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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Christopher Priest

  
 
Blake Head
01:26 / 15.10.07
Christopher Priest. Not the comic book writer. The novelist. The have the same name, but they are not the same. Here’s what the novelist has to say on the matter (as well as offering up a small summary of his career and musing on the British-ness of his writing), at the Guest of Honour speech at the 2005 Interaction Con:

Of course, the irony of this wretched business is not lost on me. Many of my books are about identical twins, doubles, name-changes, doppelgängers, mistaken identity, separation, alternatives, parallels. If any writer deserves to have an impostor it clearly should be me.

Apparently Christopher Priest, the other one, Christopher J. Priest, the comics writer, is also now trying to become a novelist. Whether his novels will also dwell on the possibilities of identity theft is as yet unknown. I’m still kicking myself for missing Christopher Priest, the established one, at that convention, when I hadn’t heard the name. This all being preamble to… well, now I do know who he is, or at least I’ve read some of his books, so I know his name, and yet I’m surprised how little I hear that name when people are discussing authors they like. Which is strange, I think, because he is acknowledged, I believe, by people who are aware of his work, as one of the masters of dark, literate fantasy horror, slowly and quietly producing some of the most interesting, challenging fiction in the genre. Reading The Prestige last year I was struck by that occasional sensation that this was what the genre should be used for, this was what other books should be aspiring to follow. The control over the narrative, the elegance of the writing, the interaction between theme and structure, the development of ambiguity, the confidence to create a multi-layered, historical novel compelling not just because of the twists in the plot but the emotional nuance of the characters’ relationships, all impressed greatly. The film, in my opinion, captured only a certain amount of that.

Reading a few more novels, The Prestige (which I’m guessing will be most familiar to most people) is actually not as fitting as some others for cinematic adaptation, dealing as it does with unreliable narration, more specifically with the unreliability of a connection between reality and written text. Priest bases another novel, The Glamour, on the break between appearance and reality, and more specifically on the malleability of visual reality, as if appearance was something that could be edited, or moved around, or chopped up, or erased. It’s one I’d love to see filmed, because I think it would demand taking a single perspective that the novel doesn’t allow you to, or at least doing something interesting with the necessity of having one perspective at any one moment. Another novel, The Extremes, uses the conceit of the commonplace existence of virtual reality machines as its entry into similar themes, and which, like others of his works, also suggests that the characters perceiving these splits might not actually be perceiving them, and instead what they think they see might just be the manifestations of their own psychosis.

I do think of him as a very English writer, though nothing exactly nationalistic springs to mind, instead there’s an ordinary-ness which predominates his later works. Events take place in car parks, pubs, flats, small towns, familiar places that are settings for the extraordinary. There’s a similar sort of drive to investigate identity, appearance and reality as in Philip K. Dick, but handled almost totally differently, looking at the effects of extraordinary happenings on ordinary people, and really focusing on the craft of writing about that kind of material, its effects on the structure of the novel and the effects on the characters. At times in The Extremes it’s almost as if Priest is pushing the number of different perspectives to breaking point, and correspondingly there are scenes that move from appearing as relatively insignificant betrayals into ones of heartbreaking brutality and cruelty, then into complete artifice, without ever completely disavowing the reality of those previous perspectives.

So what do we think? Is Priest not as well known or well liked as he should or deserves to be, or is that a trick of perception? Why the obsession with doubles and identity, mental instability, the act of creation and what is created? I’ve not read Inverted World yet, so I don’t know how his “pure” sci-fi matches up against his later more realistic stuff, but I’d be interested to know how people think they compare. Any criticisms to be made? Does the use of conceits and the obsessive focus on identity lead to a certain predictability: “Oh look, another Priest novel using a slightly different clever technique to examine the separation between appearance and reality perceived by people who might be cracking up.”? There was a point during The Glamour when a thought like that occurred to me, just before a twist away from what was I was expecting sucked me right back into the possibilities of the narrative. Is he too unassuming or clever for his own good? Obviously I think he’s a great writer, does anyone have a reason to suggest why he might not be as special as I think he is? Does anyone else think his books are superb?
 
 
rizla mission
13:53 / 16.10.07
I only know Christopher Priest via his earlier '70s books I'm afraid, but have always meant to read some of the more recent ones.

I'm a huge fan of his debut novel "Fugue For A Darkening Island", as discussed here in the 'Under-rated Books' thread. A real forgotten classic I think. Sadly I suspect it has evaded republication simply because the title and plot summary could easily be misconstrued as a right wing diatribe in our more sensitive times...

I've also read Priest's next book (I think), "Inverted World", which I guess was a fairly good SF yarn of the "physics gone maaaad" variety, although I didn't enjoy it much because I don't really know jack about psychics and got baffled almost immediately.

"A Dream Of Wessex" is a very smart, subtle, grown-up SF novel in the J.G. Ballard vein... very well written, with more convincing characterisation than Ballard and a beautiful central precise, but possibly a bit TOO subtle in terms of the fact that basically fuck all happens in it...

A very good / interesting / underappreciated writer anyhow. I always make a point of picking up his books on the rare occasions I see one second-hand.
 
 
Blake Head
22:33 / 18.10.07
Your review of Fugue for a Darkening Island makes it sound fascinating, as well as obviously not being one of those novels of his in which sod all appears to happen. I’ll pick it up if I can. I’m going to give Inverted World a go next because it’s on my shelf already, but someone else who I lent the later books to said they didn’t like it much either, again because of the science. I am quite interested in whether the focus and interests of his later period show up in his past stuff.

