The Escher Man

My review of Napper’s previous novel, 36 Streets, closed with saying “I believe Napper has a truly great novel inside him, he just needs a little more time to find his voice.” With The Escher Man, he has.

Endel ‘Endgame’ Ebbinghaus is a soldier and assassin for the Macau Syndicate. Wake up, have a drink and a cigarette, remember some awful shit, find a bloke, shoot them, drink, repeat. He’s got an ex-wife and a daughter, normal citizens he watches and doesn’t touch for everyone’s good. And something is deeply deeply wrong with his head. The Syndicate wipes and rewrites Endel’s memory on a regular basis, making him who they need him to be.

Endel is locked into a path with only one end, when some subconscious desire to break free surfaces. He attempts to recover his identity, connect with his family, and get out of the Syndicate’s clutches. Instead, he’s dropped into criminal and political intrigues way above his pay grade and his fragmented identity, where a Vietnamese border resort is serving as the test bed for an experimental psychological warfare program to dominate the last private spaces of the soul. Survival, let alone victory, is going to take everything Endel has and then some.

The Escher Man hits a lot of the same beats as Napper’s other work in this setting: Aussies in Southeast Asia, the collapse of memory and identity, violent criminals and loyal families. This book is executed with verve, real passion, and a lot of love.