OK, so I’m reading this after it was made into “a major motion picture”; blame Unity, my main supplier of crack^H^H^H^H^Hbooks for not having Christopher Priest’s most recent effort on the shelves until it now.
I’m very fond of Priest; I started reading his early stuff like Real Time World. and Fugue for a Darkening Island; a signatue of his work is that he’s fond of presenting narratives about worlds that differ markedly from our own; they start out seemless, solid, with the reader seeking to understand the alternative universe. Even as you do, you begin to see chinks and cracks which are the keys to deciphering the puzzle of what’s really going on.
In that sense, Priest’s favour of sci-fi is rather whodunnit flavoured, or perhaps more accruately, howdunnit.
Something I have noticed is that his earlier work tends to be embedded in more orthodox science fiction; his two most recent books, The Separation and Prestige are more concerned with the mystery and the story than the devices used to enable them; indeed, I read one short review of the movie of Prestige that suggested it was more fantasy than sci-fi, since the mechanism of one of the mysteries might as well be magic as science. Certainly it’s the classic soft sci-fi where we are not meant to worry too much about the mechnisms, but more their effects.
I enjoyed the way Prestige plays with multiple views of the same incidents, starting with contemporary perspectives and then segueing into diaries to tell the events of the past. We’re treated the points of view of each of the protagonists in turn, and as we see through their eyes, our views of the characters shifts; one account will leave us in sympathy with one character, the next will lead us to hold him in contempt. It’s a well executed example of the technique, and kept me on my toes.