Review: The Separation by Christopher Priest

The Separation by Christopher Priest

Published: Old Earth Books (2003), Scribner (2002)

Awards Won: BSFA and Arthur C. Clarke Awards

Awards Nominated: John W. Campbell Memorial Award

The Book:

“Twin brothers Joe and Jack, both with the initials J.L. Sawyer, competed together as rowers in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and their lives afterward were shaped by the coming war. Their differing ideologies caused them to become estranged as the paths of their lives diverged. Joe became a conscientious objector and worked with the Red Cross. Jack became an RAF bomber pilot, going on endless missions against the German people to defend his own.

However, this is not only a story of two different perspectives of the same war, but an examination of what the war might have been in numerous contradictory realities. Which of the brothers, if either, dies in a bombing raid?  Does the UK sign a separate peace with Germany, or do they fight the war through to the end? The past, present, and future are ambiguous and full of possibilities.” ~Allie

This is the third of Priest’s novels that I have read, the first two being The Prestige and The Islanders. I listened to this one on audiobook, thanks to a new blue-tooth iphone connector that will allow me to listen to novels on my commute. There will be more audiobook reviews to come! I thought the narrator, Joe Jameson, was excellent, though I have no idea how accurately he represented the various regional accents of the UK. For another interesting coincidence, this is the first of two reviews that will focus on alternate histories of WWII, since my next review will be of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.

My Thoughts:

The Separation is a less fantastical story than the other two novels that I have read by Priest, but there are common elements between the three appear to be characteristic of his style.  Perhaps most notably, twins or doubles are an integral element of the story. The Sawyer brothers are not the only pair that makes an appearance, and the nature of being or having a twin or double is often touched upon.  In the case of the Sawyer brothers, they are tied together by their similarities, and their differences serve to emphasize the alternate versions of WWII. Joe tends to dominate the narrative of a WWII with a peaceful resolution, while Jack dominates the narrative of a war that continues to allied victory.  The two brothers’ stories often interact in confusing ways, and sometimes others even take them to be the same person.  It was sometimes difficult to keep track of each twin’s current experiences at different points in the novel, but they made an interesting pair with which to explore variations on WWII history.

The two other elements that seem to be characteristic of Priest are the extensive use of fictional documents, which comprise most of the novel, and unresolved puzzles. The story is told through the Sawyer twins’ personal records, through the experiences of others who knew them, and through a historian who is investigating their life history.  I thought the documents were very well done, with each fictional author having a distinct voice that was further enhanced by the audiobook narrator.  The puzzling part of this collection of documents arises from the fact that they are often contradictory. They seem to describe more than two simple separate timelines (peace and war) since there are also records within each of these broad categories that seem to differ in key details. It is never clarified how much of the disagreements arise from unreliable narrators, and how much arise from differing realities. I think the confusion and contradictions might be intended as a comment on the uncertainty of recorded history, but they were also fun to try to piece together into coherent worlds. As in The Islanders, one should not expect to find definitive explanations in the text, or for the story to have a particularly clear resolution.  However, it felt like a very carefully constructed novel, and I think it would benefit from multiple readings to help filter all the information into the right patterns.

While trying to keep all the details straight, it also occurred to me that this would probably be an easier book to follow for readers with extensive knowledge of the UK during the WWII time period. Being able to pick up immediately how Priest is altering history might help one see more clearly the intentions behind the particular changes.  I am not especially knowledgeable in this area, but I enjoyed going over the details with my father, who has read more extensively than I have on the subject.  For instance, I didn’t really know anything about the theories surrounding Ruldolf Hess, and the possibility of peace between the UK and Germany in 1941.  The Separation might be better appreciated by someone coming to it with more knowledge than I have, but I enjoyed being inspired to learn.  It is a novel that demands an engaged and attentive reader, and one that is well worth the consideration.

My Rating: 4/5

The Separation tells the story of Jack and Joe Sawyer, twins who took two different paths in the Second World War.  Jack joined the RAF, while Joe joined the Red Cross. While they share the same reality, they also seem to exist in alternative, overlapping realities.  For instance, in Joe’s dominant reality, the war ends in 1941 with a peace arrangement between the UK and Germany.  The story is told through many different sorts of fictional documents, which often tell contradictory stories about the lives of the two young men.  The story is a kind of puzzle, requiring the reader to be actively engaged in piecing information together from the many sources.  Many questions are never explicitly resolved, and I think the novel would require multiple readings to appreciate fully. I thought The Separation was intensely interesting, and I enjoyed continuing to think through the various unresolved questions long after I'd finished the novel. I look forward to reading more of Christopher Priest's work in the future! 

