Christopher Priest RIP (1943-2024)

[nickthegeek]

This has hit hard. My favourite author.

Christopher Priest obituary

Most will know him from the Christopher Nolan film The Prestige, based on the book of the same name. Which is my favourite novel. 

And Dr Who fans will know that he submitted two stories in the 80s, Sealed Orders and The Enemy Within. The former was about the Time Lords ordering the Doctor to kill Romana (!), the second about an evil presence in the TARDIS. I'm sure either of these would have been way better than, say, Meglos!

Priest wrote (how awful to use the past tense) within the SF genre but he always disliked that term, preferring the term 'slipstream':

Slipstream does not define a category, but suggests an approach, an attitude, an interest or obsession with thinking the unthinkable or doing the undoable.

His novels are truly mindbending, in a unique and thrilling way. He has the most transparent writing style I have ever read, it's almost as if you are not reading, and the story is happening inside your head. Which makes the mindbending twists all the more brilliant and disturbing. And with 'twists' I'm not talking Sixth Sense style reversals. Priest is a lot more subtle, a lot more devastating. Going in to one of his books, you know he is going to get you - so you are looking out for it. And then you spot it - or so you think. Clever you! But then, a few chapters later, you realise that you have unwittingly entered his shadow world without realising. Priest is grinning with twinkling eyes and a sinister grin. He has you! It is enthralling. I know of no other writer like it. The Prestige, about rival magicians, is the best, and takes you on a deep, shocking and moving ride that I'm sorry to say the film does not quite do justice (but then film is a different medium).

I first came across him with The Space Machine, a highly untypical novel - a pastiche / mash-up of The War of the World and The Time Machine, great fun but not really representative of him.

His first novel, the one that put his name on the literary map, was the pure SF Inverted World, based around an eternally moving city, but all is not what it seems and the twist is both scientifically accurate and brain-melting.

His first slipstream book, The Affirmation, introduced his alternate world The Dream Archipelago and if you're curious, I'd recommend starting with this. It's unique in that it is its own sequel! Also of course, The Prestige. And The Glamour, a disturbing tale of invisibility and mental illness. And then if you're hooked, everything else he has written. 

God, I'm going to miss reading him. I have his last two books - Expect Me Tomorrow and Airside - on the shelf to read, and I am going to savour them.

NTG

[ltd]

Always fascinated by his books, even when I don't understand them - i.e. a lot of the time, which isn't to say he's anything other than highly readable. I enjoyed his novelisation of Mona Lisa (under pen name Luther Novak) which was something of a departure for him.

[nickthegeek]

Not read that one I must admit.

Of his more recent ones I recommend The Evidence (2020), which is quite straightforward (for him!) and ties up the mystery quite nicely - and is also quite meta and self-deprecating; at one point someone wonders if they are a character in a novel 'but of course they're not' (they are) (and so are we).

NTG

[ltd]

I really liked The Separation (although not convinced by the fate of the divergent universe Rudolf Hess) and The Adjacent. The Glamour I've read several times in different editions but still don't really "get it".