Michael Cisco's THE DIVINITY STUDENT

I was sent to suffer and learn and to join the Eclogue. From dictaction: you split off and are the ghost sent to encounter my soul as a stranger, bring with you the offering of the first. lost image of us together. When you are caught dreaming, look in a mirror to wake yourself. I correspond to San Veneficio in this way -- its soul is brought to me by the saints who are my eyes and ears.

No, the above passage is not written in fungi on the wall of a "tunnel" in a weird wilderness, but rather the notebook of a mad scientist who kind of combines Herbert West and Dr. Hill, who... Let me start again, here.

It's been a while since I knowingly picked up a book that I knew would scramble my brains without using a whisk, and the year's almost over, so why not give The Divinity Student another try?

Like a lot of my friends, I first came across Michael Cisco and his super-surrealist stylings via a Humble Bundle yoinks ago (the same bundle that brought me Stephen Chapman's The Troika. When they said weird, they meant it). The Divinity Student was the first one out of there that I tried to read, but I didn't make it past our nameless hero* being killed by a lightning stike at the summit of a mountain hike** and reanimated by the faculty of his divinity school via the time honored tradition of *checks notes* removing all of his internal organs (well, except we learn later that he still has lungs. Ah, but then... did they leave him his original lungs, or make him new ones?) and stuffing him with paper that's covered in writing, any paper, any writing will do.  I want to draw a parallel to the legend of the Golem but I'm really not equipped to do it well, so I'll just gesture vaguely that-a-way and move on.

If there is any religious overtone to The Divinity Student besides the obviousness there in the title, it is Christian, though, rather than Jewish, as this resurrected super-being winds up gathering up twelve... not disciples... not assistants... twelve people whose participation, after a fashion, are necessary to his quest which, about that...

The Divinity Student is then dispatched to a city to take up a post as a "word finder" which could have been a sort of active and social job, wandering the streets and talking to people and picking up the latest neologisms and slang like a lexical Cayce Pollard, but instead he is set to work sifting through ancient tomes looking for ancient words that have been lost, forgotten, or had heretofore not been noticed at all by the dominant culture. As though he was interning for Gene Wolfe, am I right, friends?*** But that's only his cover mission, see? Or so he is told as soon as he starts to converse with his fellow word finders over meals and whatnot.

The plot, though, isn't what is important at all. It's the prose, and the dreamlike quality of it. Any two-bit surrealist can stick a bunch of incongruous images together and call it art, but it takes real care and attention and a very particular cast of mind to make us not only see a weird image, but to feel that we are part of it even as it flows and changes into a completely different weird image in the way that dreams actually do. And Cisco is a master at it, one that, perhaps, I had to read Jeff Noon's Nyquist series, in which the hero is subject to unending weird compulsions, entranced, retrieved, re-entranced, bossed around like Alice knocking around urban wonderlands and acquiescing to increasingly bizarre behavior that still kind of fits into a time honored structure, before I could really appreciate what Michael Cisco is up to, here. More even than the Nyquist books, The Divinity Student wants to draw you right into the experience of being a reanimated marionette of a man who may or may not be succeeding in ripping out his strings and tying someone up in them.

Us. He's tying us up in them.

Before too long, our man has a sidekick, possibly the best single element of this book: Teo Desden the butcher, whom the Divinity Student first consults on an errand and later sort of befriends. Teo actually has a personality and motives of his own and is really entertaining and charming in an off-putting but amusing way, as in exchanges like this one:

"This is going to involve more than one corpse, isn't it?" The Divinity Student pauses. "Yes, possibly as many as twelve..." Teo suddenly gets excited. "Listen, the bodies, what are you going to do with them when you're through?" 

 Of course I got all of the Sweeney Todd vibes, especially having earlier seen what Teo can really do in this crazy little scene-within-a-scene that also gives us a look at Cisco's prose at its most straightforwad, if still a little weird:

The Divinity Student watches a fly zing in through the open door. With a speed that defies vision Teo uncoils, sending a four-inch steel blade silent across the room flashing once under the fluorescents and the fly runs right into it. Two black halves drop to the tiles, the knife lands on its hand on the sideboard and slides an inch to rest, just tapping the base of the mirror.

Oh, did I mention that the main room of Teo's butcher shop has a giant mirror in one wall like you'd expect in a ballet studio, the better for Teo to admire and cultivate his balletic moves with meat and cutlery, I guess? Like I said, he's an actual character, is Theo. I'd read a book just about him, continuing my habit of always falling in love with sidekicks and background characters instead of heroes...

But while Teo is showing off his knife work, the Divinity Student, whom we've already seen takes the longest and most convoluted way around to the solution to any problem he encounters, is busy building a divining machine, and look out Rube Goldberg, it's a doozy. Where one would expect a divining machine to be intended to make predictions a bit easier to comprehend and absorb, the Divinity Student's machine is an elaborate and colorful and magical contraption that... bascially creates fancy Rorschach blots for him to stare at and try to interpret later. I mean, this thing makes my brain itch.

Oh, and he also gets a girlfriend of sorts, Miss Woodwind, the boss's daughter, who comes as close as we're going to get to an audience stand-in, or such is how she feels toward's novels end, when she finally gets fed up with the nonsense and yells at him "What are you doing now... Come on, answer me! I've been here all this time waiting for you, at least you could tell me what's happening!"

I feel you, girl. And I think I'm going to have to read this one again sometime before I can even remotely feel like I got an answer.

Does it sound like I'm not sure what I just read? Well, I'm not sure what I just read. But I liked it, and I'm going to read Cisco's follow-up to this, The Golem, pretty soon.

*Why are so many of the books I'm taking up lately about people whose real names -- or names at all -- are withheld from the reader?

**Of the kind I've taken many a time, and if you make it to the top of Medicine Bow Peak, you've been at risk of this same thing happening. I've never not encountered lightning up there. It's a phenomenal, and phenomenally beautiful, hike, though!

***Also, there's another belovedly Wolfean element central to this weird plot, in that our hero is obliquely taught a bizarre way to harvest the memories and experiences of the dead in a way that isn't as cannibalistic as the analeptic alzabo but is almost as gross.