Liars Called

There is nothing inherently wrong with unlikable narrators: their personality can very well add to the narrative, being tied to its themes and discussions in an engaging way. Liars Called’s despicable narrator, however, only subtracts from the experience: if at first, the protagonist’s bitter and self-centered personality seems to be a perfect fit for an allegorical story about predatory capitalism, his lack of development throughout the book ends up making him a repetitive and tiresome character.

The protagonist is a young man, phallically named Lance Hawthorn Underwood, who one day is invited to go inside a magical bus by three – the book is full of threes – terrifying stewardesses. When he returns home from the surreal trip, Lance discovers that everything has changed: orc-like creatures now prowl the streets, malls have become dungeons, and people’s appearances have changed to reflect some traits of their personality.

The novel is narrated in the first person, but Lance soon proves to be the wrong man for the job. The first problem is that he doesn’t care about the fantastical universe he’s in, being vague and obtuse about its characteristics. Since the other characters often talk in cryptic words, and the events themselves don’t make much sense, the protagonist’s inability to offer any help to the reader makes the novel’s strange world feel distant and underdeveloped. A Hydra, for example, is, for a huge amount of time, referred to as just a monster with three heads and huge teeth that could be “a multi-headed dragon or similar”: a poor description that never comes close to building tension or excitement. Lance’s narration is purposefully detached (“Like so many other events, part of this is me simply portraying the past as it happened while not letting my emotions cloud things”) but this numbs the action and makes the world feel lifeless.

It doesn’t help that Lance’s failure to understand the world around him feels artificial. This perilous new world shares a lot of characteristics with RPGs: there are dungeons, bosses, classes, abilities, and experience points. Lance, however, never was into games – a fact that he repeats often – and, because of that, the novel is rife with moments of the protagonist finally discovering how the most basic things work: “Rogue must have been tied to the stealth abilities. I had never played role-playing games and only knew about them from other people talking. I inferred that games let people use abilities to be invisible to enemies, which was in line with our current situation.” This can make him sound stupid, especially when his incapacity to understand things go beyond RPGs and videogames. After freeing some slaves, for instance, Lance doesn’t have the faintest idea what the new title he has just received means: “It had new words, [Slaver’s Bane], right next to [Runed Rogue]. I didn’t know what that meant and wasn’t about to ask someone.”

Besides that, Lance is also a really bad human being: he’s a sexist, self-centered, sadistic white man that lacks empathy. There are several moments in the novel in which his words reveal how fragile his male ego is, especially when he’s creating a power fantasy for himself: “I stepped closer, entranced. Her husband was dead, which meant she was mine, by her own admission. She wanted a real man. I’d be one for her.” Lance thinks he is a “real man”, as opposed to what he as once called in school (“Little Dick”), and he’s always ready to prove that to women: “After a pause, I said, ‘It’s Lance.’ That would be the only name I’d use with these people. Little Dick was not acceptable and ran contrary to what I’d been told by prior girlfriends.”

Lance is a narrator that frequently wants the reader to know that he has a big penis; a simple fact that, for him, means he’s automatically great in bed. His descriptions often corroborate this claim, especially by the end, when he starts to have sex with an ex-girlfriend. First, his ego is again exposed in all its colors: “Callisto had been one of my first girlfriends and there were a lot of memories bound up in that. I’d show her exactly what she gave up.” The context of this sentence makes things even worse for Lance, as it is hinted that Callisto has no saying in the matter of having sex with him as she is being ordered to do so by her leader. That, however, doesn’t stop him from showing her “exactly what she gave up,” making her sorry for dumping him and his big penis. He even ignores her completely before the sex, clouded by lust for the incoming rape: “‘Did you forget what we were just talking about?’ ‘I did. You distracted me.’ Honestly, I hadn’t been paying attention to a word to come out of her mouth. Instead, a long list of positions to explore played through my mind.”

And then we have the sex scene, which perfectly encapsulates all the sexism in the novel:

“She stopped after a moment and grabbed my hands. ‘Will you love me?’ Love was impossible. I wasn’t a creature who felt that way about anyone. Lust, certainly, the burning need to feel her body arch in pleasure against mine. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I will make you cry out in pleasure. Again, and again.’ ‘You only want to have sex with me?’ Another easy question. ‘I can’t think of anything else. Not right now. I promise to make sure you enjoy every moment of it.’ And I did. We went three rounds. I felt well enough to go four, or five.”

Of course, Lance would claim that he made her “enjoy every moment of it”: he is so self-centered, so sure of himself, and so egoistic, that he would never think otherwise. If these sentences are on him, the whole “will you love me” problem, however, is not. Here, the cliché of “women care about love, while the poor men only want to have sex” exists not due to the protagonist’s perspective, but is framed as part of the story. It’s not something that is tainted by Lance’s deranged point of view, but something that happened.  A few sentences later and we have the complete package when Callisto asks him for help: “I need you to protect me.”  In other words, the power fantasy is not just in Lance’s mind, it’s in the story itself too.

