Disappearance

Disappearance enmeshes us in nested networks from which it is impossible to escape unchanged. The novel spins up an elegant series of labyrinthine, mirror-rimmed puzzles that seem intended not so much for solution as habitation – propositions that bring into alarming clarity the strangeness of domains we so casually inhabit: memory, imagination, time. Arriving in a restless tidal flow of casually virtuosic language, the novel’s many mysteries twirl, invert, and disgorge more mysteries. As in other Joyce stories we could mention, we may have seen someone die this morning, or in the not too distant future, or at some point as yet unfixed in the viscous fore-and-backwardness of disappearing time. The narrator may be the victim, or perhaps a cybernetic detective who assumes the dead man’s memories, a version of everyone’s maze-trapped prisoner. Wayfarer, philosoph, this man may lie in the grip of dementia, or dystopian oppression, or a video game from the future – names, no doubt, for a common disorder. This is a seriously playful book, hip to all the slippery ontologies of protean path-work, evocative both of old-school games (Mindwheel, Myst) and more recent philosophical entertainments (Passage, Dear Esther, The Stanley Parable). Fans of far-sighted fiction will find parallels with Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Burroughs, Hawkes, and the newer world-games of Mark Danielewski, Steve Erickson, and Jeff Noon. Followers of the graphic novel may find sublimely paranoid resonance with visions like Warren Ellis’s Planetary or Grant Morrison’s Filth. In life as not in fiction, however, there is only ever one Michael Joyce, and Disappearance demonstrates that he is not simply a master of fictional craft, but of fiction itself, in its most vital and changing form. Joyce is a genuinely transformational artist capable not simply of imagining other worlds, but of extending the range of imagination itself. This is a book that may change not just the way you see fiction, but indeed the way you see. – Stuart Moulthrop