Review: The Islanders, by Christopher Priest

The Islanders by Christopher Priest

Published : Gollancz, 2011

Awards Won : BSFA Award and Campbell Memorial Award

The Book :

“A tale of murder, artistic rivalry, and literary trickery; a Chinese puzzle of a novel where nothing is quite what it seems; a narrator whose agenda is artful and subtle; a narrative that pulls you in and plays an elegant game with you.

The Dream Archipelago is a vast network of islands. The names of the islands are different depending on who you talk to, their very locations seem to twist and shift. Some islands have been sculpted into vast musical instruments, others are home to lethal creatures, others the playground for high society. Hot winds blow across the archipelago and a war fought between two distant continents is played out across its waters. 

The Islanders serves both as an untrustworthy but enticing guide to the islands; an intriguing, multi-layered tale of a murder; and the suspect legacy of its appealing but definitely untrustworthy narrator.” ~WWEnd.com

This is only the second novel I’ve read by Christopher Priest, and the first was The Prestige.  I really enjoyed both the book and film of The Prestige, though they had their differences.  I’d always meant to read more of his work.

My Thoughts:

The Islanders is presented as a guide to the Dream Archipelago, and it contains chapters describing various islands, ordered alphabetically. The Dream Archipelago is an uncertain, contradictory kind of place, and the structure of the novel reflects that.  It is a place that can’t be seen as a whole, due to temporal distortions, and so, like the reader, the inhabitants have to build a sense of their world from experiences and disjointed information. Many pieces of the puzzle are also suspect or inconsistent.  For example, this is a book whose fictional introduction is written by a character that dies within its pages. Since I haven’t read many of Christopher Priest’s novels, I’m not sure exactly where this novel fits into his larger body of work.  There are other works that feature the Dream Archipelago, but I didn’t feel like I was missing anything crucial by reading The Islanders first.

The novel makes for a very odd kind of travel guide, since the information provided for each island varies greatly.  Some islands’ sections contain only geographical and cultural descriptions, others have complete short stories, and still others contain transcripts of interviews or correspondences.  Some chapters, like the one about the horrific insects named thrymes, were pretty exciting in their own right, but I was most impressed by how the different sections interlinked with one another.  For instance, one section contained a one-sided conversation of letters between an aspiring novelist and a famous writer Chaster Kammeston.  Though her letters seem perfectly friendly and polite, information later revealed about Kammeston highlights how many of his buttons she managed to innocently push.  I loved how the book became progressively more complicated as there was more information to mentally cross-reference, and I spent a lot of time flipping back and forth between chapters to remind myself of small details.

The novel offers many tantalizing puzzles, but it does not provide any solutions.  If you’re expecting any kind of resolution or conclusion resolves the mysteries and ties together the different plotlines, then you will be disappointed.  There are enough clues, though, for the reader to come up with their own theories, and it is also left to the reader to decide on what meaning, if any, the overall work holds. For one example, there is never any revelation about the true circumstances of the murder, mentioned in the novel’s description. However, there’s enough information scattered throughout the novel to give a pretty good idea of what happened.  I can see how this style of novel would not be to everyone’s taste, but I had a lot of fun trying to see how everything fit together!  

My Rating: 4/5

The Islanders is more of a puzzle than a conventional novel.  It is presented as a tourist’s guide to the Dream Archipelago, and it contains a story, description, correspondence, or other shortwork for a variety of islands, ordered alphabetically by name.  I liked how the various sections linked to one another, and how information gained later in the novel could change the interpretation of previous chapters.  I thought it was a lot of fun piecing larger stories together from the information scattered throughout the different islands’ sections.  There is really nothing in the way of a conclusion, though, so the larger picture only exists within the readers’ minds.  Like the cartographers that draw maps from the Archipelago’s wandering drones, the reader is left to construct their view of The Islanders by building connections between many disjointed pieces of information.   

Review: The Prestige by Christopher Priest

The Prestige by Christopher Priest
Published: Simon & Schuster UK/Touchstone, 1995
Awards Won: World Fantasy Award
Nominations: British Science Fiction Association Award, Arthur C. Clarke Award

The Book:

"In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in the dark during the course of a fraudulent seance. From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and expose one another.  Their rivalry will take them to the peaks of their careers, but with terrible consequences. In the course of pursuing each other's ruin, they will deploy all the deception their magicians' craft can command--the highest misdirection and the darkest science.  Blood will be spilled, but it will not be enough. In the end, their legacy will pass on for generations...to descendants who must, for their sanity's sake, untangle the puzzle left to them" ~barnesandnoble.com

I enjoyed the movie adaptation of The Prestige, so I thought I should check out the source material, the novel by Christopher Priest.  While the film did depart in some significant ways from the plot of the novel, I liked them both.  I think that each form of the story drew from the strengths of their respective mediums.  It was also interesting to approach the novel while knowing the secret plot twist, which I will avoid mentioning here, just in case.

