 |
The Dream Archipelago
by Christopher Priest
(Earthlight, £5.99, 264 pages, paperback; published 4 May 1999.)
This book, the first collection by Christopher Priest in about twenty
years, is superb intellectual architecture. The six short stories and
novellas gathered here are all triumphs of quiet, steady
craftsmanship, models of ingenious design and subtle implication, and
as a group they further enrich each other, interlocking cleverly,
symmetrically, sinisterly. If this is not the best SF collection of
the year, it will certainly come close.
But there is some uncertainty of classification here. Earthlight is an
SF imprint, and The Dream Archipelago has been unambiguously marketed
as SF; there are quintessentially science fictional elements to be
found here, such as a war waged with hallucinogenic gases, exotic
anthropological speculations, and a mysterious "time vortex". But any
reader familiar with the output of Christopher Priest over the last
two decades will be aware that his novels, however conceptually
indebted to SF, Fantasy, and Horror, are issued in mainstream literary
formats, with little overt acknowledgement of genre, and that their
emphasis is consistently on "inner space", the lineaments of unusual
contemporary and historical psychological experience. A look at the
copyright page of this volume shows that, with the exception of the
introductory vignette, the stories here (all apparently newly revised)
date from the period 1978-80, the time when Priest’s departure into
the mainstream was becoming evident; and the tales themselves
demonstrate this shift very clearly, being slow, contemplative studies
of minds and cultures in crisis. This book could just as easily have
been issued as "upmarket" literary fiction; given its exceptional
depth and richness, Earthlight can only be thanked for bringing it to
the attention of the SF audience instead.
As Priest’s novel The Affirmation (1981) complexly conveys, his
so-called Dream Archipelago is just what its name implies, a region of
the wondering (and wandering) mind, a location allowing intricate
explorations of various, always abnormal, mental states. The islands
occupy the equatorial ocean of a world that is in some sense a
reflection of our own, with familiar political, cultural, and
psychological realities. Modern realities are certainly being brought
brutally home to the islanders, as the rival powers of the northern
continent wage global war on each other, enforcing a bizarrely
restrictive "neutrality" on the archipelago while their forces ravage
countries still further south. Armies of occupation; battles fought on
supposedly neutral territory; horrifying medical experiments; "sense
gases" that drastically confuse perception: these traumatize
indigenous cultures, and make even cosmopolitan visitors uncertain of
their existential ground. All settings and events seem unreliable,
subjective; and, indeed, one might readily see the islands as
fragments of the inner landscape of a single human brain, obeying
subconscious rather than naturalistic logic.
So of what does this mental topography consist? One of the virtues of
these stories is their openness to multiple interpretations, as
cryptic clues are dropped and hidden designs are intimated. This
review reflects just one possible reading of the text: "The
Negation", an account of the life of a young would-be poet in a remote
military outpost, could be seen as a commentary on the human inner
conflict between action and passivity; "Whores" may be an allegory of
the universal brutalization inflicted by war, as all people,
combatants and civilians, prostitutes and their clients, become whores
in an absolute, dehumanizing sense; "The Cremation", the story of the
attempted seduction of a northern expatriate man by a married island
woman, seems to suggest that a conservative culture or mentality
resisting corruption by the modern ends by corrupting itself. "The
Miraculous Cairn", a particularly dispiriting psychological horror
story encapsulating a remarkable and sudden gender reversal, gives
elements of sexual dysfunction and (probably) child abuse an
inexplicable incarnation that vanishes as soon as adult sensibility is
brought to bear on it. These tales are all impressive enough; but "The
Watched" outdoes them, even as it links their concerns together.
The Dream Archipelago’s opening story or prologue, "The Equatorial
Moment", evokes the time vortex that overhangs the islands, making
events occurring on them strangely simultaneous (and the collection’s
stories by implication parts of a single coherent whole). Aircraft
employ the vortex as a sort of short cut, and are stacked there in a
vertical array; the role of the aircrews as observers is emphasized.
"The Watched", the concluding piece, takes this motif of observation
and carries it to elaborate lengths. More briskly told than the
earlier stories, and strengthened in its revised form since its
appearance in Priest’s second collection, An Infinite Summer, "The
Watched" investigates a further implication of war: that spying and
surveillance may destroy all privacy, making everyone a spy, everyone
a subject of spying. Tiny camera devices known as scintillas are being
used in the war, and have spread to the extent of being as common as
pollen. A reclusive millionaire living on an equatorial island is
surreptitiously observing his neighbours, refugees belonging to an
ancient and even more secretive culture; anthropologists wanting a
glimpse of these Qataari visually tantalize and spy on the
millionaire; the refugees monitor and manipulate everybody. Free will
comes to seem an illusion; ritual displaces spontaneity. As a study of
the psychology of voyeurism, "The Watched" is very incisive indeed;
with its chess-like logic of construction, its extraordinary control
of suspense, and its brilliant closing orchestration of the concerns
of the entire volume, "The Watched" must rank as one of the greatest
SF novellas.
If this book has a defect, it is stylistic: despite his great literary ambition,
Priest is not as smooth a master of language as, say, John Crowley or
M John Harrison. At times, a claustrophobic clumsiness hampers
Priest’s prose, and his rather gloomy Englishness of tone can verge,
depressingly, on the pedestrian. But his mastery of structure decidedly
outweighs this: The Dream Archipelago is virtuosity of narrative
design at its most cunning, its most urgent, and its most elegant.
Review by Nick
Gevers.
More of Nick's reviews are online at Parsec.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
|
|
