Why isn't Christopher Priest better known? Surely he deserves to be. It's true that the stellar reputation he built in the 1970s and 80s as one of the most innovative and forward-thinking SF writers of his time seemed to dissipate somewhat in the 1990s.
The Quiet Woman (1991), his follow-up to the two extraordinary crossover hits The Affirmation (1981) and The Glamour (1984), was not nearly so well received. It was almost as if he'd lost his way, or exhausted his inspiration. The novel felt drifting, formless. I stopped collecting each new book of his after that.
Which, in retrospect, was a shame. The Prestige (1995) was a swaggering, staggering return to form. But then, I didn't even read it until well after the film was released in 2006. It came as quite a surprise.
The movie, with its screenplay co-written by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, is a characteristically Nolanian mise-en-abyme, with a startling dénouement designed to freeze the blood.
The book, on the other hand, is an overt recreation of the Frankenstein legend, with numerous echoes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece behind its setting on the vaudeville stage. It's a powerful, well-written novel, but - for better or worse - it doesn't tell quite the same story as Nolan's film.
It was the late 1980s, in Edinburgh; my then girlfriend (later wife) was working on a Masters thesis on Fantasy literature. Her idea for a topic was a comparison between Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf and Christopher Priest's dazzling new novel The Glamour.
I should explain that Jackie-Anne had a rather complicated origin story. Born in Paris, she was brought up in France, the UK, and Belgium by her Flemish father and Scottish mother. To say that she lived between cultures would be to put it mildly.
People often asked her if she was bilingual. She once explained to me that it's really a meaningless concept. No-one is truly bilingual. When you use different languages in different contexts you tend to know the specific vocabulary for, say, cooking and housework - or critical and philosophical discourse - in those particular languages. She did her undergraduate degree at a French-speaking university, Louvain-la-Neuve, but since she was studying German literature, the discussions in class - and the oral exams - were conducted almost exclusively in German.
The decision to go to Scotland for her Masters degree was an attempt to establish more solid roots in her mother's homeland. I'm betting that none of them guessed that she might run into an almost equally deracinated New Zealander there, conducting his own eccentric research into South American literature (Why? Who knows? All I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time). Spanish was one of the few European languages she didn't speak to a high standard, but of course her idea of a "speaking knowledge" was a quantum leap above mine.
So: Hermann Hesse. Jackie-Anne's undergraduate degree had compared C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books with Michael Ende's Neverending Story. Of course she read them, and quoted from them both, in the original, but the thesis itself was written in German. Now, in Scotland, she was setting out to write in English about a German and an English writer, but of course in that monoglot world none of her supervisors could read a word of German. To them Hesse (in translation) was simply the subject of a 1960s campus cult; the complexities of his position in German literature were far above their heads.
Still, he was safely dead and buried, which is always satisfactory for Academics. Christopher Priest wasn't, though, so Jackie-Anne wrote to him with a number of questions - I guess she must have routed the letter through his publishers. I don't really recall.
His reply was very courteous, if a little bemused. He disclaimed any particular knowledge of - or influence from - Hesse, but he was happy to discuss some of the other aspects of his bewilderingly strange novel. It centres on amnesia and invisiblity. Nothing in the story is certain, and the true identity of the main character is very much up for grabs. I'm not sure if it's quite the same thing as Hesse's own rather more predictable narrative house of mirrors. but it was really the differences between them, one published in 1927, the other in 1984, which added up to the point Jackie-Anne wanted to make.
It did get me onto a Christopher Priest jag, though. My own favourite among his more recent works was definitely The Affirmation. The vision it presented of an imaginary dream archipelago, created by the narrator to assist in his own self-analysis, but then seemingly developing a life of its own, was one of the most compelling models for fictional creation I've ever encountered.
It must have had quite an effect on Priest himself, too, as he returned to it in a later collection of short stories, The Dream Archipelago (1999), as well as a further novel, The Islanders (2011).
Priest's work seems to fall easily into separate epochs. His transition from an intensely innovative star of the UK SF scene to a postmodern novelist parallels much the same development in writers such as J. G. Ballard and W. S. Burroughs. Priest started out more hard Sci-fi than either, though. Inverted World is probably his most influential title from this era.
