His crisp, pinpoint prose sometimes verges on the antiseptic. In his grand symphony of strangeness, Priest hits a few off notes. When The Adjacent finally explodes into a head-spinning blast of blurred reality, Priest contains the fallout - then he orchestrates it all a stunning denouement, one that readers accustomed to his unforeseen-yet-inevitable twists might not even be prepared for. A single symbolic motif, the triangle, not only casts meaning on the book's title, it holds together a volatile structure that threatens to splinter at every turn, and Priest controls it all with the cold hand of a rogue bomb-disposal tech defusing his own IED. It can't make sense.īut Priest makes sense of it, exquisitely.
Amid Priest's haunting mediations on the philosophy of weapons, war, hope, love, and loss, he draws together the threads of his plot until they eerily align. As the clues trickle in, it becomes more maddening still. The three protagonists have similarity names - Trent, Tarent, and Torrance - and at first that similarity is left maddeningly unexplained. Early on, the book establishes three distinct storylines: one set in a grim future fraught with climate-change catastrophes, one set in World War I, and one set in World War II. Interconnectedness is The Adjacent's salvation. Priest has always worked on a large scale, but his canvas has never been more sprawling. Not only does he weave together multiple storylines that span millennia, he's added parallel universes to the equation - some of which echo back to his previous novels, ones that never seemed meant to do anything but stand alone. He's also gone off the deep end - that is, a deeper end than he ever has before.
in 2013 and finally getting a stateside release), Priest has once again gone elaborate. With his latest book The Adjacent (published in the U.K.
Even 1996's The Prestige - his most accessible work, and the source of the Christopher Nolan film of the same name - was a study in dizzying puzzle-craft. How?Īs far back as his 1973 breakthrough novel, the Hugo-nominated Inverted World, Christopher Priest has specialized in intricate, speculative-fiction mysteries.
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