Book 28: The Adjacent

The Adjacent

Christopher Priest

I've never read a Christopher Priest book before, though I'm familiar with The Prestige, but I had high hopes coming into and while reading this novel. Unfortunately, The Adjacent never quite lives up to its own expectations. This is a shame, as Priest displays a multitude of talents throughout the book, moving seamlessly between third- and first-person narration and adapting several narrative voices to their circumstances. He evokes World War I's Western Front, a World War II-era English airbase, a plausible future Britain haunted by the consequences of global warming and advanced terrorist weaponry, and a wholly invented island society with equal vigor, but cannot quite weave them together into a single story, coherent or otherwise. To a certain extent, this is the point; The Adjacent obviously revels in the possibilities of parallel and complementary timelines, and to expect a linear story would be to mischaracterize the book's own goals. I do, however, wish that the necessary juggling was handled better, with a discernible point beyond the kind-of-twist ending on offer. The various timelines book includes numerous coincidences and crosswalks, which form part of its charm, but when some of these elements come together in the end, the effect is to distort realism so thoroughly that the entire book becomes a bit of a sham. The big finale is surprisingly conventional, particularly for an author who proves elsewhere that experimentation and departures from linearity (and, indeed, from a single notion of reality, even a fictional one) can be enthralling. The effect is one of unmitigated disappointment- surely the author capable of the novel's heights could come up with a more satisfying, appropriate ending?

Though I left The Adjacent feeling quite disappointed, it is only because the book often employs its tricks to enchanting effect. The highlight, for me, was a pair of stories about an ill-fated magician's trick; together, they recall Akutagawa's In a Grove, updated for the quantum age. The chapters that take place during World Wars I and II are wonderful bits of writing; either could stand alone as a short story and, indeed, the first probably should have, as it bears little relation to the remaining text beyond some hints of shared imagery and relies too heavily on a show-offish cameo that does little to enhance the small or larger stories at hand. The World War II-era narrative provides a surprising and welcome focal point, uniting threads from the near-future and the island stories, although it, too, becomes muddled by the end. Much of what Priest does simply seems unnecessary, focusing on less interesting ideas and characters at the expense of the good stories he tells effectively. As science fiction, The Adjacent explores some interesting ideas about quantum theory. Though these aren't quite explained to full effect they do offer tantalizing- but woefully underexplored- possibilities. In one of the novel's strongest bits- which hints at a resolution and sense of consistency that never, alas, come to fruition- we follow a character in real time only to discover that he might, perhaps, have been somewhere else all along. Yet Priest stops there, quickly moving on to another half-baked application of his solid basic ideas. That, in essence, was my experience with The Adjacent: it is a novel full of interesting riffs on an excellent, unique idea, with top-notch worldbuilding thrown in for good measure, that can't quite put everything together in a meaningful way.

Grade: B