Archive for the ‘Christopher Priest’ Category

Airside

July 3, 2025

Christopher Priest’s final novel, Airside, like much of his later work, deals as much with the past as the present (his publishers even have a name for this, describing it as a “speculative historical novel”). Where An American Story focussed on 9/11 and Expect Me Tomorrow began in the mid-19th century, Airside covers much of the twentieth century via the medium of film. It begins in 1949 as a (fictional) actress, Jeanette Marchand (under her original name, Verity Mae Kalutz), flies from New York to London. On leaving the aircraft, however, she is never seen again:

“What happened to her when she entered the marquee, or where she went next, no one knows.”

Priest creates a biography for Marchand which sees her leave her native Pennsylvania for New York aged sixteen to work in vaudeville, rooming with an equally young Ruby Stevens – who, like Jeanette, will change her name (she is the non-fictional actress, Barbara Stanwyck) when they travel to Los Angelos and break into motion pictures:

“Throughout the nineteen thirties Jeanette worked regularly, becoming one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood.”

By the 1940s she is still making films but “is usually cast as a teacher, an older relative, a nurse.” The novel will be a delight for anyone interested in Hollywood, and, indeed, films in general as its protagonist, Justin Farmer, is a film critic and his reviews are scattered through the narrative. Farmer’s interest in cinema originates in “seeing two of Jeanette’s early films when I was seven years old.” At the time, of course, he knows nothing of Marchand’s disappearance, but when he is older it will both fascinate and torment him. As a student he visits London (later Heathrow) airport noting the unique atmosphere, “tension was undeniably if intangibly in the air.” Priest has described the novel as being about:

“…the liminal and always slightly disconcerting experience of passing through an airport.”

Farmer has his own reasons for being fascinated by airports having gone to a primary school built near one:

“He spent most of the break periods pressing himself against the school fence, staring out at the runway, learning a lifelong lesson as he did so, that preoccupation could be an effective defence against the brutalities of the outside world.”

Farmer has an obsessive personality, keeping notebooks (and later files) of every film he has seen, becoming something of an expert in pre-internet times. As his career progresses, however, he never forgets Marchand and takes any opportunity to speak to those who might have worked with her. He also has a special affinity for films which feature airport such as La Jetée and Casablanca (it is his reviews of such films that appear in the novel).

The novel works on a number of levels: it is a mystery, to which Priest will offer us a solution, though one the reader may see coming; a very particular history of film; and the exploration of something more abstract, the in-between world of ‘airside’. For, although Marchand’s disappearance is to some extent explained, Farmer uncovers similar such disappearances such as that of Hans Zeigler in Varna:

“Justin has become interested in the story of Heinz’s disappearance because of its similarity to the disappearance of Jeanette Marchand…Both had vanished without warning and without a plausible explanation. The more Justin researched the story, the more stories like it began to come to light.”

Justin has his own eerie experience of airside where he becomes lost in the terminal corridors to the point he settles down to sleep, awakening to find his flight has taken place. In these moments Priest is asking the reader not to accept the impossible but to admit ambiguity – his work famously includes many examples of doubling, but the key aspect of this is the ability to look at events two ways.

In the climactic scenes, Priest includes (as he also does in his glimpse of the future in Expect Me Tomorrow) reference to climate change as a sudden storm brings a film festival to an end. Appropriately, it is a particularly filmic conclusion. Priest leaves behind some of the most interesting work by an English writer in the last fifty years. Given that chronology is often questionable and questioned in his fiction, if you have not yet read him, starting at the end may be the most appropriate tribute.

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Indoctrinaire

October 16, 2024

Indoctrinaire, published in 1970, was the debut novel of British science-fiction writer Christopher Priest. The novel is set in both the near future (the 1980s) and the far future (the 22nd century) and concerns the development of a mind-altering drug. The first part, ‘The Jail’, is the most successful albeit the also the most (deliberately) confusing as the novel’s protagonist, Wentick, is taken from the Antarctic laboratory (the Concentration) where he is based to the Planalto district in the Brazilian rain forest. Who the two individuals who come to collect him, Astourde and Musgrove, work for is never entirely clear. In Brazil, his initial contact, Astourde, flies ahead and Wentick is left to travel across land with Musgrove, undertaking the final part of the journey, where a vast circle of the rain forest has been reduced to stubble, on foot. As soon as Wentick enters the circle, he finds that the jungle “had disappeared.”

“Behind them, as in front, the stubble extended to the horizon.”

Musgrove tells him. “That’s because it doesn’t exist on this time-plane.” With the novel’s science fiction credentials established, Priest focuses on the behaviour of his characters in a manner reminiscent of J G Ballard who is clearly an early influence. Wentick wakes to Musgrove missing, and when he finds him, Musgrove throws stones at him and tells him to “keep away”. When they eventually reach their destination, Wentick undergoes a period of psychological torture. The ‘jail’ itself is a maze where opening one door closes another, and his ability to move around is restricted more each day; he also undergoes regular interrogations by Astroude, assisted by a hand which seems to be growing out of the table:

“…Wentick could see where it joined the wood. It was pointing at him.”