And Lance’s problematic traits do not stop there. He is also sadistic, feeling pleasure in killing those weaker than him: “More creatures died. I stepped on one’s head, kicked another, and beat a third into submission. Each one made me happier.” He generally shows no signs of empathy toward others. Lance, for example, starts to refer to some women as whores after being offered them, (“‘You’re right. Bonkers with a knife. It’s grand,’ she said to Theo, loudly enough that even the whore next door paused her encouraging theatrics,”) and, when he saves some of them from being raped, he immediately calls attention to his own heroic deed while smiling at them: “‘You’re welcome,’ I said to the ladies while smiling happily.” Lance is the kind of person that is simply “bothered” by slavery: “That was the deal I’d made with Coach Madison, but I detested his very existence if he was really enslaving people. That practice bothered me.” And the list could go on. This even makes some narrative decisions feel more troubling than they otherwise would be: Lance can shapeshift to a form that is defined by its uncontrollable lust, and the sign that is often used to distinguish it from the others is… its brown skin.

The narrative acknowledges that Lance is a terrible human being – he’s often called a murderer – but that doesn’t change the fact that being stuck with this kind of narrator – without any sort of trade-off – is not a great idea. He doesn’t help to develop the world, he’s thematically repetitive, and, on top of everything, he’s a horrible person.

The story is clearly a commentary on the predatory state of contemporary capitalism. The evil-looking stewardesses that lure people to enter their magical world use money as a fish-hook: “The chance at a lifetime! Money for everyone, free to spend for great items,” and people are even rewarded when others are killed: “I glanced down at the card in my hand. The total dollar amount on my card had increased. It almost struck me as odd that watching a person die earned me money.” –  “almost” being the keyword here to define the protagonist’s personality. Lance’s new world is one of survival: this post-apocalyptic-monster-infested place justifies people’s predatory behavior. There is no one he can trust, and no one should trust him. It is every man for himself – and all the “whores” for the strongest of them.

Lance is always there to show how petty, self-centered, and downright evil people can be: “Thinking on the horrible exchanges of parents selling their children, or parents falling behind, or those who were abandoned by exiting caretakers, each instance somehow helped me keep going. Every person who died meant I had survived.” And the novel is very clear in its purpose of being allegorical in its construction: “This place didn’t operate on love or trust. It ran on fear and control. The sensible part of me of a few weeks ago felt disgusted at such a situation. We had turned America into a third world country run by dictators with wide smiles.”

Liars Called, however, is at its best when it’s veering into pure nonsense – although even then it’s quite repetitive. The first time vending machines appear, for example, is a very funny scene precisely for being nonsensical and absurd: “A few vending machines had been spotted, but their positions changed when no one was looking. They probably ate people who shook them.” At first, the vending machines work as a comical device, but then the narrative oversells them: the protagonist keeps bringing them up and thinking about how strange they were and, so, by the end of the book, every mention to them will probably be met more with an eye-roll than with laughter.

Another problem is that the secondary characters are all flat. Arson, for example, is defined by his trait of being unable to hear things correctly. Little Shade is defined by her tendency to being… shady, and so on. Coach Madison is the unidimensional brute of a villain, which means he is just a cruder version of Lance. The only character that shows any signs of being complex is Lance’s father: mainly because he doesn’t act like the protagonist thinks he should, mixing politeness with an air of danger, but he never gets much space to be developed.

The book also ends without a proper climax. Actually, it is filled with action scenes that are supposed to be epic, but when the protagonist is describing a Hydra as “a multi-headed dragon or similar” it becomes difficult to get excited. For all it’s worth, the reader will probably be cheering for the Hydra to kill Lance. The character narrator is unbearable and there is no reason for us to root for him. Since the secondary characters are all flat, there is also no reason to root for them as well. Consequently, the battles become boring, hollow affairs.

There is little plot to speak of, too. Lance finds himself in this magical version of his own world and is trying to survive. There is no villain to battle at the end, no big twist or revelation. There is little sign of character growth or of a narrative arc: Lance starts as an asshole and ends as an asshole. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with unlikable narrators. They don’t need to be morally judged, or have a redeeming journey or quality to work. But they need, at least, to be engaging in some way or another: and, alongside “runes” and “rogue”, “engaging” is also missing on Lance’s vocabulary. He’s despicable and that is the end of it. When the discussions about him are about to start – mainly when fairies call him a dangerous killer – they are cut short by some character or event, and things stay the same.

Liars Called misses the point of unlikable narrators. They are not supposed to be fully unbearable and, at the same time, narratively uninteresting. There must be something positive – narrative-wise – to make them worth it. But, in the end, even if Liars Called had a good narrator, the novel still wouldn’t work, since it lacks engaging characters and events, and even a decent structure.

August 25, 2019.