Christopher Priest is among the most inventive authors I’ve encountered in fifty years of voracious reading. Whenever I feel inspired to launch into new vistas of imagination, all I need do is read (or listen via audible) to yet again another one of his books.
Thanks, Christopher, you have yet to let me down, most especially when your tales are set on an Earth-like planet comprised of thousands of unique islands. Included in this island series: The Affirmation, The Islanders, The Gradual and the book that's the subject of this review, The Dream Archipelago, containing some of the darkest yarns the author has written. Case in point with two from this collection: The Miraculous Cairn and The Cremation are drenched in sexually charged Gothic horror.
In any event, here are a number of memorable highlight from my travels in The Dream Archipelago:
YOU ARE ENTERING THE TWILIGHT ZONE
The first short tale, The Equatorial Moment, is written in intimate second person. The narrator addresses you as a pilot who has had a foretaste of the timeless: “So here in the sky you believed that you had glimpsed the insight: the mystery of the vortex appeared to be laid bare before you. It made time cease, you reasoned. All flying aircraft that entered it were held by it so long as they maintained a steady course, only to be released when they made their crucial change of direction.”
Sounds to me as if Christopher Priest is inviting us to make an artful shift from Earth-bound clock time to the ethereal realm of the Dream Archipelago. Ars longa, vita brevis. Having taken the trip myself, I can assure you it is well worth the ticket.
NOVELIST AND HER NOVEL
There’s Moylita Kaine, seasoned author of The Affirmation (not Christopher Priest’s; her own novel well over 1,000 pages). Readers of The Islanders will remember Moylita back when she was a young, aspiring writer sending off fan letters to her hero, the famous islands author Chaster Kammerson. In this book's story entitled The Negation, Moylita's novel has made an indelible impression on Dik, an eighteen-year old soldier who has read the work repeatedly since age fifteen. This novel not only proved the most profound experience of his young life but Dik harbors a secret ambition to become an author himself and write a novel very much like The Affirmation.
Dik has an opportunity to speak with Moylita Kaine one on one. Following his conversation (among the more intriguing sections of this tale) Dik has an added incentive to evaluate The Afirmation in light of ideas he came across in a book of literary theory: reading a novel is as much a creative act as writing one; the significance a reader ascribes to a novel holds greater weight than the author’s intension; and, above all, the novel is great if a reader deems it great. We are left to consider how unfolding events in The Negation will impact young Dik’s assessment of The Affirmation.
HEAD TRIPS
In Whores, an unnamed narrator, a soldier on extended sick leave, plans to visit islands within the Dream Archipelago but he must contend with an ongoing medical issue: as a consequence of being gassed by the enemy, he suffers from intense bouts of synesthesia.
We follow him as he wanders about on his first island, Lucie, where houses becomes monstrosities and give off cynical laughter. He’s assailed by a host of smells, enticing and captivating, while sounds and textures bend in weird, bizarre and sometimes frightening ways. However, he claims he's no longer disturbed when music becomes strands of colored light or he's subjected to other varieties of hallucination.
By and by he meets one of the island whores, Elva, a slightly built brunette, and follows her to her room. He feels he is about to suffer an extreme attack of synesthesia but doesn’t leave; he judges the strange dance of his senses will enhance rather than diminish his sexual pleasure. Little does he know he is about to undergo the most harrowing nightmare of his life.
SCIENCE FICTION ART
What I find particularly fascinating about a Christopher Priest tale is what I term “The Jolt of the Weird.” In other words, events move apace in a somewhat, recognizable, realistic way then suddenly the protagonist is hurled into a fourth dimension - for example, the bending of time in The Gradual or the phenomenon of invisibility in The Glamour. Undoubtedly, this is the very reason his books are categorized as science fiction.
The most obvious example of such a weird jolt in this collection occurs in The Discharge, a tale where the twenty-something narrator is caught between the regimentation of his everyday cookie-cutter life as a foot soldier and his aspiration to live in the world of art and aesthetics and vivid imagination.
Several pages in the narrator describes a technique developed by painter Rascar Acizzone wherein a kind of pigment is applied to canvas using unique ultrasound microcircuitry. To a casual observer Acozzone's large canvases appeared to be little more than arrangements of color. But (please sit up and take particular note) if a viewer actually makes physical contact with the canvas's ultrasound pigments then hidden images are brought to life and supercharged with shocking eroticism. "Detailed and astonishingly explicit scenes were mysteriously evoked in the mind of the viewer, inducing an intense charge of sexual excitement." Whoa, baby! Now that's creativity in action!
The narrator goes on: "I discovered a set of long-forgotten Acizzone abstracts in the vaults of the museum in Jethra and by the laying on of the palms of my hands I entered the world of vicarious carnal passion. The women depicted by Acizzone were the most beautiful and sensual I had ever seen, or known, or imagined. Each painting created its own vision in the mind of the viewer."
The tale continues. The narrator ultimately makes the choice to flee the military and become an artist. He goes on to employ Acizzone's technique of ultrasound microcircuitry into his own paintings. After a number of years the military police catch up with him. However, they also have to deal with his highly unique paintings, which turn out to be just the thing that saves his life. You will have to read for yourself to discover the specifics. Thanks again, Christopher!
"He became still, four of his fingers resting on the pigment. For a moment he stayed in position, looking almost reflective as he squatted there with his hand extended. Then he tipped slowly forward. He tried to balance himself with his other hand, but that too landed on the pigments. As he fell across the painting, his body started jerking in spasms. Both his hands were bonded to the board." - Christopher Priest, The Dream Archipelago
Christopher Priest, British author extraordinaire, born 1943
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