Book Review | The Gradual by Christopher Priest

In the latest novel from one of the UK's greatest writers we return to the Dream Archipelago, a string of islands that no one can map or explain.

Alesandro Sussken is a composer, and we see his life as he grows up in a fascist state constantly at war with another equally faceless opponent. His brother is sent off to fight; his family is destroyed by grief. Occasionally Alesandro catches glimpses of islands in the far distance from the shore, and they feed into his music—music for which he is feted.

But all knowledge of the other islands is forbidden by the junta, until he is unexpectedly sent on a cultural tour. And what he discovers on his journey will change his perceptions of his country, his music and the ways of the islands themselves.

Playing with the lot of the creative mind, the rigours of living under war and the nature of time itself, this is Christopher Priest at his absolute best.

***

Pro tip, folks: never, ever, ever ask artists where they get their ideas from. It's not a trade secret or anything so sensational—it's just a silly question in the eyes of the aforementioned, and at best, silly questions beget silly answers, such as the bit about the Bognor Regis-based ideas dealer Neil Gaiman used to use. The fact of the matter is that art is inherently personal, and people, whatever their superficial similarities, are completely unique, so what inspires one person in one way isn't likely to inspire another, and if it does, it'll be differently.

That's just one of the lessons the eventually-fêted composer Alesandro Sussken learns in The Gradual: a dreamlike diatribe on the source of song and scene and story and so on, arranged, somewhat like a literary symphony, around one man's lifelong journey through the tides of time.

Like The Islanders and The Adjacent and a bunch of other Christopher Priest books before it, The Gradual takes place in the Dream Archipelago, which is to say "the largest geographical feature in the world, comprising literally millions of islands." The Susskens—a family of musicians, mostly—live on Glaund, which is at war with Faiandland, and has been for as long as anyone can remember, for reasons no one can rightly recall. This sort of thing is not uncommon in the Dream Archipelago, so Alesandro doesn't take it too personally... that is, until his older brother Jacj is enlisted.

Years pass. Indeed, decades do:

Jacj's absence was eternally in the background of everything I did. Whatever had happened to him gave me feelings of dread, misery, horror, helplessness, but you cannot work up these emotions every day, every hour. I feared for him, was terrified of the news that I felt would come inevitably: he was dead, he had gone missing in action, he was horrifically wounded, he had deserted and been shot by officers. All these I pondered.

Yet the time went by... 

As time tends to. Inevitably, Alesandro has to direct his energies elsewhere, and perhaps it's the fact that Jacj may yet be out there somewhere that leads to our hero's first fascination with the world outwith his.

The Scotsman Abroad | The Adjacency Effect

Horror of horrors: I've been without the internet for the last 48 hours!

Actually, aside the initial inconvenience, it's been a fine few days. I squeezed a whole hell of a lot of reading in, finished the superior third season of The Killing, played the final Dishonored DLC, and caught up on a few awesome comics.

It's amazing, the sheer quantity of stuff you can get done when you aren't distracted by emails and tweets and feeds and so on. If I'm honest, when I woke up this morning to see that they'd fixed things at the exchange, I was almost disappointed. Almost.

In any case, I've got an awful lot to catch up on before I'm back on track, so today, for your entertainment, let me point you elsewhere.

Seamless storytelling can sometimes seem like magic, but in The Adjacent, Christopher Priest goes to great lengths to stress the applied aspects of both practices: 

"What I do [...] is contrived to look like a series of miracles, but in reality the preparation of a magical illusion is a prosaic matter. Few people realise the amount of rehearsal conjurors have to put in, nor what goes on in the background. A trick often requires technical assistants, who will help design and build the apparatus. The movements a magician makes on stage are the result of long and patient rehearsal, while still having to look natural and spontaneous to the audience. It is an acquired practical skill, in other words. Only while in performance, in the glare of the limelight, can magic look like inspiration. Even at best it is never more than an illusion. Things are never what they seem." (p.86)

This is true of almost every facet of The Adjacent. Its narrative feels fairly straightforward at first, but the farther into the fold we go, the less linear and logical it looks. One tale turns into two, two into ten... ten threads or thereabouts, then, which contradict as often as complement one another, seeming to stand alone from the whole at the same time as suggesting some imperative collective resonance. Meanwhile, whatever motivations or expectations Priest's cast of characters either have or lack at the outset are quickly obliterated; annihilated on even the theoretical level by something uncomfortably akin to the Perturbative Adjacent Field proposed by Professor Thijs Rietvel.

You can read the rest of my review of The Adjacent over at Strange Horizons.

In short, it mightn't be the place for readers new to Christopher Priest to begin, but for those of us who've stuck with him through thick and thin, it's an astonishingly rewarding novel. In long... well, you know where to go.

The Scotsman Abroad | On An Island

So the latest of my reviews for Strange Horizons went up a week or so ago.

It's of The Islanders by Christopher Priest, which you may recall was one of my most anticipated new releases of the year.

Turns out I wasn't wrong to be so excited about it. Here's a snippet, from the very beginning of the article:

Whatever you think The Islanders is, think again. 

That is unless you think it's the first new novel by Christopher Priest in almost a decade; it is that. But none of the other things you may or may not or may yet imagine of it are even close, to be sure. 

Actually... strike that. The Islanders isn't even a novel in the conventional sense, because despite appearances to the contrary, or else precisely because of them, The Islanders is not so much a narrative, with a plot and characters or any of the usual storytelling accoutrements, as it is a travel guide — a work of reference — purportedly written by and for tourists en route to or through the Dream Archipelago, which is to say "the largest geographical feature on our world" (p.8): an elusive arrangement of some several hundred thousand islands, large and small, scattered about a single vast ocean and enclosed on the north and the south by two gargantuan continents entrenched in perpetual warfare with one another.