He later finds an ear growing from a wall. Priest creates an atmosphere of intense paranoia with neither Wentick nor the reader any closer to understanding the purpose of the place, and the other characters unstable and unpredictable. Wentick is only able to free himself by rejecting the role of prisoner but an escape attempt by helicopter is forestalled when they are intercepted by an unknown aircraft which forces them to land.

The novel’s second half is of a more traditional science fiction tone and setting as Wentick finds himself in a future Brazil after a world war that has caused widespread destruction, particularly in north America and Europe. This requires a move into explanatory mode, occurring in a summary of the last two hundred years which Wentick is asked to read, and the explanations of Jexon, the scientist responsible for bringing Wentick to the future. It doesn’t give much away to reveal that the Wentick’s work in the Antarctic, to increase intelligence, has resulted in a gas which causes humans to become aggressive and confrontational (and so Priest, unlike Ballard, provides us with a scientific explanation of the behaviour at the ‘jail’).

“There would be a community going about its everyday existence in whichever way it chose… Slowly things would begin to degenerate. A fight here, a rape there… In about three days the whole community would be affected by it… People living from hand to mouth would band together and kill the weakest members of their community…”

Jexon is hoping that Wentick can help them discover a way of combating the gas, though ironically, they have removed him from the Concentration before his work was finished necessitating an attempted return in the novel’s final pages.

In its first half, Indoctrinaire demonstrates many of the qualities that would make Priest such an important writer: isolation, paranoia, the rational versus the irrational. We also see in the two time zones an early indication of the doubling that frequently occurs in later novels. Though it is probably not the best place to begin reading his work (unless you are a fan of 70s science fiction) it does suggest something of the extraordinary talent that would emerge over the next fifty years.

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The Space Machine

October 13, 2021

The Space Machine is, in many ways, out of keeping both with the three novels Christopher Priest wrote before it, and with those which came after. This is, of course, partly because the novel is an affectionate pastiche of H G Wells, but also, I suspect, because of the delight Priest seems to have taken in writing it:

“I thoroughly enjoyed writing this one, probably more than I should have done. For me it represents a kind of personal peak, because I wrote it in an extrovert mood during a happy period of my life, at a time when I wasn’t too broke, and I was not yet feeling held back by other people putting labels on me.”

(He does, however, go on to note that, “Everything went smoothly until publication day, when the Observer memorably observed, ‘Three hundred pages of homicidal tedium.’”)

The Space Machine takes two of Well’s most famous novels, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and grafts them together into a single narrative. It begins in 1903 and, like Wells, Priest uses a narrator to tell his story, in this instance a commercial traveller, Edward Turnbull. As the novel opens the greatest mystery is far from scientific as Turnbull and fellow salesman, Dykes, discuss the arrival of a young woman, Miss Fitzgibbon, at the hotel where they are staying. Dykes wishes to take a bet on who can speak to her first (this may be Edwardian rather Victorian England, but Miss Fitzgibbon (Amelia) is strictly out of bounds), but Turnbull is more intrigued when he hears that she works for the inventor, Sir William Reynolds – he has recently designed a Visibility Protection Mask for motoring and hopes to interest Sir William. Turnbull arranges an ‘accidental’ meeting as Amelia passes his room that night but, when they face the danger of being caught by the landlady, they are forced to enter Miss Fitzgibbon’s room. Priest has fun with necessity versus propriety from the start:

“‘Your room?’ I said in astonishment. ‘Do you not want a chaperone?’”

Edward and Amelia’s attempts to behave with the appropriate decorum even in the most unlikely circumstances becomes one of the novel’s running jokes: at one point, for example, Amelia refuses to remove her stays even when they are faced with an apparently endless walk over a desolate landscape (and even when she does take them off, she insists on carrying them with her). Edward can be just as strait-laced – when, at the end of this journey, they encounter a group of slave-workers who are “almost completely unclothed” he suggests he go to them alone, but, as Amelia points out:

“We are about to starve to death and you smother me with modesty!”

Edward is not discovered in Amelia’s room even after the landlady insists on entering, but her suspicions are enough to necessitate his departure the next day, though not before arranging to visit Sir William. It is there, of course, he encounters the time machine, and not long before he and Amelia decide on a test run, secure in the knowledge that it will always automatically return to 1903. Ten years in the future, however, they are greeted with unexpected violence:

“Somewhere just outside the house there was a massive explosion, and some of the panes of glass cracked. Splinters fell down upon us.”

And for Edward, an even more disturbing sight follows when he sees a woman running towards the house only to be consumed by flame:

“I had recognised the woman and knew her to be Amelia, suffering her dying moments in the hellish war of 1913.”

And so Priest embeds a future into the narrative that we knowingly head towards no matter how unlikely it might seem, but also one his narrator will attempt to avoid at all costs. In shock, Edward attempts to interfere with the driving of the machine and accidentally dislodges the rod that ensures it travels in time only, sending it through space as well.

