The Adjacent by Christopher Priest

E-book Edition (review copy)

Published June 20th, 2013 by Gollancz

Review copy provided by publisher.

Review by N. E. White.

The Adjacent is a love story about two people torn apart by place and time. It has elements of H.G. Wells, World War I, an island nation, an Islamic version of England, and magic, but at its core, it is a love story.

In lyrical, but matter-of-fact prose, a complicated story of death unfolds as we are introduced to Tibor Tarent, a photographer reeling from the recent death of his wife, a nurse. He is returning from an aid mission to a southern country. Where exactly, we are not told. But he’s returning to England, London specifically, but it’s an English countryside and culture we would find hard to recognize.

Massive storms have scarred the countryside and a new weapon is burning out what remains. The residents live in a somewhat militarized society that has long ago embraced Islam. As he is moved from place to place, escorted by mysterious government officials, he grieves for his wife, who had been obliterated out in the desert by the same weapon plaguing London.

The book soon leaves Tarent’s story to plunge us into the life of two individuals shipped off to the World War 1 front lines for suspect reasons. In this section, we are given another, older, version of Tarent who happens to be a magician, one who uses a technique often termed an ‘adjacent distraction’. This is our first, most obvious connection between this story and the previous one with the photographer.

Don’t quote me on the sequence, but the story then weaves between Tarent’s story coming to terms with his wife’s death and the inexplicable events happening around him, and the stories of two women, one a pilot and the other mysteriously connected to him, but in a brief, adulterous way. Like the many Tarent’s in the story, inconsequential details blur the stories of his wife: the woman named Krystyna (or Kirstenya or any other variant), and ‘the other woman’. Each show up in Tarent’s (or Tommaz’s or Tomak’s) life at crucial stages. In one version of their story, we meet his wife in the guise of a Polish pilot helping out in the war effort as best as she can. She tells him her story and it seems that the version of Tarent she is telling her story to is a copy of the Tarent she left behind at home. While potentially confusing, what is clear in each section is the undeniable bond between the two; an everlasting love that transcends the cold vagaries of life.

Each section of the novel blurs the facts, doling out tantalizing details that you think will help you solve the mystery of the individual stories. But in the end, we simply discover what happens. Really, there is no mystery to solve (it is unsolvable). There is only a story to be enjoyed for its rich texture and a wonderful sense of warped place and time.

With that said, this is a book for Christopher Priest fans.

This is my first foray into Mr. Priest’s fiction. I’ve watched the movie adaptation of The Prestige, but I’ve never read anything by him. While I believe a new reader to Priest’s works do not need to read all his previous books to enjoy The Adjacent, I did get the sense that I was missing out on something. There were many references and/or details that I thought would have some significance to the story (or stories) I was reading (the wires, the cultural norms or ab-norms of the island population, that whole weapon thing, the city that was and then was not there, etc), but they never panned out. Or rather, the details didn’t seem to matter to the end result. All of which I think was the point.

Even so, I did enjoy this book. Mr. Priest has a wonderful way of creating a surreal experience out of the ordinary. And he does it in such a way that you’re not aware of it until after the fact. He gives so much detail and information in flawless, emotional prose that both enriches the reading experience and immerses you in the character’s world. Even so, this reader was left with a sense of mystery that pulled me along at every (potentially frustrating) turn in the story. I wanted to know what the dang weapon was and who was using it, but then we are left with what is really important – the bonds that hold us together through place and time.

It was wonderful to read Mr. Priest’s take on this novel (SFFWorld.com interview). I especially liked that he didn’t think he was painting England in a grim light because it becomes, in The Adjacent, an Islamic state and environmentally damaged or changed. While reading his book, I didn’t get the sense that it was overwhelmingly grim, but only that it was simply different. I think that is The Adjacent’s triumph. It offers several alternative realities that feel as real as the world we live in today, and as easily visited as flying a plane over a wide, blue ocean (or reading The Adjacent).

I highly recommend this book to all fans of Christopher Priest as well as someone looking for a book that offers the sense of shifting realities as real as our own while offering you a different view of what we could have been and may become.

N.E. White, May 2014.