My Thoughts:

In the novel version of The Prestige, the story of the rival magicians, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier is framed in a 'modern' story about their great-grandchildren.  The Borden descendant, Andrew Westley, is an adopted child who has always had the unexplainable feeling that he has a twin brother.  The Angier descendant, Kate, is living in a wing of her family home, haunted by a scene she witnessed as a child.  The mystery of Kate and Andrew shows how the magician's feud has affected both of their families for generations, but it only takes up a small portion of the book.  It mostly serves to introduce the two fictional documents that make up the bulk of the story, Alfred Borden's semi-private memoirs and Rupert Angier's diary.

Instead of switching back and forth between the two magicians, as was done in the movie, the first part of the novel follows Borden's story from beginning to end.  After that, the point of view switches to Angier and we learn his complete life story.  Priest succeeded in giving each of the men a distinct voice, and the two documents even differed markedly in style.  Borden's memoirs were vaguely intended to be read by others, so he wrote very guardedly about his professional and personal life.  Due to this sense of having an audience,  his life story was kept very focused and entertainingly structured.  On the other hand, Angier's diary was, in this fictional world, never actually intended to be read.  As a result, it was much more fragmentary and disorganized, and the pacing was inconsistent.  I personally preferred Borden's memoir over Angier's diary, mostly due to the more concise and focused style.

One interesting result of telling the story through two private 'documents' is how it clearly showed each man as the hero of his own life story, with the opposing man as the villain.  Borden was a working-class boy who had the talent and intense desire to learn stage magic.  Angier was an aristocratic gentleman who left his family to perform as a magician alongside his lower-class girlfriend.  Angier, unlike Borden, had no natural talent for devising tricks, but he was just as obssessed with the field. All it took was one incident of youthful arrogance on Borden's part to kick off the feud that would shape their personal and professional lives. 

Neither of the magicians seemed like a particularly reliable narrator, due both to their individual identity crises and the natural tendency of a storyteller to cast themselves in a positive light.  Even when they were recounting the same scene, the tone, intentions, and often even actions or dialogue, differed in a realistic way. I felt that this helped to lend a sense of reality to both of the magicians. I can't deny that they both had significant personal flaws, most notably their obsession with stage magic over the people they supposedly loved.  However, even though they often made decisions that left me infuriated, I typically found it easy to sympathize with them.  I suppose I respect people that are so deeply motivated, even if that drive pushes them towards painful consequences for themselves and others.

Perhaps due to the nature of the story, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier are really the only characters who feel like fully realized people.  The descendants take up only a small portion of the book, and, of course, the reader is only introduced to any other characters through the filters of Angier and Borden.  However, it was curious to me that Borden and Angier seemed to be the most important people in each others' lives, and the most often mentioned in their respective journals. Borden almost never mentioned his wife and children. Angier abandoned his wife and children for years to run around with another woman, and when he finally came back to them, they simply forgave him.  The most notable non-viewpoint character is Olive, an American dancer and stage assistant who is the mistress of both magicians at different times.  Even she is kind of a stereotype, the sexually-liberated American temptress who lured the men from their wives.  I know the story is fundamentally about Borden, Angier and their magic, so I understand why little time was devoted to their wives, families, and friends.  I just feel as though it would have been interesting to get a better picture of how they interacted with the people that were important in their lives.

I was also a little disappointed with the final scene of the story.  It didn't really answer some of the major questions of the magicians' story, or provide much closure for the descendants' story.  Since the descendants' story took up so little of the book, it ran the risk of feeling unnecessary when it was not made clear how it either reflected or enhanced the main story. I'm not opposed to leaving some things open-ended, but I would have liked for there to have been a little more to tie the old and new stories together thematically. 

My Rating: 4/5

The Prestige is an exciting story about two feuding rival magicians and how their obsession with their craft shaped their personal and professional lives.  I enjoyed the novel, even though I already knew a lot of the plot twists from the film adaptation.  A modern story, which felt slightly extraneous, frames the main plot, which is told through fictional documents authored by the magicians Borden and Angier.  I liked the way these documents were used to give each magician a unique voice, and how their unreliability as narrators enhanced the sense of realism.  I favored Borden's narrative, since I found Angier's to sometimes drag or seem unfocused.  While the two magicians made for intriguing protagonists, I wished Priest would have chosen to show more of their relationships with their families or friends. I think that The Prestige is worth reading, even if you've already seen the movie.  The story and style are different enough that I was never bored, even though I already knew the general plot.