I say that. But in truth (not that there is truthfully a single truth to be arrived at throughout this astonishing testament to Priest's much-missed mode of magical realism, unless there is), these too — these broad, whispered, hand-me-down physical characteristics — are called into question on more than one occasion as we track the seemingly meandering ley lines of The Islanders. For various reasons, you see, foremost amongst them gravitational anomalies known as temporal gradients which make aerial navigation practically impossible — and this is very much par for the course in Priest's latest — "There are no maps or charts of the Dream Archipelago. At least there are no reliable ones, or comprehensive ones, or even whole ones" (p.14). 

(continue reading)

Ladies and gentlemen, be my guest: click on through to read the rest!

And if you're still on the fence about this beauty of a book, I'd also point you towards Adam Roberts' excellent review of The Islanders over on Punkadiddle. Adam writes that The Islanders is "a magnificent novel, one of my books of the year," and I'm not at all inclined to disagree.

Quoth the Scotsman | Christopher Priest on Perception

A couple of caveats to bear in mind before we start. Unless otherwise indicated, none of the quotes quoted in the following article are representative of the beliefs of the person in question quoted nor those the person quoting the person in question. Additionally, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental... or so I'm saying.

In short, Quoth the Scotsman is just a space here on TSS for me to post neat quotes as and when I come across them. Simple. As. That.

***

Here before me I have a copy of one of my single-most anticipated novels of 2011: The Islanders by the great and terrible Christopher Priest. 

It's a good feeling!

And by gum, it's a good book, too. But then, you hardly need me to tell you that. Christopher Priest has been astonishing readers in genre and the mainstream for almost forty years now; he's that rare species of author literary critics whip out the big words for, and with every reason.

Anyway, I know I'm very far from alone in my undying appreciation of Christopher Priest, so to tide you over till I've crossed all the eyes and dotted all the tees in my review of The Islanders, I thought I'd share a choice quote from the chapter (though it is not, strictly speak, a chapter at all) accounting for the isle of REEVER, or HISSING WATERS, as per the local patois.

In the following excerpt the gazetteer describes the vortical distortions, or temporal gradients, which make mapping the vast Dream Archipelago such an absolute nightmare:

"If you fly in one direction, looking down at the ground - say from north to south - a certain island will look a certain way: mountains here, a river there, a town, a bay, a forest, and so on. However, if you fly over it a second time - east to west - the same island will look oddly different: the river doesn't reach the sea in quite the same part of the coast, the forest looks darked or larger, the mountains now have fewer peaks, the coast seems less jagged, or more. Has it actually changed? Or was your observation inaccurate the first time? You go round for a third look - north to south again - and the island has seemed to change its layout yet again, and is different in a new way.

"Worse, if you set off across the sea to an adjacent island, then try to return home, the island you left will now seem to be in another place or direction entirely. Sometimes it will have vanished altogether, or that is how it appears." (p.284)

In the UK, Gollancz will be publishing The Islanders in late September; mark your calendars accordingly. There's no date that I can see for a US release, alas, but worst case scenario, I'm sure The Book Depository will have your back.

Meantime, expect a full write-up of The Islanders here on The Speculative Scotsman, or on one of the other genre review resources I haunt... very probably before then.

The Scotsman Abroad | Starburst For A Darkening Island

When it comes to staying current with all the Next Big Things publishers put out every month, it's often hard enough just to keep your head above the waterline. All the huge new releases, whether they be debuts from literary stars on the rise or the much-anticipated subsequent volumes of one or another of the hundred series I seem to have ended up reading - quite despite my most noble intentions - it can be tough, sometimes, just to doggie-paddle through the now.

Tough enough that there seems precious little time left to spend looking back, as I'd like to, and tough enough that there's nary a moment left to piddle away looking forward, into the sweet wondrous dream of what's yet to come.

All of which is to say, forgive my ignorance: I'm sure there are an incredible number of books coming out through the rest of 2011 that have either slipped my mind or I straight-up haven't heard of. But of those forthcoming releases that I am anticipating, from here in my fortress of witless ignorance, uppermost amongst them - that is alongside the first volumes of IQ84 by Haruki Murakami - has to be The Islanders by Christopher Priest... who I imagine most folks are familiar with in large part because Priest wrote the book a certain other Christopher (Nolan) based The Prestige on.

But Christopher (Priest) has been publishing books since 1970. That's for more than forty years! And last month - perhaps you'll recall from this installment of The BoSS - I was pleased to receive a review copy of Gollancz' revised edition of his second novel, Fugue For A Darkening Island -- the first of his works to be nominated for the raft of awards he would later take home.

Unsurprisingly, it was awesome. What's doubly awesome is that my review of Fugue For A Darkening Island is now available for you all to read, should you like your appetites for The Islanders whetting some. Trebly awesome, then, that this is the review with which I'm making my debut in the pages of Starburst Magazine.

Starburst, for those of you who don't know - for shame on all your houses! - was a popular print magazine launched in 1978. 2009 marked its 365th monthly issue which was also, alas, its last to hit newsstands.

At least, that's what they want you to think! In fact, two years on, Starburst is back -- and not so much changed, despite being free and online now, rather than a paid publication for magazine racks and the like.

For myself, I was yay high when I bought my first issue of Starburst, and I kept right on subscribing through to the bittersweet end. Starburst Magazine wasn't my first or my last, exactly, but it was among my utmost, so it gives me tremendous pleasure to see it risen like the proverbial phoenix and so completely re-energised by its new form...

...and now - hold onto your horses - with extra added me! :)

I know, I know... they've no idea what they've let themselves in for, have they?

Anyway, go read the review of Fugue For a Darkening Island while I explode in a confetti fashioned from shreds of cheer and sheer glee.