Customer Reviews

Prestige (GollanczF.)

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Written on the cover of this book is the phrase "Winner of a World Fantasy Award" -- those are the words that first caught my attention. And in retrospect, I find The Prestige entirely deserving of that honor. Few and far between are the books that I pick up and can still remember several years later, but it's been three or more years since I read this one, and certain vibes and moments that I took from it are still with me. This is due, in part, to an average-to-good plotline, but in the end, to Priest's own sleight-of-hand as an author -- he shows an impressive range, a nice attention to detail, and a subdued sense of style which sets the perfect tone for this tale of rival vaudeville magicians in the late 19th century...

Set in 1878, and focused on two magicians who are rivals in both business and love, this story is delivered in a style that made it literally impossible to put down (I think I surreptitiously read it during school classes for about two days, non-stop, and might as well have been absent. I don't even know what I missed). Moving from one character's perspective to another, the story unfolds almost entirely through journal entries written by the two protagonists.

The intriguing conceit of the novel is that these journals are not discovered until almost a hundred years later, when the descendants of the two rivals meet and feel a mysterious connection to each other. As they slowly uncover the series of mysterious and unnatural events which befell their warring ancestors, the action moves fluidly from past to present to future and back, almost without warning. The drastically different narrative styles used in the two journals reveal that Mr. Priest must have an incredible amount of talent -- they might as well have been written by two different people, so unalike are their tone and perspective.

The details of the plot are far too complicated to summarize, but I would go out of my way to recommend this book to fiction lovers. While the story does not leave you with any significant knowledge or insight into the meaning of life, it is pleasure reading at its best, and there is a lot to be said for that.

This was a lot of fun but probably doesn't warrant repeated reading since it's pretty dependent on plot twists and shocks to hold your interest. With most Christopher Priest novels currently out of print (Dream of Wessex, etc) it's nice to see this one still out there and it's one of his better novels too, which is a nice bonus. Basically it concerns two magicians at the turn of the century who's paths cross and through a series of unpleasant events become bitter rivals, screwing up each other's tricks and driving each other to more and more complicated illusions in a magical game of oneupmanship. This tale is told through two journals as read by their descendants, first one magician, than the other. This style works pretty well, there are some quirks and it probably won't fool anyone who is a Victorian scholar but it looks good enough to me and it's not enough to make me hate the books. What he does an excellent job of is getting us into the world of magicians, without turning the book into a tedious expose of how they do their tricks ('cause it's all about the illusion), you get a glimpse into a sort of exclusive club that's all about convincing you that you're seeing what you shouldn't be seeing. The method of using both journals is a trick that required quite a bit of skill to pull off properly, since the order of the journals make a bit of difference in order to remain surprising and it's interesting to see two different versions of events, especially when one explains the other in greater detail (the only problem with that is that by the time you get to the concurrent event in the second journal, you might have forgotten what happened the first time around). Some people might take some issue with the fact that it gets seriously weird toward the end, and being that the book mostly sticks to "real" stuff the way it starts to go toward fantasy might turn off some people . . . you'll have to read and decide that for yourself, unfortunately. Also, I wasn't exactly sure what the point of the bookending modern day descendants was, they barely appear and Priest doesn't make too much of an effort to give them any sort of personality, which leaves the ending a little flatter than maybe it should be. Still, this is a fine novel showing a lot of imagination and skill, and those looking for fantasy without elves and swords should take a sharp detour here. Even with its flaws, it's highly readable and very recommended.

As someone with an interest in the adaptation of books and stories into films, I often read a book and then watch the movie or movies to see how various screenwriters have reshaped the material. In this instance, seeing the movie pushed me to finally read the book that had been sitting on my shelf for two years. One always hates to be a heretic, but this is one of the very rare cases where the movie improves on the original.

The premise of this World Fantasy Award-winning novel is certainly an intriguing one: two English magicians of the Victorian era, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier, engage in a lifelong rivalry to outperform each other, a rivalry which at times leads to life-threatening sabotage. Their story is told partially from the modern perspective of their great-grandchildren, but mainly through their own diary entries. The narrative framework is the first area in which the film is a vast improvement. The modern storyline serves almost no purpose and the filmmakers wisely jettisoned it. Similarly, the diary entries are entirely unconvincing as Victorian documents, and play a much-subdued role in the film.

However, the main problem of the book is that the feud is never given much of a basis -- in other word, there are no stakes. The one fairly egregious act early on is done by Borden to Angier, but when Angier eventually turns the other cheek, Borden keeps at it. Indeed, the feud seems to periodically die off, only to inexplicably flare up again over the course of twenty years! The filmmakers recognized this problem and came up with a much more convincing back story to explain the start of the feud, and then very carefully calibrated its escalation over time.

