Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews (36 page)

The Prestige

by Christopher Priest

Touchstone, 404 pages, hardback, 1995

Christopher Priest is probably the most underrated novelist at work today, almost certainly because he chooses to write in that curious subgenre that is sort of science fiction, sort of fantasy, but in no way generically classifiable as either. For some reason we Brits accept foreign writers who work in this field – John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Ben Okri, Valerie Martin and others – but not our compatriots, unless they happen to be Martin Amis or John Fowles.* Priest, who can write any of these

[* 2011 note: How much has changed in the past decade and a half!]

other authors under the table – with the possible (and it's only possible) exception of Fowles – tends to go forgotten. Yet, perhaps because he publishes so infrequently, one has the sense that the appearance of each new novel represents a publishing
occasion
– a moment when each of us, if we have the slightest concern about the future of fiction, should put our money where our mouths are.

The Prestige
is Priest's first novel in five years (the last was
The Quiet Woman
in 1990). It is one of those delicious books in which truth – if there is indeed an absolute truth to the tale – is revealed only gradually, and partially. A variety of narrators, most of them unreliable, describe to us the feud that sprang up between two Victorian stage magicians, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. Angier made an early living as a fraudulent spiritualist, which is what incurred Borden's obsessive wrath; Borden's public debunking of Angier, prefaced by his unintended inducement of a miscarriage by Angier's wife, is the source of Angier's venom. Yet atop all this is the professional jealousy between the two. Borden has a trick that seems to require the instantaneous transmission of a human body from one place to another. Angier cannot understand how this is done and eventually, in desperation, seeks the assistance of the inventor Nikola Tesla in solving the puzzle. Tesla is able to duplicate the effect only by constructing a genuine matter-transmitter, powered by the new force presently transforming society, electricity. However, the device is really a matter-
duplicator
: while a live Angier reappears in some startling part of the theatre, dazzling the punters who have come to see the "magician", there remains, unnoticed in the place where he was originally standing, his corpse – the "prestige". To perform the trick he must die, nightly.

To reveal more of this novel would be to do it and its readers a disservice: Priest has many surprises up his sleeve, not the least of which is his own ability to perform as a (narrational) illusionist. Never, while reading
The Prestige
, are we allowed to take anything for granted: the turn of a page is likely to reveal to us that this particular magician has a new trick that forces us to re-evaluate all that has gone before.

Others have tried this game, of course. William Goldman did it with
Magic
(1976), which was filmed in 1978 (the "magic" involved was ventriloquism). Jack Curtis did it with a rather nasty horror novel called
Conjure Me
(1992). There are further examples. What these authors were trying to do was explore the area between conjuring – stage illusion – and real magic. Neither of the two cited authors was able – quite – to bring it off. Priest does.

What he also manages to do is, through lack of overt statement, to make sly satirical comment on the nature of human pettiness. Imagine: Here we have a potentially history-changing invention, the matter-transmitter, and what is it used for? A conjuring trick, whose secret must be preserved from the world at large because that, after all, is the sacrosanct ethic of professional stage magicians. Meanwhile its inventor, Tesla, is content enough to keep silent about his breakthrough because he needs a few thousand dollars to pay off his creditors – who are less interested in the benefits his work might bring to the human species than in whether or not their bills are paid.

The Prestige
is a novel full of subtle nuances. I particularly liked the way in which the dual nature of Borden is handled – is he one person or is he two, is he a single soul with two bodies, is he two souls sharing a single body? – and the portrayal of the woman (Olive/Olivia) who in effect creates her own twin in order to be the mistress of one illusionist after the other. She, like the illusionists themselves, discovers how to be two people simultaneously; also like them, in the end she has to decide which of her selves she would prefer to be.

I read this novel at a sitting: it's a long novel so it was a long sitting. Here is one of our finest novelists at his peak. Need I say more?

—SFX

Dirty Boots

by Mike E. Purfield

Writers Club Press, 235 pages, paperback, 2001

Here's a strange one – and in fact a very good one, despite a blizzard of proofing errors and a lack of copy-editing, as one generally expects from Writers Club/iUniverse books.

Page has AIDS, and decides there's little for her at home in New Jersey; she might as well hit the road. Sam's problems are almost worse: an orphan of unknown antecedents, when asleep he is a focus of poltergeist-like activity, and when he awakens his physical appearance – skin colour, hair colour, etc. – takes a while to settle down. He also has clairvoyant bursts, which are reflected in his drawings; and it is these that tell him he should make his way to Sedona (read Noplace), Arizona. A long string of foster-parents have been unable to tolerate his freakishness; when the latest pair look set to stand idly by while he's murdered by a lynch mob, he obeys his clairvoyant instructions and likewise hits the road.
En route
he encounters Page, and she agrees, on the grounds that she has no other fixed destination in mind, to go with him to Sedona.

