Subject: Review: The Prestige, Christopher Priest

From: John Grant <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 22 Sep 1995 19:21:16 GMT

THE PRESTIGE by Christopher Priest
Reviewed by John Grant

Christopher Priest is probably the most under-rated novelist at work today,
almost certainly because he chooses to write in that curious subgenre that
is sort of science fiction, sort of fantasy, but in no way generically
classifiable as either. For some reason we accept foreign writers who work
in this field -- John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ben Okri, Valerie Martin and
others -- but not Brits, unless they happen to be Martin Amis or John
Fowles. Priest, who can write any of these other authors out of their skins
-- with the possible (just possible) exception of Fowles -- tends to go
forgotten. Yet, perhaps because he publishes so infrequently, one has the
sense that the appearance of each new novel of his represents a publishing
_occasion_ -- a moment when each of us, if we have the slightest concern
about the future of fiction, should put our money where our mouths are.

_The Prestige_ is Priest's first novel in five years (the last was _The
Quiet Woman_ in 1990). It is one of those delicious books in which truth --
if there is indeed an absolute truth to the tale -- is revealed only
gradually, and partially. A variety of narrators, most unreliable, describe
to us the feud that sprang up between two Victorian stage magicians, Alfred
Borden and Rupert Angier. Angier made an early living as a fraudulent
spiritualist, which is what incurred Borden's obsessive wrath; Borden's
public debunking of Angier, prefaced by his unintended inducement of a
miscarriage by Angier's wife, is the source of Angier's venom. Yet atop all
this is the professional jealousy between the two. Borden has a trick that
seems to require the instantaneous transmission of a human body from one
place to another. Angier cannot understand how this is done and eventually,
in desperation, seeks the assistance of the inventor Nikola Tesla. Tesla is
able to duplicate the effect only by constructing a genuine matter-
transmitter, powered by the new force, electricity. However, the device is
really a matter-_duplicator_: while a live Angier reappears in some
startling part of the theatre, dazzling the punters who have come to see the
`magician,' there remains, unnoticed in the place where he was originally
standing, his corpse -- the `prestige.' To perform the trick he must die,
nightly.

To reveal more of this novel would be to do it and its readers a disservice:
Priest has many surprises up his sleeve, not the least of which is his own
ability to perform as a (narrational) illusionist.  Never, while reading
_The Prestige_, are we allowed to take anything for granted: the turn of a
page is likely to reveal to us that this particular magician has a new trick
that forces us to re-evaluate all that has gone before.

Others have tried this game, of course. William Goldman did it with _Magic_
(1976), which was filmed in 1978 (the `magic' involved was ventriloquism).
Jack Curtis did it with a rather nasty horror novel called _Conjure Me_
(1992). There are other examples. What these authors were trying to do was
explore the area between conjuring -- stage illusion -- and real magic.
Neither of the two cited authors was able -- quite -- to bring it off.
Priest does.

What he also manages to do is, through lack of overt statement, to make sly
satirical comment on the nature of human pettiness. Imagine: here we have a
potentially history-changing invention, the matter-transmitter, and what is
it used for? A conjuring trick, whose secret must be preserved from the
world at large because that, after all, is the sacrosanct ethic of
professional stage magicians.  Meanwhile its inventor, Tesla, is content
enough to keep silent about his breakthrough because he needs a few thousand
dollars to pay off his creditors -- who are less interested in the benefits
his work might bring to the human species than in whether or not their bills
are paid.

_The Prestige_ is a novel full of subtle nuances. I particularly liked the
way in which the dual nature of Borden is handled -- is he one person or is
he two, is he a single soul with two bodies, is he two souls sharing a
single body? -- and the portrayal of the woman (Olive/Olivia) who in effect
creates her own twin in order to be the mistress of one illusionist after
the other. She, like the illusionists themselves, discovers how to be two
people simultaneously; also like them, in the end she has to decide which of
her selves she would prefer to be.

I read this novel at a sitting: it's a long novel so it was a long sitting.
I cannot loudly enough exhort you to repeat my feat. Here is one of our
finest novelists at his peak. Need I say more?

%A Christopher Priest
%T The Prestige
%I Touchstone (Simon and Schuster)
%C London
%D September 1995
%G ISBN 0-671-71924-6
%P pp 404
%O hardback UKP 15.99
 
This review also appeared in the September issue of _SFX_ magazine, UK

John Grant