heart at the guts of each of them. The way he’s woven in his experience working for a decade in the poorest parts of South East Asia to create a very real, very possible feeling future Asia Pacific, where the Former United States is a spent force, Europe is a wasteland, and China has taken over to be the prominent planetary superpower, is perfect. In particular the c-glyph tool–a memory pin and essentially Google inside your head–plays a key part here as he extrapolates out a very real theme for us today: can you ever really trust a technology company to do the right thing by its users?
If there is one author alive and writing today capable of picking up the cyberpunk banner and waving his fist at the future of our species whenever Richard Morgan hangs up his boots, I think it’s T.R. Napper. Rarely does a book so encapsulate its genre while also pushing the boundaries of its audience. The Escher Man is fucking brilliant.
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