Metro by Jeff Edmunds

Metro has the feel of Being John Malkovich and Twin Peaks and Poe's "The Raven."

In this world, you can see and experience through the eyes of one person after another, after another.

In this world, the closer you look the more bizarre the story seems. (And the main victim who may, or may not, have been murdered is named "Laura.")

In this world, repetition makes the story ever more haunting and memorable.

The disorientation of the telling of the story is offset by the detailed and compelling visual description of surroundings, of people, of their actions.

The effect feels a bit like Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers. But maybe I'm just jumping to conclusions -- Paris setting plus experimental fiction = nouveau roman. The narrative is told in the first person, while the nouveau roman presented stories from the perspective of objects rather than people. But an otherworldly effect is produced by telling the story again and again, often in the first person, and that person whose eyes you use changes without warning and sometimes without clear identification, and the story changes too with the change of perspective. We are told that this happened and then this happened. We are given precise and memorable details. Then we see the same sequence from someone else's perspective, undermining what we had presumed was "fact." And no super-consciousness ever intervenes to sort it all out for us.

What we have is what might have been constructed from a dozen different "eye-witness" accounts of an event. Each starts from different knowledge of what came before and after, from different interests and proclivities. What happens matters to each of them for different reasons. But yet we are never fully introduced to any of these witnesses, never told much about their background or reliability. At times we are not sure which of them is presenting the story now.

Remember the old series of detective movies shown in first person perspective, with the eye of the camera being the eye of the detective (Philip Marlowe?). You never saw the detective. You always saw everything through his eyes. This book works that way, only with quick cinematic cuts that occur with no warning; the eye of the camera is now one person, and now another, and now still another.

So while this book deals with a murder or a series of murders, and individual paragraphs read with the slick clarity of a mystery novel, you trip and trip again as the author gleefully undermines your expectations, as if putting your eyes into another body (a la Being John Malkovich). At some level it is an elaborate game or puzzle. For that reason, you should print it out rather than read it online (although it is available for reading online). You'll want to mark up your copy with notes, trying to sort out the puzzle, even though you know very well that there is no solution.

At the same time this is a very literate and self-consciously literary creation, with clever and detailed descriptions of even the most banal of activities (e.g., undoing a necktie is "deconstructing the knot").

All in all, this book is so intriguing and well-executed that you not only suspend disbelief, you suspend it again and again, believing incompatible variations of the same tale. And you even forgive the author for not pulling all the pieces together neatly at the end and making you feel comfortable, but rather leaving you with a haunting dissonance and a palimpsest of superimposed images rather than a simple clear story that you could easily summarize or retell to a friend.

The effect is similar to that of a drawing described by Frank Conroy in his autobiographical novel Stop-Time (p. 276). The artist shows the picture to the narrator who at first can't figure out what it represents. Then, the artist explains that it is "the lock on the Metro door." (The echo in the title of this book is probably a coincidence). "I looked again and recognized it instantly. In a single moment I understood distortion in art. The drawing was highly complex, much more elaborate than the simple bar and catch I had watched interacting countless times on the Metro doors. What he had drawn was the process, the way the bar approaches the catch, slides up the angled metal, and drops into the locked position. He had captured movement in a static drawing. For a moment I was speechless."

As Stanislaw Lem noted in his autobiography, Highcastle (p. 112), "... in general we can ennoble a work or call it shallow, depending on the backdrop we give it on the stage of our mind as we read. ... Thus, coming upon an error, one could cry, 'Inconsistency!' or, conversely, 'Brilliant dissonance!' or, 'The abyss, depicted by the intentional cracking of the shell of logic!'" Adjust your expectations appropriately for Metro, because in this case the inconsistencies are undoubtedly intentional, and the effect is definitely brilliant.

Read it yourself online, for free, at www.mindspring.com/~toones/ministry.html (the site of the publisher, The Ministry of Whimsy Press). And join us for a chat session with the author and the publisher on June 22, 2000. (Check www.samizdat.com/chat.html for details).

You can read this book online, Metro

Other book reviews by Richard Seltzer

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