Christopher Priest (1) (1943–2024)

This novel is highly deceptive. On the surface, it is about the impact of the 9/11 attacks on those it left behind. It then goes into some of the less lurid conspiracy theories; Priest makes the case for the evidence presented so far being seriously lacking. In this, you might think we were in similar territory to Ken Macleod's Intrusion, where another science fiction writer goes a bit off piste to orthodox political thinking for the purposes of building a contrarian viewpoint to provoke debate. But that isn't Priest's intention at all.

Priest introduces us to Ben Matson, a British journalist whose girlfriend goes missing on 9/11. He believes her to have been a passenger on American Airlines flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. but her name appears on no passenger lists. As he investigates her fate, he becomes increasingly sceptical about the official narrative - and then a crashed jetliner is found off the US coast which seems to have come from nowhere - no corresponding aircraft has been listed as missing, and the US Coastguard suddenly declare that the wreck is not a jetliner after all, but rather a ship sunk in World War 2.

As the story develops (told in numerous flashbacks), we meet Kyril Tatarov, a mathematician born in the Soviet Union but now an American citizen. Possessed of a brilliant mind, Tatarov has evolved a theory that extends from the mathematical into the social, proposing that in a world governed by social media, with more and more people being exposed to a range of opinions about what others think happened, that consensus can reach a point where reality warps and what people think happened becomes the new reality.

In a world where political debate is now governed, not by facts but by "optics", this idea seems all too possible, though the only reality being warped in our world is that inside our own heads - for the moment. Yet we have long understood that "history is written by the victors", and "a lie can be half-way round the world before the truth has got its boots on", and similar ideas are part of the currency of modern political and social debate. How long before actual facts are bent to suit the consensus - and how long before we cease to notice it?

But beyond this, Priest is playing games with us. On one level, the title allows for some ambiguity from the outset. Is An American Story a story from America, or is it a story about an airliner, in the sense of Hitchcock's North by Northwest? Or both?

And there are other clues that point in a different direction. Priest's three books immediately preceding this one - The Islanders, The Adjacent and The Gradual were all, partly or mainly, set in Priest's fantastical seascape of the "Dream Archipelago", on a world very much like ours but home to a large number of islands scattered across a world-ocean which are subject to strange time dislocations, making the business of travelling from island to island more complex than just dealing with different administrations and their varying rules for entry, exit and customs. This book is firmly set in our world, but part of the action takes place on the Scottish island of Bute, or Eilean Bhòid in Gaelic - just as the islands in the Dream Archipelago have their common name and their local, patois name. Priest describes the seas around Bute, and the ferries that ply these seas, in the same way that he described the islands of the Dream Archipelago in his previous books. And the arcane and sometimes seemingly pointless bureaucratic processes that travellers in the Dream Archipelago encounter when arriving on a new island seem echoed when Matson arranges to interview Professor Tatarov in a mysterious American intelligence establishment suddenly set up in a disused hydropathic resort on Bute (which vanishes almost without trace a few years later).

Just to increase our sense of dislocation, the book was written in 2017-18 but is partially set in around 2021; Priest's idea of the fate of post-Brexit Britain, with a pro-EU Scotland declaring independence adds to the feelings of dislocation; a Balkanised Britain is a theme that Priest has hinted at throughout his writing career, and it certainly adds to the reader's unease. There is an element of autobiography in all this, as later in life Priest settled on Bute and lived there until his death earlier this year.

All in all, then, this was a book that made me think. At the end of the novel, Ben Matson finds some evidence he can believe in, no matter where that leads him. How the evidence got there is never explained, but within the context of the story it all makes some sense - but that leads to other parts of the 9/11 narrative being undermined. Perhaps this all takes place in a world where reality really is malleable - there is an Easter egg in the text that gives readers of other Priest novels a hint - but ultimately this is a novel designed to challenge our own complacency about the world we are making for ourselves.… (more)

We are returned to Priest's 'Dream Archipelago' for this novel, which traces the career of composer Alesando Sussken, from his early life in the military dictatorship of the Republic of Glaund - one of the protagonists in the global war that the islands of the Archipelago are neutral in - through his growth as a composer, and then his life-changing trip with a cultural delegation around the islands of the Archipelago. How that trip changes him, both of the better and for the worse, is the substance of the book. Along the way, we discover more of how the temporal vortices affect those who travel between islands, and how more experienced travellers deal with this. (Of course, this may or may not have any bearing on other Priest stories that happen to be set in the Dream Archipelago; that is in the nature of things.)

The sense of life amongst the islands of the Archipelago is just as strong here, and it is contrasted with life in Glaund, an Orwellian grey townscape of concrete, industrial decay and deadening conformity. Sussken takes inspiration for his music from distant views of an offshore island that his government prefers not to talk about; he can only take that so far until his tour. Glaund also affects him in other ways; he has an encounter with the Generalissima of the military regime who commissions a work from him. The parallels between Sussken's situation and that of Shostakovich faced with demands from Stalin for uplifting music in the service of the State, are clear.