Its first sentence: "I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles", has, according to one critic: "justly become one of the most famous in science fiction". The bizarreries of the situation in which the inhabitants of the city called "Earth" find themselves are strange in the extreme. I won't spoil the story by attempting to explain them here, but the vital difference between this SF novel and Priest's later, more postmodern works is the fact that it does get explained, and even (to some extent) resolved in the course of the narrative.
Other works from this period, such as A Dream of Wessex, have much in common with the "Dangerous Visions" SF of authors such as Philip K. Dick. There's definitely something of Dick's A Maze of Death (1970) in the idea behind the book, which:
can be read as a straightforward story about a group of twentieth-century dreamers who create a consensus virtual-reality future. Once they enter their imaginary world they are unable to remember who they are, or where they are from. On another level, the novel is itself an extended metaphor for the way in which extrapolated futures are created.That's where Priest might have stayed if it hadn't been for the great leap forward represented by The Affirmation. It's not for nothing that he was named among the 1983 Granta 20 Best Young British Novelists.
All of which brings us to this, his last (albeit posthumous and unfinished) book.
It's an odd story, exhaustively (and sensitively) analysed by Martin Petto in his review on the Strange Horizons website:
... how many books is this? Not one, despite the physical artefact that sits on my desk beside me. Its front and back covers, its table of continents [contents? - JR], its index — they are all an illusory scaffolding for what is three books in an overcoat. This makes The Illuminated Man a unique — uniquely moving and uniquely frustrating — read.Priest himself explained at the beginning of the book:
The first book — and also the worst book — belongs to Christopher Priest, the British science fiction writer who died in 2024 whilst working on The Illuminated Man ... His biography of J. G. Ballard was to be his first significant work of non-fiction.
I contend that Ballard was one of the most important writers in English in the twentieth century ... However, I believe he has so far not been afforded the final step: the acknowledgement of true and permanent greatness.The second book contained within The Illuminated Man "is preceded by both a prologue and a preface by Nina Allan":
Allan is another British science fiction writer and critic, active since the start of this century ... She was also Priest’s partner (and became, over the course of writing The Illuminated Man, his wife). It had not been anticipated she would have any role in the book Priest started in January 2023. But then:But that's not where the complications end. "Allan had been commissioned to write an essay on Ballard for Writing the Future: Essays on Crafting Science Fiction (2023)":Six months later, he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. We believed even then that he would have time to complete the book, or at least a passable draft of it. Sadly, we were wrong. When it became obvious Chris would run out of time, we agreed between the two of us that I should finish what had - so tragically and unexpectedly - turned out to be his final work.
Talking with Priest about this essay, he shared the Pringle chronology with her. Priest: “I’d forgotten I had this.” Allan: “I became obsessed with it” ... Ultimately Priest took forward the wider book-length project with Allan’s blessing, but it remains a bit of a mystery as to why he did. It also seems unarguable that Allan was better suited to the task. “‘It sounds like you should be writing it,’” she reports a friend as saying. “She was responding, I suppose, to my enthusiasm for the project, for the excitement I still felt for it, in spite of everything”.The prologue, Petto continues: "showcases what this book could have been, what it partially still is, in its deft blend of criticism, biography, and autobiography ... It is with ... Priest’s own memoir in Chapter 15, that the better book re-emerges. These chapters focus on the accident that precipitated Priest’s diagnosis with terminal cancer and the couple’s individual response to this."
“I suggested that I should take over those parts of the story, he agreed immediately. ‘I can’t write about that stuff, but you can,’ he said. He seemed incredibly relieved”. The final hundred pages of the book ... are simply remarkable. This book is entirely Allan’s book and interleaves an intensely affecting memoir of the period around Priest’s death with a critical evaluation of Ballard’s late work and finally a culminating synthesis of all the elements of The Illuminated Man. That these pages were written under such devastating circumstances makes the accomplishment even greater.Petto concludes as follows:
The Illuminated Man is profound and deeply moving. It is also inconsistent and confounding. It is sometimes outright bad. It would ideally have been Allan rather than Priest who started the project. In artistic terms, leaving Priest’s initial book intact rather than fully incorporating it was a mistake. But “artistic terms” aren’t really important here ... “We came to think of this book as ours, a shared endeavour that sustained us and maintained our togetherness even as Chris’s work and life came to an end” ... That is an impregnable statement to which the lens of literary criticism cannot be applied. This book — this interlocking trilogy of books — couldn’t exist independently of the context that led to its creation and, ultimately, it is a privilege to read this shared endeavour.
