The Escher Man by TR Napper

Violent cyberpunk is alive and well in Australian author TR Napper’s latest novel The Escher Man. Set in South-East Asia around the turn of the next century, The Escher Man centres around a violent enforcer and hit man – Endel ‘Endgame’ Ebbinghaus. But from the opening chapters readers will clock the fact that things are not quite right – that they are dealing with an unreliable narrator, made more so by his inability to trust his own dreams and memories. And it is this aspect of the narrative that gives this tale some emotional and political resonance.

When The Escher Man opens, Endgame is working for local Macau enforcer Mr Long. After carrying out an assassination he has his memory pin reprogrammed and returns to his alcohol fuelled existence. Memory pins are how people have started to retain their memories as other technology has impacted on the brain’s capacity to retain memory. But it turns out they can also be manipulated and soon Endgame starts to perceive that things are not quite as he has been programmed to remember them. This puts him on a path to vengeance and redemption, but one that will take him to some very dark and violent places first.

The revenge thriller is definitely having a renaissance. Led by the likes of Keanu Reeve’s John Wick and Liam Neeson’s ageing agent of revenge but also seen even more recently in films like Dev Patel’s Monkey Man. The template is always similar – damaged but incredibly dangerous protagonist is given some sort of emotional reason to blow up their life and go after the institutional forces of evil that have driven them to violence in the first place.

But there is more to The Escher Man than just incessant and constant violence (and there is a lot of that). What Napper is really interested in is the manipulation of memory and how the corporations in this future world want to weaponise and corporatise memory. Given what is happening at the moment on social media – the denial of events and the rewriting of history – the element of the story has particular current resonance. Napper also provides plenty of philosophy (unfortunately often delivered as infodumps).

Which makes The Escher Man a more rounded package, particularly for lovers of more recent cyberpunk and violent revenge stories. There is the pan-Asian setting, extreme violence often powered by technological body modifications and evil corporations. But Napper also wraps in some emotional resonance and plenty of moral conundrums to get readers thinking even while the bullets and knives are flying.

The Escher Man by TR Napper

7.5

7.5/10