Published by Titan Books in September 2024
This year has been a bit of a T.R. Napper year for me. I love the blend of cyberpunk and hardboiled, and starting with his debut novel 36 Streets earlier in the year, I’ve read most of Napper’s works.
I loved (and I do mean loved) the Hanoi Old Quarter setting of 36 Streets to the point of spending a few days looking up trips there that I couldn’t possibly afford. I rejoiced when I found a couple of Bahn Mi shops in my locality.
The only part of Napper’s work I wasn’t a fan of was some of the endings. Not this time though. This time it works.
When I started reading, I felt a bit uncomfortable. I read a cyberpunk hardboiled book earlier in the year by another author who didn’t really get the irony of the genre, and I was worried the protagonist here – Endgame Ebbinghaus – was a bit of an unironic caricature. A hard drinking, hard smoking, violent thug of a sort that cyberpunk writers wanted to subvert. I was worried but I really shouldn’t have been. I should have trusted Napper and it was a learning experience to be pleasantly wrong.
Without giving too much away, things happen involving memory that make you never really sure that the Ebbinghaus you’re presented with at any time is the right one; the original one. Or even if there can be such a thing as right or original in the world of The Escher Man. That sounds confusing, and in many ways, it is, but it’s not frustratingly confusing. It’s just right.
The reason we don’t know for sure is because Ebbinghaus doesn’t know himself, and everyone else is so unreliable that even when something is revealed both to us and to Ebbinghaus, I don’t believe it. It’s like Inception. No wait, it’s like Memento. Memento is a really good example for this, as it’s clearly imprinted on The Escher Man’s DNA.
Ebbinghaus wakes each day with an ocular imprint message to himself explaining who he is and what he’s doing, a neat cyberpunk-esque play on Guy Pearce’s tattoos and polaroids. A memory specialist clinic is even called Memento in what I can only assume is a homage or an easter egg that makes T.R. Napper happy when someone points it out. I’m pointing it out. I noticed!
In this way Ebbinghaus can be the caricature because he’s playing a role. I just wish he was a bit less surly and a bit wittier. Just a bit. I fell in love with 36 Street’s Lin because she was cocky, sarcastic, and tough. Ebbinghaus spends the book threatening, complaining, and talking through his fists and I struggled to like him as much as I liked Lin, and maybe that’s the point? He isn’t a nice guy. None of his personas are nice guys.
As an aside I love Napper’s gang member names a lot. The Axe, Chrom Lin Phu, and Three Scars Pierce. Evocative and cool the lot of them.
The book is split into three parts, with the first and third taking place in Macau, and the middle in the fictional Xuan Tang Resort. The second part could have been a book in its own with the sheer number of subplots and new characters.
More memory shenanigans are afoot in Xuan Tang Resort but what feels like a major plot point (with worldwide consequences) isn’t really explored in a way it could be. Ebbinghaus has to be told that there’s something off in Xuan Tang by a couple of characters, and I think I would have liked it if Ebbinghaus had spent a bit more time looking around and come to that conclusion naturally.
The second part had Yojimbo (or 1996’s Last Man Standing) Vibes. Ebbinghaus playing the various gangs of Xuan Tang against each other the only way he knows how. Rocket launchers and fist fights. The man is not subtle, but he is effective, and entertaining when he cuts loose.
Again, it could be argued that Ebbinghaus is being incredibly selfish at this point in the narrative, focusing entirely on his own mission and doesn’t really care about the wider plot, but then again if he doesn’t, then why should I?
It’s a pacing thing I imagine. The book is fast paced and packed with interesting characters and situations. A problem with the pacing though is that I don’t feel as connected to the setting as I did to Hanoi. Xuan Tang or Macau don’t feel as rounded or alive as Hanoi did.
What I did appreciate about The Escher Man is that didn’t explain much of its worldbuilding outright. There are Cochlear Glyphs, Glimmer bikes (and trains), the USA has become the Former United States etc, and I never needed to know more about those things than their role in the story. If I was ever unsure what something did, a character would use it and then I’d know. I wasn’t led by the hand every step of the way. I was trusted as a reader, which is a rare commodity, but one I love.
The ending then. I’m a big fan of characters solving problems using their wiles and established resources, and here Napper nails it. The ending might not be what you expect, or want, or even believe (remember, memory can be a tricky thing hereabouts) but to me, it felt like the only possible satisfactory ending.
For all my (minor) gripes – and we can’t love everything 100% – I think The Escher Man is a great book and probably the best crafted and most well-rounded novel of Napper’s career to-date. It does that great thing of making me want to read more and I’m excited about what’s to come.