Sussken notes, though, that prolonged exposure to the Archipelago seems to make other composers adopt more populist themes, based around folk tunes and popular marches. That he reacts against this suggests that he feels unwilling to compromise his art (though readers may reflect that this never stopped Charles Ives or Gustav Mahler incorporating such themes in their symphonies). When the Generalissima sets out the requirements for the work she commissions from Sussken, he is dismayed to find these to be the elements she demands. But as so often, it's "art for art's sake, but money for God's sake", which lands Sussken in more trouble.

The denouement ties up all sorts of loose ends, though it would not be possible without the extraordinary nature of the Dream Archipelago It is satisfying, and (unusually for Priest) has a little humour in it (also be alert for a northern English Easter egg slipped into the text). There is also a reference to one of the earlier Dream Archipelago stories, but that only adds to the sense of dislocation rather than binding the stories together in any way. This was most likely Priest's intention.

As ever, the writing makes the events clear and the story holds together well, despite the complexities of the plot. The world of the Dream Archipelago is not out world, but neither is it at all alien. This is where the strength of the novel lies, in making the setting familiar and yet not familiar. Recommended.… (more)

Immediately before reading Christopher Priest's The Islanders, I had read a biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the remarkable Englishman who trekked across Europe on foot in 1932 as a very young man, exploring the places, people and lives he met in those distant, pre-war years. He spent time after his walk living in the Balkans; during the war, he helped lead insurgent forces on Crete, mingling with the Cretan shepherds and (through speaking fluent Greek) mingling with them invisibly. After the war, he settled in Greece, living on the Peloponnese coast and writing about his travels on the mainland and around the islands of the Aegean. So when, through a fairly random choice, I opened The Islanders, I was ready for a novel made up of gazetteer entries for imaginary islands set in an imaginary sea, populated by artists, writers and scientists, leading lives that only seem ordinary on the surface.

The stories in this book are set in the "Dream Archipelago", a profuse scattering of islands in a great world-sea between two warring continents in north and south. The world they are on is not ours, and yet bears outward similarities to our own. But there is much about the Dream Archipelago that is illusory. Time and space are sometimes not fixed quantities; the world of the Dream Archipelago stands at an angle to our own, and the familiar may sometimes flip over into the fantastic. At first, this is only reflected in some of the gazetteer entries and some of their handy hints for travellers that bring the reader up short; but then. as we go further into the book, we encounter stories about individual inhabitants of this world, first as historical background material and then later as individual accounts, and we see the world, and specific events in it, through different eyes. Gradually, our own perception shifts and our interpretation of events is challenged.

Priest started writing stories set in the Dream Archipelago in the late 1970s, with the first three appearing in book form in his collection An Infinite Summer in 1979. In his introduction to that book, Priest says that the stories were inspired by a holiday in the Greek islands, but that there were a number of other locations that went into the mix, especially the Channel Islands (a small group of islands just off the northern French coast, but held as the semi-feudal property of the British Crown for many hundreds of years). Indeed, Priest gives the islands of he Archipelago a legal and administrative system that seems to come directly from Jersey or Guernsey. He also said in that introduction that the individual stories should not be considered as being linked in any way; other than being set in the Dream Archipelago, they had little or nothing in common. But he kept returning to the subject, and by the time all his Archipelago stories were collected together in The Dream Archipelago in 1999, some of the earlier stories had been revised to make them fit more directly into the loose series that these stories had become. His 1981 novel The Affirmation also had segments set in the Dream Archipelago, although that part of the novel portrays the protagonist's own psychotic retreat from his (and our) reality into a world that appears to be of his own making. But this is a game that Priest is playing with us, because in The Islanders, there are references to a novel written by a character in this book, called The Affirmation. Later Priest novels, such as The Adjacent (2013) and The Gradual (2016) are set, partly or wholly, in the Dream Archipelago. Yet it would be unsafe to think of these books as constituting a series of some sort, but rather a setting that Priest returned to as ideas occurred to him that would befit from the shared setting.

So in The Dream Archipelago we piece together some lives - and deaths - from different viewpoints, and over an extended reading, rather like the way we who read history piece together our own interpretation of events based on differing interpretations of the same events as seen from different viewpoints, or relating seemingly un-associated snippets of information that go together and make a whole story. This approach will always leave some narrative holes, whether we are reading about real events or fictional ones, but that just gives a book like The Islanders a special smack of authenticity, just like real life. It is a prime example of the sort of speculative literature that I think of as a "puzzle novel"; but in this case, there is no one answer that is right. Rather, the reader has to arrive at an answer that they personally find satisfying. For Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth. And if you find this novel to have beauty, you will find truth in it, no matter how fantastic the events or how fragmentary the beauty.… (more)