Review of The Adjacent by Christopher Priest

Christopher Priest is one of the greatest writers of science fiction of both the 20th and 21st centuries. He's not a one-trick pony: he doesn't rinse and repeat as so many genre authors do. He doesn't write cheap fiction; there is human substance to his ouevre. And his ideas are original—or at least off the center of the bell curve. 2013's The Adjacent just very well be the culmination of everything Priest wrote—in a good way.

The Adjacent is a patchwork quilt. (It's probably more an Escher tesseract, but that metaphor proved difficult to sustain.)  The first patch is a near-future in which journalist Tarent covers a Europe degraded by climate change and social upheaval. As the book opens (patch appears?), Tarent is mourning the death of his wife who was killed under mysterious circumstances. Only a burned black triangle remains on the ground where she had been standing, something Tarent reflects on during his return journey to the Islamic Republic of Great Britain. In the second patch, an illusionist named Tommy Trent joins Britain's World War I effort. As an airman, he attempts to use the tricks of his trade to disguise warplanes. The third patch takes elements of the first two and changes the colors. The fourth patch takes the first three and changes the pattern. The fifth patch...

Accordingly, The Adjacent is an achitecture parallel to J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. It's a parade of motifs that appear and re-appear in varying guises. It's a shaking of the puzzle pieces out of the box, taking a picture, putting them back in, and shaking the box for another picture. It's a slow river of concepts that re-contextualize the presentation of those concepts as they appeared before. It's The Atrocity Exhibition with proper character and plotting.

The Adjecent is likewise Christopher Priest's ”multiverse”. It is a smorgasbord of pieces from most of his books—stage magic, twins, alternate worlds, extreme coincidence, mystery, the 20th century's world wars, Dream Archipelago, subjective perception, virtual reality tech, and more. What makes this a milkshake not a kitchen sink is the amazing fashion Priest stitches all the pieces together, yes, into a quilt. It's patches of story linked to one another in satisfyingly indirect fashion—with a sum to its parts.

The sum—the theme—of The Adjacent is located within the Bermuda triangle of: the illusion of perception, the similarity (not sameness) of things, and the peculiar manner in which history may or may not repeat itself. Each patch of the quilt finds itself at some angle in this triangle (sorry for mixing metaphors, but it's appropriate with this novel), creating a mysteriously concrete milieu of story in the process.

Sam Leith, in writing for The Guardian, laments that The Adjacent opens more doors than it closes, potentially leaving the reader wanting more answers than are given. I understand the perspective. If the expectation of the reader is a box tied off with a bow, then it's possible they will have similar disappointment to Leith. If, however, the expectation is, as with most Priest novels, a fuzzy scene which attempts to highlight an aspect of the human condition in thoughtful, science fictional fashion, you have a chance of enjoying the novel. Yes, Priest does not provide ready answers for every patch of The Adjacent. There is no ostensible logic why one patch sits adjacent to another. But when viewed from above, there is a quilt. It's a whole. It has function. It provides warmth.

In the end, The Adjacent may be Christopher Priest's magnum opus; there is a master storyteller at work here. The patient, paced prose lays down character and story with the regularity of fence posts. At a minimum, it is a highly readable Priest novel that does not require prior knowledge. At maximum, particularly for readers with experience in Priest's ouevre, it combines and recombines familiar elements in engaging meta fashion.