It is this accident which takes the travellers to Mars and here Priest does what Wells doesn’t: gives a picture of the world from where the invasion originates. Priest does not deviate from the Martians as portrayed in The War of the Worlds but describes a society which explains their behaviour on Earth. Perhaps the most surprising part of this is the existence of humans on Mars as slaves and food for the Martians; yet it is also the most logical, as the chances of Martians developing a taste for human blood within days of arrival are slim. Priest uses the depletion of humans on Mars – the reason for the invasion – to explain why Edward and Amelia are initially able to remain undiscovered, staying in an empty building and eating in communal areas, largely indistinguishable from the Martian humans. The description of their time on Mars is the longest section of the narrative and, if this does not interest you, you are likely to find this middle part a little slow.

They do eventually return to Earth (and, of course, nearer to Amelia’s possible death), using one of the projectiles designed for the invasion, and Priest introduces characters and events from The War of the Worlds, including a Mr Wells who is not so much the author as one of the author’s anonymous narrators. For those who love Wells, or classic science fiction at all, this novel is enormous fun, very much in Wells’ spirit of wonder and dread. Of the many novels inspired by his work, it is among the best.

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The Islanders

May 28, 2012

Unlike J. G. Ballard, a novelist who similarly stood astride literary and genre tributaries, Christopher Priest has never quite made it into the mainstream. He has also had some celluloid success with the adaptation of his novel The Prestige a few years ago (and, in one of those strange connections we often find in his fiction, wrote the novelisation of David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, Cronenberg being the director who filmed Ballard’s Crash). He has, however, perhaps suffered from not having the same exotic biography to draw on. Though both writers have produced intelligent, radical science fiction, their approaches are different: whereas Ballard is like a microscope, focussing on and enlarging one aspect of society in each novel, Priest’s method is kaleidoscopic, presenting many faceted realities which often only seem to coincide with our own at angles.

His first novel in almost ten years his structure is more kaleidoscopic than ever. The Islanders takes the form of a gazetteer, each of its chapters detailing information about an island in the Dream Archipelago, an imaginary island group that has featured in Priest’s writing before. The gazetteer is shamed-facedly incomplete, the islands being uncounted and uncharted:

“There are no maps or charts of the Dream Archipelago. At least there are no reliable ones, or comprehensive ones, or even whole ones.”

The Dream Archipelago exists in geographical ambiguity. As Dant Wheeler, a journalist who contributes one of the chapters (more on this later), points out:

“As regular readers know, the IDT no longer publishes maps. The official reason for this is because most maps of the Archipelago are notoriously inaccurate, but our former policy was that an approximate map was better than no map at all. However, the newspaper had to revise this policy when a few years ago the T&V Supp inadvertently sent a group of retired church workers to a Glaund army rest and recreation base.”

This makes the Dream Archipelago a gift for a writer – and is possibly a dig at that particular genre of world-building fantasy novels that always begins with a map.

Though ostensibly a gazetteer, not all the entries are purely informative. As well as the above quoted travel journalism, one chapter contains a series of letters, another documents relating to a suspicious death, and a few read more like short stories. What makes this a novel, however, is the number of reoccurring characters and plot-lines. Most of the recurring characters are artists: the writer Chaster Kammeston, who provides the introduction but whose funeral is described in the text, the artist Dryd Bathurst (whose biography Kammeston writes), the conceptual artist Jordenn Yo who creates networks of tunnels, the writer Moylita Kaine, who corresponds with Kammeston before her own writing career begins (her first novel is entitled The Affirmation, also a Christopher Priest novel). The most important character who isn’t an artist is Elsa Caurer, an intellectual and teacher (and Kammeston’s lover), and also, it seems, the individual to whom The Islanders is dedicated! In this format the reoccurrences can seem increasingly unlikely, but they allow the novel to explore the idea of the artist, though perhaps with tongue at least halfway in cheek. Bathurst debauches from island to island leaving a trail of paintings behind him; Kammeston refuses to leave his island, even for love, because it will damage the mythology of his fiction.

Priest also has some fun with his various plots, genre-hopping in way that goes largely unnoticed until they come to fruition. There is a murder mystery – the death of the mime artist Commis, with clues revealed sporadically throughout. There is a horror story about deadly insects, told in entries in a scientist’s journal:

“We discovered just how dangerous the insect could be when rolled: the bristles are as fine as hairs bit they are stiff and hollow and act as hypodermic needles for the venom they contain.”

(The thryme, as they are called, are quite as terrifying as anything in Alien). There is a love story (Kammeston and Caurer, as mentioned previously), a coming of age story (Kammeston again), a supernatural story (in the chapter ‘Dead Tower’) and a thriller (the story entitled ‘The Drone’). While some of the short, informative chapters can feel like treading water, the longer chapters are often examples of story-telling at its best, and the cross-referencing means that the novel is more than the sum of its parts, with a re-reading undoubtedly needed to fully appreciate it. Priest is a writer we should treasure and acclaim, as those involved in the genre ghetto of science fiction have done for many years.

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