Dan is a psychopathic serial killer. The first of his countless victims was his elder sister, who came across him eviscerating a pet. But he believes that, just because he killed her, doesn't mean she's dead; he periodically recognizes her among the people around him, and must kill her all over again. He realizes Page is the latest "reincarnation" of his sister, and sets himself to murder her and anyone who gets in his way. Of course, he has the minor problem of not knowing where she is, because she's left town for parts unknown; but he kidnaps psychic Perry and forces her to guide him in pursuit.

On arrival in Sedona, Page and Sam introduce themselves to Scott, an artist whose painting of one of the local churches has loomed large in Sam's clairvoyant visions. But Scott proves to be a Satanist who'd like to sacrifice Page ...

But that's probably enough of the plot, and I've not even started on Uncle Ivan, who's violently rousted from a years-long coma and is likewise drawn to Sedona, or the bizarre secret within an Arizona mountain that will unlock the door to the mysteries of Sam's existence.

Dirty Boots
is, if you like, the weirdest road movie you ever came across, a nightmarish comedy that makes you chuckle with guilt. While reading it I kept thinking of writers whose heyday was in the 1970s or a little earlier – writers like Richard Brautigan and Richard Fariña – but really Purfield has his own voice, and his own distinctly skewed worldview. Despite the irritations I mentioned at the outset, the fluidity of his prose makes the pages turn quickly, and the entertainment rarely if ever flags. It's much to be hoped that a non-vanity press will pick this book up, edit and proofread it properly, and reissue it in a better edition. But the book's recommended even in its current form.

—Infinity Plus

Resurrection Men

by Ian Rankin

Little, Brown, 436 pages, hardback, 2003; reissue of a book originally published in the UK in 2002

This is the fifteenth book (and the thirteenth novel) in Rankin's series about tough Edinburgh cop Detective Inspector John Rebus, but it's the first this reviewer has read; it most certainly will not be the last,* because
Resurrection Men
is excellent.

[* 2011 note: Indeed it hasn't been: my shelves now bulge with Rankin books.]

Rebus has had his brushes with authority in this past, but this time he's thrown a mug of coffee at a superior officer. The sin's grave enough that he's sent off to a police training establishment in central Scotland to join a group of senior cops who likewise require reconditioning; if they can see the error of their ways they'll be restored to their careers – "resurrected", in other words.

Of course, it's a setup; three of Rebus's "class-mates" are suspected of being crooked, and he's been planted among them to see what he can find out. Unfortunately for him, when they're given the file on an old crime to investigate as an exercise, it proves to be one in which his own fingers were not entirely clean.

The murder case he's been taken off is left largely in the hands of his trusty sidekick, Detective Sergeant Siobhan Clarke, who continues to work it with extremely green rookie David Hynds. Of course, the bond between Rebus and Clarke is such that they give each other covert help in their investigations. But that seems not to be the sole crossover between the two cases.

Most procedural stories that virtually
taste
of realism aren't particularly page-turners; most page-turning crime thrillers involve a certain fantastication that requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. Rankin manages the rare double act, though:
Resurrection Men
is an absolutely gripping thriller that's at the same time completely, grittily convincing. The supporting cast, and Rebus's relationships with them, are likewise superb – that dual comment applies most especially in the context of Siobhan Clarke, who's an exceptionally appealing character in her own right. There are rumours that Rankin may be planning to retire Rebus, leaving Clarke as primary protagonist in the continuing series. If there's any truth in them, it'll be on the one hand a great pity – because Rebus is a fine creation – but on the other a joy, because Clarke most assuredly deserves her own novels.

Nearly better than anything else is Rankin's capture of the city of Edinburgh, both on and off the tourist streets; it becomes almost an extra character in the story.

The two intertwined mysteries and their resolutions are entirely satisfying, and they possess a characteristic that's rare in mystery novels: as you look back at the plot from the standpoint of the denouement, you realize that there was a certain inevitability in events turning out this way, given the characters involved. Nothing, in other words, seems remotely contrived or
created
; all is truly naturalistic.

—Crescent Blues

Hell on Earth

by Michael Reaves

Del Rey, 280 pages, hardback, 2001

A few years ago, somewhere in the midst of nowhere, a young girl, pregnant by her father, gave birth to a monster that promptly slaughtered everyone in the delivery room before vaulting off through the window.

In the present, strange things are a-doing. New York-based occultist Colin, raised and trained by a Transylvanian necromantic order called the Scholomance, is robbed, by some entity that reeks of wrongness, of his primary talisman, the tripartite Maguffin known as the Trine; immediately afterwards a fabulously lovely lady angel called Zoel arrives on his doorstep offering to help him get it back in return for his assisting her on an enigmatic quest. They are shortly joined in this by the demon Asdeon, who has collaborated with Colin before and maintains a shifty friendship with him.

