If
I made a list of science fiction-y writers in the world, Christopher
Priest would be near the tip-top. Sublime prose, deft structure,
probing ontological and metaphysical questions, intellectual
engagement—books like The
Affirmation, The
Prestige, The
Glamour, and others feature a
writer who captures the art, imagination, and
humanity inherently possible to writing. Continuing his run of
success (and books with titles beginning with ‘The’),
The Separation
is both innately Priest yet something entirely fresh in his oeuvre.
Fish
scales was the metaphor continuously popping into my head while
reading The Separation—a
strange thing considering the novel is a frame story. The book opens
with pop historian Stuart Gratton searching for memoirs,
testimonials, briefings—anything that can give him more information
on a lesser-known British pilot from World War II named J.L. Sawyer.
Having an identical twin, Sawyer competed in the 1936 Olympics in
Germany alongside his brother in the coxless pairs, meeting some
success. Rowing not a profitable enterprise, upon his return to
England Sawyer pursued his second love in university, aircraft.
Earning his pilot’s license and joining the RAF, his skills arrive
just time in time for war to break out over Europe. Captain of
numerous sorties over Germany, luck eventually catches up to Sawyer
and he is shot down over the English Channel. Pulled from the sea by
rescue craft, it is Sawyer’s convalescence which finds him trying
to put the pieces, i.e. fish scales, back together.
As
historically rich and grounded as The
Separation is in wartime and
post-war Britain, at its heart is a search for identity and
understanding of memory, as well as a probing of the moments on which
later outcomes hinge. Priest clearly having done research into RAF
bombing raids, Winston Churchill’s memoirs, and the inner workings
of the Third Reich before, during and after WWII, he uses a handful
of very specific elements to complement Sawyer’s narrative. Key to
understanding this is, where Sawyer was a bomber pilot, his twin
brother is a conscientious objector who works with the Red Cross in
attempt to heal the proverbial wounds of Nazi bombing raids in
London. The Churchill we know from history was not entirely
pacifist, something which Priest plays with. Conversely, history
remembers Rudolf Hess as an evil member of the Third Reich. His
parachuting into Scotland on a ‘peace mission’ amid the war is
not something oft recalled, but Priest does, using the moment as one
of the many hinges upon which future outcomes play out. History not
a straight line in The
Separation, the personal and
social shift and move in many directions.
Another
reason fish scales are my metaphor of choice is narrative structure.
Beyond the framing device (which in this case might be called the
fish’s backbone), Priest slowly and regularly lays down bits of
story, overlapping elements here, moving slightly in a new direction
there, jumping ahead in time, returning to an event from another
perspective (and all without sacrificing any narrative coherence—a
wonderful success). We see the Sawyer brothers from university
through to retirement, but again, with no line of bread crumbs to
follow, rather an array. These fish scales iridescent, they change
brightness and color depending on perspective. Which is a good time
to introduce…
…the
unreliable narrator. One aspect of the fish scales’ iridescence is
that the characters cannot and should not be taken at their word. On
one hand, things are happening behind the scenes that the narrator
either is withholding, remembers incorrectly, or does not realize as
with The Affirmation.
And on the other, Priest subtly plays with the underlying reality of
the story, something more akin to his Dream Archipelago novels. And
there is the added element of twins. There is one scene in the
novel, for example, wherein Sawyer’s air crew see him walking along
a road near their base. They wave, but get no response. The reader
immediately thinks “Well, it
must have been Sawyer’s twin brother, hence the lack of
recognition.” But the reader
is never 100% sure given the way Priest deploys fish scales. This
and the other ways in which Priest implements uncertainty ultimately
combine to offer a novel whose author and main characters cannot be
completely trusted, but in turn create a novel more than the sum of
its parts.
In
the end, The Separation
is as good a novel as Priest has ever written, if not his best. The
science fiction-y elements minimal, one would be better off labelling
the novel as slipstream given how readily recognizable yet trembling
reality is underfoot—another good metaphor paralleling the novel’s
interests in memory and identity. Most of the searching for self and
identity routed through twins, doppelgangers, and alternate
histories, any reader with a particular interest in these areas will
find a rich bed of material if not just damn good story.
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