CHRISTOPHER PRIEST (14 July, 1943 – 2 February, 2024)
The Grimmfest Team are saddened to learn of the death of Christopher Priest, one of our favourite authors, who we were delighted to have as a guest during the early days of the festival.
Priest was one of the most consistently brilliant of a remarkable generation of writers loosely affiliated with the so-called “New Wave” of “speculative” – as opposed to “science” – fiction. Championed by Michael Moorcock in NEW WORLDS magazine, and by Harlan Ellison in his notorious DANGEROUS VISIONS anthologies, and including, in addition to Moorcock and Ellison themselves, J.G. Ballard, James Sallis, M. John Harrison, Thomas M. Disch, John Sladek, Hilary Bailey, and, to some extent Angela Carter, this “New Wave” mixed experimental, Modernist techniques and surrealism with fairytale and fable, science fiction and fantasy, and even hard-boiled crime fiction; seeking to move English language literary fiction away from what was seen as a too-narrow focus on Realism, and at the same time to bring a more literary approach to genre; to create a form of fiction that constantly blurs boundaries, and defies easy categorisation.
Even among his peers, Priest was a slippery, difficult to pin down writer. His early novel, FUGUE FOR A DARKENING ISLAND (1972), written during one of the UK’s periodic bouts of hysterical anti-immigrant paranoia, is a queasy, uneasy, deliberately ambiguous examination of every racist’s worst fears made manifest, presented in the briskly brutal and unsentimental manner of a John Wyndham post-apocalyptic survival tale. It’s an uncomfortable read even now (perhaps in some respects more so than ever, in post-Brexit Britain), and one can only imagine the impact it must have had when it first appeared, and wonder at how many readers failed to see the satiric elements, and simply enjoyed seeing their own racist fantasies played out. I shudder to think what some of the easily-triggered, hypersensitive types currently proliferating all over the internet, with their apparent inability to understand context or nuance or even irony, would make of it.
This startling literary hand grenade was followed by the critically acclaimed INVERTED WORLD, the closest Priest ever came to writing “hard SF”. It’s a jaw-droppingly inventive and genre-redefining spin on the “challenging environment” scenario, popularised by the great Hal Clement in novels such as MISSION OF GRAVITY and CYCLE OF FIRE, which gradually develops into an exploration of perception and subjective reality; themes which proved increasingly central to Priest’s work from this point on. There was a foray into recursive sci-fi and literary pastiche, with THE SPACE MACHINE, a sequel to H.G. Wells’ THE TIME MACHINE, which offers a laconic yet loving tribute to one of Priest’s literary heroes, while A DREAM OF WESSEX explores ideas of lucid dreaming and projected futures in a troubling tale of a project to recruit some of the nation’s most brilliant minds to “dream” a utopian future in the midst of an increasing dystopian reality, with predictably identity-damaging results.
But it was with THE AFFIRMATION, THE GLAMOUR, and the subsequent collections of short stories set in and around the “Dream Archipelago” that Priest really came into his own; tales in which reality is increasingly fluid, set in a realm in which the divisions between the real and the imagined, “fantasy” and “reality” become increasingly permeable and difficult to detect or define; in which personalities become fragmented, schizophrenic, and characters find themselves doubled, and then challenged and thwarted by those doubles.
These themes are central to THE PRESTIGE, the novel for which Priest is of course best known; an extraordinary tale of feuding magicians and the blurring of stagecraft, science, and something very akin to real magic, which was filmed by Christopher Nolan, with varying degrees of success. Priest himself was ambivalent about the results, to the extent that he wrote an amusingly acerbic extended essay, THE MAGIC, chronicling his experiences of the film’s development and difficulties, in which he praised the intelligent approach to many of the problems the novel presents in being adapted for the screen, while pulling no punches about where he thought Nolan failed.
His view was best expressed in a comment he made during the Q&A at Grimmfest, as he regaled our audience with some of his more unusual experiences as a writer, and in particular with those relating to seeing his work optioned and / or adapted for the screen. Nolan, he felt, got most of it right “apart from the ending – which is rather a big problem” (A view which has always seemed to me perfectly reasonable, given that, when I first saw the film with a couple of friends who hadn’t read the book, I had to explain what happened at the end to them, based on my knowledge of the original source material!). Then again, writers are never entirely happy with adaptations of their work; not least, as James Ellroy once observed, because it so rarely leads to any real increase in sales. Indeed, once the movie is made, it often takes the place of the book in the public imagination, as Charles Laughton’s classic film of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER did Davis Grubb’s brilliant original source novel.
And in Priest’s case, this would be a tragedy indeed. His writing is uniquely strange and magical; his clean, spare prose a startling contrast to the ever weirder, wilder manner in which his narratives develop and unfold. His death is a huge loss to the world of imaginative and fantastic fiction, and to those of you yet to discover his work, the Grimmfest Team cannot recommend it highly enough. And if you are already familiar with his work, it’s probably time for a revisit, to remind yourselves of what we’ve lost. The books remain, of course, and all of them repay a second or a third reread. But tragic to think there will be no more. Heartfelt condolences to his family, loved ones, friends, and colleagues.
R.I.P., Christopher Priest.