The Adjacent - a beautifully written, intricately constructed novel by one of our finest and most imaginative living authors. His name is Christopher Priest.
If you haven't heard of him, you should; if you think he's a mere scribbler of science fiction, you couldn't be more wrong. Christopher Priest's use of the English language and mastery of the novel as a literary form is on a par with the likes of Wilkie Collins, Graham Greene, J.G. Ballard and Martin Amis.
In terms of structure, The Adjacent features eight distinct parts, described roughly in a few words as follows:
One: Distant future. Photographer Tibor Tarent returns to war ravaged England following the death of his wife, a victim of a perplexing explosion attributed to terrorists near the hospital in Turkey where they were residing these past months.
Two: WWI. Thomas Trent, an accomplished stage illusionist, receives an army officer's commission and travels to the front - his mission: to make British war aircraft invisible to German eyes. Tommy Trent shares a compartment on a train with none other than H.G. Wells.
Three: Distant Future. Obeying official orders, Tibor Tarent reports in at a military compound located in England's rustic farm country. Prior to entering the front gate, he witnesses a phenomenal happening and explosion in a field below.
Four: Distant Future: Journalist Jane Flockhart interviews retired Professor Thijs Rietveld, Nobel Prize winning physicist who speaks of the "Perturbative Adjacent Field." As scheduled, a young photographer appears on the scene to take photos of the great man. Jane Flockhart learns the photographer's name: Tibor Tarent.
Five: WWII. Mike Torrance, Aircraftsman First Class, services British bombers at a base in England. He meets and falls in love with a beautiful pilot in the ATA, a woman originally from Poland.
Six: Distant Future. Tibor Tarent confronts a few instances of true weirdness at the rural military compound. Fortunately, in his brief stint at this site, Tibor bonds emotionally with a woman, an attractive, compassionate teacher.
Seven: Photographer Tomak Tallant travels across Prachous, an island within the Dream Archipelago, a world spun from Christopher Priest's fertile imagination. Tomak's travel companion is a woman "spreader of the word." The tale then shifts first to Thom the Thaumaturge, a stage illusionist, and then a visitor to the island, a woman nurse who can fly planes.
Eight: Photographer Tibor Tarent has ample opportunities to use his camera, including a quizzical (understatement) visit to a WWII British airbase. Then an unexpected someone lands a plane at the field.
I can appreciate why a number of reviewers judge The Adjacent a love story. There's little doubt Christopher Priest places love and death, Eros and Thanatos, at the heart of his philosophic tale. I say philosophic for good reason: although the author's language is clear and accessible (in that sense, an easy read), The Adjacent is definitely not an airport novel, not even close. The work's overarching vision is to raise more questions than it answers; offer multiple strands of ambiguity in place of satisfying closure; invite a reader to break a mental sweat, tap realms of imagination to become a psychic, even spiritual, explorer, a cocreator in this venture we call literature.
The Adjacent is the type of novel where a reader will uncover many new subtle connections, rich images and hidden themes with each careful reread. Here's a trio of themes to which I keep returning:
THE MULTIVERSE
Many scientist in our current 21st century consider we might be living in a universe that extends thousands, maybe millions of times beyond what we can see with our eyes and advanced instruments - vast worlds where diverse physical laws apply, where space, time, atoms, gravity are all different.
Tarent begins grasping the possibility of such a multiverse. "Baffled again, Tarent stared for a long time, wondering what he had seen, or even if his memory had failed him. There were so many contradictions he had to absorb, so much to try and make sense of."
BOUNDARIES AS PERMEABLE MEMBRANES
"Tarent noticed that a placard had been placed on a door at the base of the buildings, warning that the structure was unstable." Ha! The photographer's reading that placard reminds me of a current day spiritual teacher's similar experience when he writes in one of his books: "There was a sign by the side of the trail put there by the park authorities. It read: danger. all structures are unstable. I said to my friend, “That’s a profound sacred scripture.” And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death."
In the fluid universe of The Adjacent, the key is twofold: recognizing the extent of the fluidity of both time and space and then accepting this manifest reality rather than fighting against it.
ADJACENCY
Tibor Tarent is stunned when he beholds the power of adjacency in action, materializing above a Mebsher (a futuristic Hummer-type vehicle). "The light-point suddenly exploded like a firework shooting three angled white shafts of light directly down to the ground. . . . A skeletal pyramid of white light surrounded the Mebsher, a perfect tetrahedron, and moments after it had formed it solidified into pure light."
As the great physicist in the novel explains: "The quantum adjacency we created can be considered as a tetrahedron of particles."
A word on this three-dimensional geometric shape: the tetrahedron is one of the five Platonic solids. We find the dual of each of the Platonic solids by imagining a dot at the center of every face. Then, if we connect the dots, we create a new Platonic solid - the cube and the octahedron are the dual of each other, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron are the dual of each other but the tetrahedron is unique since it self-replicates, that is, a tetrahedron is the dual of a tetrahedron.
A tetrahedron has 4 edges - and, of course, its dual has 4 edges.
4 + 4 = 8. Recall the novel itself contains 8 parts.
A farfetched connection? Take the challenge. Pick up The Adjacent and see for yourself.
Christopher Priest, born 1943
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