The Escher Man
★★★★★
A grim tale of Endel, a violent henchman with a tortured history who’s losing himself in drink and gambling. Just as this was getting a bit tiring, the deeper story unfolds and you realise our protagonist is as much a victim himself - that his memory could be unreliable, and if true, is he really who he thinks he is?
Napper posits that our identity is, to a large extent, the product of our memories, and explores what happens when a technology (memory pins) make that a flexible concept. This sometimes makes for a challenging read, as Endel’s memory issues make him an unreliable first-person narrator and memory resets trigger narrative resets just as I’d become invested in a new setup, leading to a very stop-start flow. I also felt Endel’s character lacked development - we peel back the violent gangster to find just another violent gangster underneath, which felt like a missed opportunity. There wasn’t a lot to like about him and he never really redeemed himself.
More a thriller than cyberpunk, the narrative feels like an extended hyper-violent gangster movie cut with a large dollop of Momento. I would have liked to spend more time exploring the wider dystopia that had been created by the use of memory pins rather than staying so tightly focused on the gangsters and their haunts. On the plus side, I really liked the imaginative tech, the Asian flavour, and the family scenes and relationships were well done. But overall, it failed to make the most of exploring the implications of fungible memory and identity, and was too preoccupied with the violence - more John Wick than Momento.