Another problem the book has is that for the reader to really buy into the notion that these two magicians are obsessed with each other, the protagonists must be equals. However we learn much more about Angier than Borden, and indeed, while Angier is a bit of a schmuck, he comes off far more sympathetic than Borden. Again, the film does a much better job of making the two men equals in stature, and very different in nature. It also does a good job of streamlining their family lives, which are rather convoluted in the book.

There are plenty of other more mundane instances where the film comes out looking better. For example, in the book Angier consults with the real-life inventor Nicola iTesla. Tesla builds him an apparatus which can replicate matter, lectures Angier about how he should not use it to counterfeit currency, and then proceeds to abandon his lab due to bankruptcy! The film takes the much more interesting and plausible approach that Tesla disappears because Thomas Edison's goons have finally tracked him down and torch his lab. And ultimately, Priest commits the sin of making the story's two big twists all too obvious to the reader, thus removing any sense of wonder or suspense. Meanwhile, the film does a great job of holding off on revealing the twists until the last possible moment, and actually adds one or two.

Ultimately, it's hard to recommend the original book version of this tale -- with its clunky framework, poor pacing, uneven characterization, vague motivations, and tipping of its hand -- when the film version exists. Instead of spending six hours reading this, watch the movie and use the other four hours on another book.

This is one of many, many books that only made it onto my radar because there was a movie coming out. If I know that a movie I'm particularly interested in was based on a book, I make every effort to read the book first. I am SO glad that I did. Christopher Priest's haunting mystery story is without question one of the finest novels I've read this year.

Andrew Westley, a man adopted at a young age, is summoned for a meeting at the home of a woman he's never met. At the same time, he recieves in the mail a book penned by his biological great-grandfather, a famous stage magician, about his life and the practice of magic. Upon meeting the woman, Kate, Andrew discovers that his ancestor and hers were great rivals on stage, a rivalry that lasted their entire careers, and the feud has continued through their families over the centuries. Reading manuscripts left behind by their predecessors, Andrew and Kate begin to piece together the truth about the feud that drove their families apart and the horrific secrets of the lives their grandfathers led.

This is a fantasy novel in many respects, but beyond that, it's a mystery. What's more, is an amazing mystery. The lives of Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier are intertwining riddles, secrets that overlap and comingle in ways even the men themselves don't understand. This, to me, is the best kind of mystery -- the sort where the reveal leaves you stunned but, at the same time, embarassed that you didn't see it coming, because it's so perfectly constructed. The book reads like a magic trick, except at the end the curtain is whisked away and all the secrets are revealed.

I'm still anxious to see the movie, but now I find myself nervous that it couldn't quite live up to the novel. This was fantastic.

Wow. Being one of the many people who saw the movie first, I was immediately surprised at how radically different the book was from its cinematic adaptation. Starting off in the latter years of the 20th Century (already a major difference), the book was an intricately-woven web of mystery, magic, and wonder. It's next to impossible to write an adequate review of the book (or the movie, for that matter) without giving away too much (even a little bit would be too much!), and I'm sure that the other reviews give enough information on their own.

This was a very intimate, truly MYSTERIOUS, and dark story. So dark even, that in some ways, it was even darker than the movie (which went for a more obvious - even conventional - angle on the story).

I loved it, and movie fan or not, you probably will, too.

I saw the film before reading the book, and enjoyed both thoroughly, but can't understand reviewers who say they liked the film better. Both were wonderful, and for different reasons. the film was great because of the gorgeous and passionate actors and their escalating rivalry. The novel is exquisitely written: brilliant pacing, literate to the nth degree. It was a pleasure to read a truly beautiful work of art. I gave it four stars, however, for the ending. I felt that it suddenly turned into horror (as opposed to fantasy), as if H.P. Lovecraft (one of my favorites, I might add) had been called into hurriedly tack on a shocking conclusion. I had so enjoyed the measured pace and suddenly, it was all blurry and running together in haste. Maybe the author was constrained by a frugal publisher, who knows. Still, I will always think of reading this book with great pleasure, and recommend it to my friends.

Christopher Priest must be one of the most decorated but unread authors around. In 1983 he was named one of the Best of Young British Novelists. And The Prestige won both the World Fantasy Award and Britain's James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Meanwhile, I'd never heard of him and when the book got some good reviews over here, it was a NY Times notable book, I couldn't find it anywhere. Bur I'm glad I finally got ahold of a copy, because the novel lives up to the hype.

Priest tells the story of two turn of the century magicians, Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden, who are first rivals and then bitter enemies as what starts out as an attempt to learn each others secrets deteriorates into obsessive hatred and is even handed down to succeeding generations. Eventually their efforts to top one anothers latest tricks draw Nikola Tesla into the picture. Angier travels to Colorado to see if Tesla's experiments with electricity have any magical implications. They do and the results are predictably, but delightfully, horrifying.