As I read Martin Petto's marvellous essay-review, clearly written straight from the heart, I found myself reverting to comparative mode: not between Hermann Hesse and Christopher Priest this time, but back to my memories of Bulgakov's luminous last book, The Master and Margarita (1928-40).
The Master's unfinished historical novel about Pontius Pilate constantly doubles with the story of the devil's visit to Moscow in this bewildering book, in all its overlapping versions (and more-or-less "complete" translations). But the message of the book is clear: that Art - in some strange way - can even overcome Death.
It's certainly proved true in Bulgakov's case.
The other thing it reminded me of was more unexpected. I remembered my sense of frustration at reading The Quiet Woman, all those years ago. I remembered that strange interpolated chapter where a UFO descends to earth. Above all, I remember the protagonist's decision to sell the book she's been working on to the European Union's unpublished fiction vault, rather than fighting any longer to share it with the world.
It seemed so depressing, so futile an ending at the time, but see what's become of it now! Priest, too, turned out to have his own Margarita, and his increasingly unavailing attempts to finish this last book have borne strange fruit: something far greater than any biography of the most slippery customer in contemporary British writing could ever have been.
It must have just seemed like wishful thinking at the time, but maybe Bulgakov had a point after all. Perhaps the arc of the moral universe really does "bend toward justice", as Martin Luther King's favourite quote would have it. Perhaps all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. It doesn't look like that most of the time, but occasionally, ever so seldom, the clouds part and something marvellous comes through.
Christopher Priest's final work is starting to look very much like that.
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Novels:
- Indoctrinaire (1970)
- Indoctrinaire. 1970. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1973.
- Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972)
- Fugue for a Darkening Island. 1972. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1978.
- The Inverted World (1974)
- Inverted World. 1974. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1975.
- The Space Machine (1976)
- The Space Machine: A Scientific Romance. 1976. An Orbit Book. London: Futura Publications Limited, 1977.
- A Dream of Wessex [aka "The Perfect Lover"] (1977)
- A Dream of Wessex. London: Faber, 1977.
- The Affirmation (1981)
- The Affirmation. 1981. Arena. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1983.
- The Glamour (1984)
- The Glamour. 1984. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, Ltd., 1985.
- [as Colin Wedgelock] Short Circuit [Film novelisation] (1986)
- [as John Luther Novak] Mona Lisa [Film novelisation] (1986)
- The Quiet Woman (1990)
- The Prestige (1995)
- The Prestige. 1995. Gollancz. London: The Orion Publishing Group, 2004.
- The Extremes (1998)
- eXistenZ [Film novelisation] (1999)
- The Separation (2002)
- The Islanders (2011)
- The Islanders. Gollancz. London: The Orion Publishing Group, 2011.
- The Adjacent (2013)
- The Gradual (2016)
- An American Story (2018)
- The Evidence (2020)
- Expect Me Tomorrow (2022)
- Airside (2023)
- Real-time World (1974)
- Real-Time World. Times Mirror. London: New English Library, 1974.
- An Infinite Summer (1979)
- An Infinite Summer. 1979. The Science Fiction Book Club. Newton Abbot, Devon: Readers Union Group of Book Clubs, 1979.
- The Dream Archipelago (1999)
- Ersatz Wines – Instructive Short Stories [early work] (2008)
- Episodes (2019)
- Anticipations (1978)
- Anticipations. 1978. Pan Science Fiction. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1980.
- Your Book of Film-Making (1974)
- The Book on the Edge of Forever (1993)
- The Magic – The Story of a Film (2008)
- [with Nina Allan] The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard (2026)
- [with Nina Allan] The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2026.
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