Meanwhile, in Oregon, bestselling journo and crime-book author Liz Russell is watching a serial killer called the Maneater – who has been stalking her these past few years – apparently fail to die in the execution chamber; even during the autopsy, after his brain has been removed and discovered to be lacking in the areas responsible for such motor functions as breathing and heartbeat, the Maneater is still able to wink at her. If the vile spirit that has enlivened him is able to hop from body to body, as indeed proves to be the case, then Liz's life is in eternal danger ...

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, bodyguard Terry Dane, a veteran of Desert Storm, during which he had an encounter he's tried to forget with a demonic figure amid the hellish fires and darkling skies, manages only by chance to stop an unkillable madman from assassinating his rock-star client on the street. Later the said heavy-metal artiste, stage-name Chopper, is found so hideously slaughtered in his private, locked-room studio that if the obvious comparison were made there'd be letters from angry hamburgers. The mystery of this murder is one Terry must solve, even if at the cost of his own life ...

Off go these various disparate characters on their various disparate quests, encountering demons and dangers galore. They all finish up in Las Vegas – the 21st century's Sodom and Gomorrah – where there is the most dramatic demonic manifestation yet, in the vanquishing of which all three of the main protagonists must play their essential parts ...

There is, as you will have gathered, quite a lot of plot in this not particularly long book – plenty of event to keep the pages turning.

Unfortunately, the net effect is all rather forgettable. This is the kind of novel that used to be published originally not as an elegantly produced hardback but as a mass-market paperback, designed to be read once on a long train journey and then abandoned for the next passenger to pick up. The tale is efficiently told, but I never had any deep sense of involvement in the characters and their fates or any compelling urge to discover what was going to happen next. If there are any profundities to the underlying ideas – indeed, if there are any underlying ideas at all – then they have all been pared away for the sake of that efficiency of telling. I came away from
Hell on Earth
with the feeling that it is one of those novels that can be adequately synopsized simply by: "They have adventures." The plethora of event somehow does not seem to tie together to form a single, unifying, inevitable plot.

There are some good points. The demon Asdeon is a fine fictional creation – by far the most enjoyable character in the book. Although he's Americanized, with a penchant for Bogart impersonations that actually
are
Bogart impersonations because of his shapeshifting ability, the precursor I was reminded of most was Albert Campion's butler Lugg in Margery Allingham's novels. Of course, it is not necessarily a good sign that a secondary character should steal the show on every appearance, but this shouldn't detract from the achievement.

Also of note is Reaves's facility for creating pop-culture similes and metaphors, which generously litter the pages – rather too generously, perhaps, because they can come to grate. The functioning of the Striker saw (device used in autopsies), for example, is described thus: "It worked by high speed vibration and would not harm soft tissue, although it sliced through bone like a kitchen knife through Janet Leigh." Or there's a description of the lovely-to-die-for angel Zoel: "Then she smiled, another one of those smiles that could melt an iceberg faster than Godzilla's fiery breath." All very slick and professional stuff, of course – despite the image of a halitotic smile – but not necessarily effective in the task of dragging the reader into the plot.

Then there are the times – too many of them – where one has the impression Reaves is laughing at his readers, that he's deliberately revealing the mechanics of putting together a generic supernatural-horror story in order to mock their predilections. After one particular set-piece we read:

Probably he was supposed to feel shock or fear at the sight of the priest's throat wound functioning as a second mouth. Colin felt neither; only impatience. Whoever or whatever was possessing the priest should have known that it took more than this kind of shoddy theatricality to impress him.

And the same, of course, goes for the reader, because the scene in question
did
smack of "shoddy theatricality". Similarly, three-quarters of the way through the book, Colin exclaims: "I've been too long in the dark. I want some answers. [...] who stole the Trine? Who sent me on this wild goose chase? And why?" They're questions the more perceptive reader, too, has long been asking, because Colin's adventures to date have indeed been a wild goose chase, with the components of the Trine being merely plot coupons – rather like the various objects you have to gather in a role-playing gamebook for reasons that never if at all become obvious. The suggestion here is that readers are too often satisfied with such stuff, and that those very same readers won't notice the jibe. And right at the end of the book, when Colin has to decide what best he should do next in order to plant the seed of a sequel, a miniature Asdeon appears on one of his shoulders and a miniature Zoel on the other, each urging him to follow a different course, much as in the old cartoons where Donald Duck might be swayed one way and the other by a devil and an angel on his two shoulders.

There's often, in fact, the feeling while reading
Hell on Earth
that somewhere below the surface there's a comic novel or outright parody just itching to break loose, but being held somewhat insecurely in check. Yet to judge the novel as a romp would be misguided as well, for it lacks a romp's requisite bubbling
joie de vivre
. What is conveyed instead – presumably by accident rather than design – is as noted a somewhat sneering contempt for readers of novels like this one.

Whether such readers deserve all they get is of course another matter ...

—Infinity Plus