It's pretty hard to describe this novel without giving too much of the story away. It's also a story that invites comparison; I saw reviewer references to The Alienist, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, H.G. Wells, etc. Suffice it to say, the writing is terrific, the story is original but harkens back to classic themes and the tension he builds is palpable. My only complaint is that it either ended abruptly or simply before I wanted it to; I'm not sure which. Find it and read it. You won't want it to end either.

GRADE: A

Priest does almost everything right in this novel. But as with the prestige that is one of the central themes, the novel depends on the author playing a game of peek-a-boo with the reader. Just as the protaganists torment each other with the ultimate secret of the others tricks, the force that drove this reader onwards was curiousity as to exactly how the author would explain everything. And, I think, the final explanation and the resolution, horrific and effective as it was, was a let down. Part of the problem is that the book can be broken down into two different narrative halves each going over the same period of time and events. Unfortunately, the different halves seem to belong to different genres. The first half and the gradual revelation of the sacrifices the magician has to make for the sake of his act can be roughly described as a realistic, impressively imagined, well researched, semi-historical drama. This led me to expect that the second half would continue on the same vein and the seemingly supernatural occurences would be revealed to be the result of a particularly clever illusion. Instead, the second half is an almost straight forward horror story. Of course it was an effective horror story and one I would have been happy to read but compared to the first half, it lacked conviction. Overall, Priest has written an atmospheric, chilling novel with full blooded characters. But it could have been more.

I watched the movie and was compelled to read the book. I expected an expansion of the characters and situations in the movie, but was pleasantly surprised to find that the book was much different yet at the same time very much like the movie. Some comparisons between the two:

The reasons behind the two magicians' grudges towards each other are different, they had different career paths here. The movie had them as friends first who had a falling out while here the two never met each other under pleasant circumstances. In the movie the two were much more cruel to each other than in the book, but the feelings of bitterness and the drive for revenge still felt deeper in the book. Also, Rupert was the more sympathetic character in the book while Borden turned out to be so in the film.

The relationships between some of the characters were the same, especially in the case of Olivia, but Rupert's family situation was deeper and far more complicated. Cutter, while a driving force and a friend to both magicians in the film, was a background character who worked with Rupert for less than twenty pages and then faded away.

The Tesla machine was almost the same, but with a much different twist. Rupert's family background was expanded more. Borden's secret was better concealed in the book, and was revealed in a different way. Due to the format in which the book was written, a lot of the story relied on subtleties while the movie made a point to drive everything home. Still, both ended on different notes, and both were very powerful.

As for the book itself:
I loved the format, with the present day descendents and the different narrators in different sections. Part one was Borden's relative being invited to Rupert's relative's house to stir up some unanswered questions. Part two was Borden's version of the story. Part three was Rupert's relative's story of a disturbing childhood memory. Part four was the longest and was Rupert's diary, kept over a 40 year period and told his version of the story. Part five was the present day Borden's discovery of Rupert's secret and the discovery of a memory that had haunted him all his life.

The story unfolded in such a mysterious way, with neither magician letting very much of their secret go in their narratives... the stories were their journals and if someone had gotten hold of them their secrets would have only been alluded to and never fully revealed. The end of Rupert's journal was pretty conclusive in terms of explaining his trick, but one part was never resolved. SPOILER ALERT, STOP HERE IF YOU HAVEN'T READ: The final section could have contained about ten more pages that detailed whether Kate knew that Rupert's spectre still lived in the vault with the "prestige materials" and the Tesla machine, and if she still used the machine to expand her finances. Also, what did Andrew plan to do with the little Nicky once he carried him from the vault? It seems he was better left to rest there. And why did Rupert's ghost wander into the woods, and what really happened in 1904 when he tried to transport himself into his dead body? Did he communicate with the following generations of his family or did he hide in the vault? Kate seemed to know he was there, yet seemed scared when he appeared. What relationship will Kate and Andrew develop now that all of this has been brought to light? Not enough material for a sequel I wouldn't think, but questions I would have liked answered.

Overall, one of the best books I've read in a while and certainly the most developed. I will be on the lookout for more by Christopher Priest. He writes very compelling fiction and did a great job of capturing the time period. Highly recommended.

Simon Vance takes the audio listeners on a journey of the mind you will never forget. If you saw the Michael Caine/Hugh Jackman movie a few years ago, this audio production is better. Remember what someone once told me, "Books are always better than movies"...well audio is another world, in my opinion, and better than both books or movies.

If you don't know the basic story, it is about two rival magicians at the turn of the century who try to outdo each other illusion by illusion. There is an evil in their rivalry to out do the other.

Vance's narrative skills is fantastic to listen to. He can do amazing things vocally as he recants the tale, written by noted author Christopher Priest. He knows his way around an accent/vocal character showcase the talent of the performer.

So go get this now before this audio disappears from view.

Bennet Pomerantz AUDIOWORLD