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A review by mwx1010
The Adjacent by Christopher Priest
5.0
The Adjacent is probably the archetypal Christopher Priest novel. It’s all here as something of a greatest hits package of his work tying together a number of his common preoccupations (aeroplanes, stage magicians, H.G. Wells, dystopian future Britains, weird quantum mechanics, the Dream Archipelago…) as well as a number of his previous works.
At its heart this is a love story (well, at least one love story) but that’s not immediately clear to the reader. Priest’s voice is terse, almost Ballardian, but the simplicity of the writing sometimes masks that this is very, very clever stuff. He knows exactly where he’s going and the misdirection is set up from the off (as is made very clear early on in an extended section dealing explicitly with the nature and mechanisms of misdirection).
Probably not the best place to start with Priest as there are so many callbacks to other works, but something that will definitely reward re-reading.
At its heart this is a love story (well, at least one love story) but that’s not immediately clear to the reader. Priest’s voice is terse, almost Ballardian, but the simplicity of the writing sometimes masks that this is very, very clever stuff. He knows exactly where he’s going and the misdirection is set up from the off (as is made very clear early on in an extended section dealing explicitly with the nature and mechanisms of misdirection).
Probably not the best place to start with Priest as there are so many callbacks to other works, but something that will definitely reward re-reading.