Maybe other people might have read Priest without realizing it? After all, he’s authored tie-ins like eXistenZ and, um, Short circuit, under various pseudonyms. His Wikipedia page has more info.
 
 
Blake Head
18:33 / 16.11.07
I quite liked Inverted World in the end, though it's hugely different in terms of writing style from his later stuff: it's a much more familiar speculative science fiction story, and I thought the society of the moving city and its guilds was intriguing enough to carry me along. My ignorance about the physics didn’t seem to impact my enjoyment of the book as much as others it seems. It was only really the conclusion that left me a bit lost, a bit like the ending of The Glamour, Priest seems to accelerate away on his own track of thought in pursuit of a suitably ambiguous or thought provoking ending, it’s recognisably the same sort of progression that he makes throughout the novels but it seems to leave the reader (or at least me) left behind, feeling that we’ve arrived somewhere but suddenly not feeling like we’ve travelled the distance.

I suppose if we did want to play spot the theme, you’ve got the recurrence in Inverted World of the idea that what appears to reality as difference is irresolvably a matter of perception, just in this case rather than magic or mental illness you have a technology based probable cause for that change in perception. You’ve also got the beginnings of the obsession with the same-but-not-the-same figures due to the time distortions caused by travelling towards and away from Optimum: family members are suddenly no longer acting within the stable roles that you are used to, then disappearing, companions become people you struggle to recognise or have nothing in common with, and then in turn you’re not recognised because of your own aging; the distortion of time as something that separates people and their relationships.
 
 
Blake Head
15:26 / 27.11.07
The Separation is very good. I’ll try and avoid giving the game away, but basically it’s an account of the lives of two brothers before and during the Second World War, one a conscientious objector driving an ambulance in London, the other an RAF bomber pilot flying missions over Germany. Except, one soon discovers, history records their actions in an incomplete and misleading way, and the contradictions that this appears to throw up suggest a more major split that could affect the outcome of the war…

Like The Prestige there’s a modern day framing device, also like The Prestige the similarities and differences between twins are an essential component of the narrative, like The Glamour the different sections of the novel each offer a different perspective on the events based on the differing “source material” the novel is comprised from. Imposters, doubles, and identity confusion are all present. One of things that I’ve not really mentioned yet in the thread is how all this identity/reality confusion... stuff... is linked to characters that are subject to physical and emotional trauma. That’s there too. Once again, Priest writes characters who live with a fear that they’re cracking up, that their “lucid imaginings” are just that, imaginary, and yet, perhaps most strongly present in this novel is the theme that the unreliable mental state of the narrators is just one of several possible and potentially multiple causes for the contradictory perspectives on what’s actually going on. As ever, irresolution of all these possibilities is key.

No one moment is defined as the one where the titular separation takes place, there’s no “hinge” identified that the novel’s possible alternate histories rest on, though several are suggested which might have the potential to be so. Instead, a series of separations exist in the novel: there’s the aforementioned ethical and obvious physical separation between the twins, but more generally there’s a string of once-close relationships in the novel that suffer from estrangement, there’s the separation between what the different documents record about the characters, the separation between the public image of the war and the reality, and very strongly present is the moral distance that the act of mass bombings of German cities creates, the physical separation that in turn creates a separation between our idea of an “act of war” and one of mass murder.

The entry point for the reader this time is the historical document. As in other novels, this conceit is used both as the frame for the information presented to the reader and within the novel. At least one of the things Priest is trying to show here is the way that the facts presented in these documents have a limited verifiability, there’s a distance present between the reality of what happens and what we’re able to record about it, the difference between someone’s name or image and the person themselves. Inevitably, then, it’s a novel about the unreliability of historical writing. I seem to have a thing about covers at the moment, but the cover of my edition is worthy of note: two young boys, twins one can presume, each with one arm surrounding the other, the other grasping a book. That’s my theory for what the book’s about right there: people that are separated trying to erase the differences between themselves, and the shared nature of historical narratives: composed from multiple sources there are inevitably overlapping accounts which contradict each other, just as there are distances between events, absences of information which must be filled. Priest suggests that both history and memory are semi-creative acts, we fill in the gaps where we don’t have enough information, we strive for a consistent narrative and we excise information that doesn’t fit the picture and call it unreliable. This strategy, laudable enough, presupposes a reliable chain of events, a singular reality where timelines can only take one path, that they don’t divide from each other and cross over one another again. Which could of course be considered one of the distinguishing features of fiction; something else I think Priest addresses repeatedly.

There’s a fascinating essay by Paul Kincaid on the book here, who reckons it’s all about the multiple porous membranes of reality; spoilers present, but definitely worth a read after finishing the novel to add another perspective on what’s actually going on. One of the most interesting points he makes is about how, just as much as it’s a novel which deals with alternate histories peeling away from each other, it’s about how, once separated, the characters, and the variant realities they may arise from, seem to unconsciously strive to mirror the “alternates” they’re no longer attached to.

The meanest, but still possible, reading of The Separation would be to say that it just doesn’t make sense, that Priest piles contradiction upon incongruence until the whole edifice topples over at the end. But for me the inconsistencies in the narrative are an aperture Priest creates to allow the dream-like confrontation between his characters and their fears, and I never found it anything less than confident, convincing and gripping. So if alternate histories, literary doubling or just dense, clever speculative fiction are to your taste, I really can’t recommend it highly enough.
 
  
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