RIP Christopher Priest

[Bill Mullins]

Author Christopher Priest, who wrote the novel The Prestige (upon which the Christopher Nolan film of the same title was based) died on Feb 2, age 80, of cancer.

[Bob Coyne]

That's sad to hear. I thought the Prestige was a very good book, and I really liked the movie too. I also I read one of his other books Inverted World, which was also good.

[Bill Mullins]

It turns out he also wrote (and self-published) a book about the adaptation of his book into Nolan's movie. Prices on Amazon are sky high, but an acquaintance is going to check with his widow (after an appropriate wait) to see if it is still available. I'll post here when I find out.

[AJM]

Could you please also check if I could have his slippers?

After an appropriate wait of course…

[Bill Mullins]

AJM -- are you the same size?

Michael Dirda has been reviewing books for the Washington Post for decades. He's an email friend, and I thought his review (from the Post) of the book version of The Prestige would be of interest here. He's not a magician himself, but is (as you'll see) certainly an intelligent observer of it (and he's also an SF fan, and a Baker Street Irregular). With his permission . . . .

TRICKS AND TREATS
By Michael Dirda
October 26, 1996 at 8:00 p.m. EDT

THE PRESTIGE. By Christopher Priest. St. Martin's. 404 pp. $24.95

EARLY in this sinister, marvel-filled novel, the consummate illusionist Alfred Borden, Le Professeur de la Magie, recalls watching an older master of what was once called Oriental Magic. Ching Ling Foo's greatest trick, we learn, was to produce out of thin air a large glass bowl containing a dozen ornamental fish. After careful professional observation Borden surmises that the bowl must be concealed beneath Ching's mandarin robes, actually held between his legs throughout his entire performance. Yet the sickly Ching, who hobbles painfully on stage, is to all appearances far too frail to carry a heavy, water-filled bowl.

"The reality was completely different," Borden discovers. "Ching was a fit man of great physical strength, and carrying the bowl in this way was well within his power. Be that as it may, the size and shape of the bowl caused him to shuffle like a mandarin as he walked. This threatened the secret, because it drew attention to the way he moved, so to protect the secret he shuffled for the whole of his life. Never, at any time, at home or in the street, day or night, did he walk with a normal gait lest his secret be exposed." Such fanatic obsessiveness, concludes Borden, "is the nature of a man who acts the role of sorcerer."

His own autobiography, he tells us quite plainly, is "the story of the secrets by which I have lived my life." But what is Le Professeur de la Magie's particular secret? And what is that of his longtime nemesis, Rupert Angier, The Great Danton, creator of the electrifying illusion known as "In a Flash"? Neither, we gradually realize, is quite what he appears to be. But then misdirection has always lain at the heart of conjuring -- and of suspenseful storytelling.

Christopher Priest's The Prestige is a brilliantly constructed entertainment, with a plot as simple and intricate as a nest of Chinese boxes. A journalist, Andrew Westley, long troubled by the feeling that he has an unknown twin, encounters a somber young woman named Kate Angier. The two turn out to be great-grandchildren of these rival fin-de-siecle magicians, whose careers are related to us through a recently published memoir and a private diary. The feud between the pair apparently began when the self-righteous Borden interrupts a seance directed by the impoverished Angier assisted by his pregnant wife. As it happens, neither magician understands the true motives of the other, and the two needlessly grow into bitter enemies, frequently sabotaging one another's acts. Eventually, each develops an illusion that the other cannot fathom and yet desperately covets. Both men abandon their careers suddenly in their late forties, with at least one of them dying soon thereafter.

Against this backdrop Priest recreates the music-hall world of 1890s London, discloses the hard work and training behind successful magic, and hints increasingly that certain stage marvels may in fact violate physical laws. The result is a dizzying magic show of a novel, chockablock with all the props of Victorian sensation fiction: seances, multiple narrators, a family curse, doubles; a lost notebook, wraiths and disembodied spirits; a haunted house, awesome mad-doctor machinery, a mausoleum, and ghoulish horrors; a misunderstood scientist, impossible disappearances, and the sins of the fathers visited upon their descendants. Imagine Possession rewritten by Barbara Vine, or Robertson Davies at his most smoothly diabolical. Even Priest's innocent-seeming dedication -- to his children -- contributes its touch to the book's devious artistry. Little wonder that last year The Prestige won Britain's James Tait Black Award for Best Novel

. The great theme of almost all supernatural fiction is repression. In horror stories the monster often represents our secret, id-like self, the outward embodiment of forbidden desires. Who has not sometimes yearned to tear apart his enemies as does the Wolf Man, transform highborn beauties into pliant slaves a la Dracula, trample with Mr. Hyde across society's hampering rules? More subtle tales, like Henry James's "Turn of the Screw" or James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner, deliberately avoid such blatant externalization. Instead they show that nervous hysteria and religious mania, once released, may be as deadly as any werewolf. When the uncanny tale takes up magic, we tend to discover unholy pacts or the transgression of normal human barriers: The magician seems not a subhuman beast but a godlike superman, disdaining natural limits and cheating death itself.

I don't want to reveal too much about the narrative twists and epiphanies that contribute so much to the reader's pleasure in The Prestige. Still one might point out the peculiar dualism that pervades the book's pages, with constant talk of doubles, twins, Platonic halves, spies, facsimiles, rivals. We hear about cult leaders who can bilocate; we are told the same story from opposite viewpoints; we even watch an act called "The New Transported Man," in which Alfred Borden closes himself in one box and instantly opens the door of another, 30 feet away. For a while each conjuror even maintains dual households, shuttling back and forth between wife and mistress. Several characters possess two names, because of adoption, profession or title, and the book's action is framed by the apparent deaths of two children. The enemy magicians both admit that they are much alike, a pair of soul mates.

THOUGH all the narrators of The Prestige tell the truth, the attentive will realize that it is never the whole truth. One needs to ignore the fluttering handkerchiefs, to read carefully between the lines, as if deciphering the lacunae and misdirection in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Note the distinctive use of the first person in Alfred Borden's narrative of his life. Bear in mind how the older sister of Kate Angier frightens her with tales of "mutilated victims imprisoned below, of tragic lost souls in search of peace." Recall the young Rupert saying that "I wish . . . that I could use my magic to bring Papa back to life." Do not forget that when little Nicky Borden is killed, Kate says that "somewhere in the distance, it seemed, I could hear his terrible scream echoing still." Above all, ask yourself what is "the small hitch" in the electrical device created by the legendary Nicola Tesla.

An illusion, says Alfred Borden, consists of three parts: the set-up, the performance, and "the effect, or the prestige . . . If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit, which apparently did not exist before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick." One or two loose ends aside, Christopher Priest deftly produces more than one disturbing "prestige" in this superlative novel, a spooky diversion just right for Halloween and chilly November nights. But stay alert and remember the magician's cardinal rule: "What is seen is not actually what is being done."

Michael Dirda is a writer and editor for Book World