BOOKS A liminal archipelago Jay Vickers

An authoritative thematic study of a supremely fortean novelist is let down by its structure, finds

The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest

Paul Kincaid

Gylphi Limited 2020

Pb, 235pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781780240886

Christopher Priest is arguably the most fortean science fiction writer of all – though as this study of his work makes clear, he stopped identifying himself as an SF writer decades ago. Some critics have labelled his work slipstream or even magical realism – or, as SF critic and longtime fan Paul Kincaid says, it’s in “a liminal territory… genre that doesn’t really obey the rules of genre”. Priest’s novels are all about uncertainty. “This unreliability of reality is one of the defining characteristics of Priest’s work”; he doesn’t ever use the word, but this is absolutely fortean territory.

For non-SF fans Priest is probably best known for writing The Prestige, which the film of the same name is based on – but his 50-year writing career is so much more than that. The Unstable Realities of Christopher Priest explores recurrent themes in his work. Priest has written very little that could be called “hard SF”; the term “inner space” could have been coined for his work. From the first page we see that “what happens in our own minds [is] more important than what happens in the distant reaches of space”.

Priest is intrigued by memory and its unreliability. Our continuing identity is dependent on our memory: I remember what I did last week, last year, so I’m the same person who had those experiences. But if we remember a different version of reality from what other people remember, which version of reality – and which of us – is real?

As his writing career develops, this “sense that reality lies in the eye of the beholder, and is therefore subject to constant change, would become an ever more overt, ever more complex part, of Priest’s fictional world.” The ambiguity of perception occurs in many of his novels, perhaps most clearly in The Glamour (1984), where characters using the glamour become not so much invisible as unseen, un-noticed.

In his 1981 novel The Affirmation, Peter Sinclair is writing his autobiography, though it’s not set in Britain but in the Dream Archipelago. But in the Dream Archipelago another Peter Sinclair writes an account of his life, set “in an imaginary realm called Britain”. Each Sinclair writes the other’s story. Both are real. This “doubling” is another recurrent trope in Priest’s fiction, taking many forms: “twins, two people who look alike or have the same name, a reflection, a shadow, an echo”.

The Islanders (2011) is the most oustanding example of different versions of reality, different histories of people and places. It’s presented as a gazetteer of the islands in the Dream Archipelago, the constantly shifting setting of several of Priest’s novels. It contains “legal documents, newspaper reports, letters or fragments of autobiography”, as well as longer stories – but they repeatedly contradict each other: “There is no certainty, no consistency, in the realities that are presented by the various entries in the book.”

As the author says, the Dream Archipelago is “an infinitely variable stage set”.

Kincaid demonstrates clearly that there are multiple ways of interpreting Christopher Priest’s work: “All are valid, none are complete.” His analysis is excellent, though frequently repetitious as he covers similar or overlapping themes in the various novels. This is largely the consequence of his strange decision to examine Priest’s work chronologically in the even-numbered chapters, and thematically in the odd-numbered chapters.

There’s also the problem that the author knows his subject so well. He is intimately familiar with every character, every plot line, every recurring theme of every version of every novel – and of every short story.

But because he knows the books so well, he forgets that most readers won’t share this encyclopædic knowledge; even lovers of Priest’s work will have read many of them years if not decades ago – and memory, as we are constantly reminded, is unreliable. It would have helped to have had clear, concise plot summaries of each novel as they appear chronologically – and here again the alternate chapters format really doesn’t help, because the author is often discussing complex ambiguities in a novel several chapters before introducing the novel itself.

Indeed, at times it becomes confusing as to which novel he’s actually discussing; a very simple aid to help the reader and clarify the author’s argument, as in many scholarly works, would have been sub-heads.

But perhaps this confusion, this ambiguity, is deliberate; after all, it echoes the essence of Priest’s novels, “that remembering and misremembering create the reality we occupy”. Whatever its awkwardness in construction, this book will probably remain the authoritative study of this significant British writer’s work. ★★★★