The Prestige by Christopher Priest.
Pick a card; any card: wrong! But seriously, I mean, we all love a magician, right? Rabbits out of hats, card tricks, watermelon piercing, firing a series of crossbow bolts at your own head, it's all good.
So here are two magicians, in late-19th-century England: Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier. Bit of a golden age for stage magic and cabaret stuff, you'll be saying, plenty of room for two magicians to operate without conflicting with each other, no reason for them to be trying to eat each other's lunch, still less do more nefarious acts of mutual sabotage. Well, yes, you'd think, but that wouldn't make for much of a story, so here we are.
They first come into conflict when both are just starting their careers and Borden, something of a purist in matters of the prestidigitative arts, becomes aware that Angier is making his living doing séances in the homes of paying customers, complete with spooky banging on the table, rattling of curtains and maybe a bit of the old ectoplasm on special occasions, all of course produced by some pretty straightforward techniques available to the illusionist. Borden objects to the deception implicitly involved here and infiltrates one of Angier's engagements with the intention of unmasking and debunking his trickery. In doing so, and subsequently being thrown out on his ear, there is a scuffle during the course of which Angier's wife is knocked to the floor, which results in her losing the baby she is carrying. And so a feud is initiated which will eventually persist beyond the lifetimes of its protagonists.
We are invited to infer that Borden, of relatively humble origins, is a more naturally talented and instinctive illusionist than Angier, who is from an aristocratic family, but that Angier is nonetheless a man of great determination and persistence. Borden is the talk of London with a trick called The New Transported Man wherein he appears to disappear and reappear almost instantaneously on the other side of the stage with no means of getting from one place to the other. Angier secretes himself in the audience but can't work out how Borden achieves the illusion. Well, says Angier's assistant, that's because you're missing something that's right under your nose: Borden must use a double, someone who looks like him. Impossible, says Angier, it's literally the same guy. And so Angier devises a scheme to uncover the truth: have his assistant (and clandestine lover), Olivia, "defect" and go and work as Borden's assistant and gain access to his secrets. This plan partly backfires when Olivia falls in love with Borden, but as a last favour to Angier gets Borden to write a note explaining the trick, which is revealed to contain a single word: TESLA.
And so Angier heads off to Nikola Tesla's laboratory in Colorado Springs to persuade him to give up the secret of whatever he had done for Borden. Two things become apparent fairly quickly - firstly that Borden's note was a red herring, as he and Tesla have never met, and secondly that Tesla may be able to help, as long as Angier can cough up a substantial wedge to finance the work. And indeed it turns out that he can, after a long period of development and experimentation, although the finished product doesn't quite work as Angier had envisaged: instead of some sort of teleportation device, it seems to be some sort of duplication device capable of producing an exact copy at a pre-defined distance away from the apparatus. But, hey, a few minor considerations aside, it works for the purposes of an illusion that will surpass Borden's, so we'll take it.
Angier arranges for the transportation of the disassembled device back to England and soon, after a lengthy period of rehearsal, starts performing his own Transported Man illusion around the country, to great acclaim and profit. This one outdoes Borden's because in addition to all the exciting electrical arcs and sparks (especially thrilling to a Victorian audience just getting to grips with the idea of mains electricity) Angier's miraculous reappearance is at a much greater distance than Borden's - all the way at the back of the theatre, or up in the stalls, whichever provides the most dramatic effect.
Borden is aware of Angier's new celebrity, of course, and soon devises a way of sabotaging the act - show up in disguise, get invited on stage as one of the people who inspect the apparatus before it's used, and then slip off backstage and cut the power halfway through. What Borden has failed to realise, though, is that there's no illusion here: the Tesla device really does duplicate living things across distances, and cutting the process off part-way through has catastrophic effects: the original Angier is left in a weakened state, and there is a partially-materialised Angier roaming the corridors of the theatre like a ghost.
Borden's understandable assumption that the whole thing was an illusion, it should be added here, derives partly from the nature of how his own illusion was achieved: there really are two Bordens, a pair of identical twins, who, by an act of remarkable discipline and deception, manage to live as if there were only one of them and take turns being "Alfred Borden".
Angier (or the non-ghostly part of him, anyway) heads off to his ancestral home in Yorkshire to recuperate, and it soon becomes clear that he will never perform again. The spectral Angier left behind spends a bit of time scaring people, including Borden himself, one of whom he scares enough to induce a fatal heart attack, before heading north to be reunited with his other self and attempt one last use of the Tesla apparatus to resolve their separation.
We now zoom back out to the framing device, in some version of the present day, where Andrew Westley, born Nicky Borden before being adopted, visits Kate Angier in the ancestral Angier home, ostensibly as part of some journalistic assignment but actually to satisfy his curiosity about the backstory of their respective families, and the historical feud initiated by their respective ancestors. Andrew has always had the odd feeling that he has a twin somewhere, with all the odd telepathic communication that twins are reputed to have. This isn't quite true, as it turns out, but it transpires that Andrew and Kate's respective parents met at the house when Andrew (then Nicky) was very young and during some argument Nicky was flung into the Tesla apparatus, with inevitable results. Andrew ventures down to the cellar and finds a gigantic carved-out cavern containing all of what Angier referred to euphemistically as the "prestige materials" - shelves and shelves of Angier's inanimate bodies, emptied of consciousness at the point when they were put into the Tesla machine, but still "alive" in some weird way. There is also the body, in a similar state, of a small boy, Andrew's childhood self. He decides to take this away with him (though it's extremely unclear what he's going to do with it) but then also becomes aware of something moving around at the end of the cavern. Has Angier's divided and possibly reunited self lived on in some way?
The Prestige is probably most famous for its 2006 film adaptation, directed by Christopher Nolan and featuring Hugh Jackman as Angier, Christian Bale as Borden and a stellar supporting cast. This retains most of the central plot but diverges in a few key ways:
- the thing that initiates the feud is a botched bit of knot-tying by Borden (while he is acting as Angier's assistant) which results in the drowning of Angier's wife
- the present-day framing device is dispensed with completely
- the Angier that goes into the Tesla device comes out completely normal (rather than as a consciousness-free shell) and has to be killed off each time, generally by drowning
- the ending is different: instead of Angier being partly split in half the trick proceeds normally and Angier engineers Borden being framed for his murder, for which he is subsequently hanged (or, rather, if you've been paying attention, one of him is)
The book was the recipient of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize on its publication in 1995; there is a list of previous blog featurees in the review of Harvest (though I note that that list omits Master Georgie which won in 1998). It also picked up a couple of major fantasy fiction awards, including the World Fantasy Award; like the only other recipient on this list, The City & The City, I would say it fits rather awkwardly into that genre, if at all.
This is the third Christopher Priest novel to appear on this list after Inverted World and The Affirmation (and the first since his death in February of this year), and it's quite different from either: Inverted World was fairly hard sci-fi (though set on Earth and with minimal technology) and The Affirmation was a strange dream-like fantasy. The Prestige is much more of a "normal" non-genre narrative than either, although of course there is the whole duplication/teleportation thing which is arguably a science-fiction device. Anyway, it's extremely good and I recommend it, whether or not you've seen the film (which, to be clear, is also excellent). It's also the second book since August (and fourth overall in this list) to be adapted into a film starring Christian Bale, following American Psycho. As far as I can recall the only other book in this series which features magicians and stage illusions as a major theme is, erm, The Illusionist.
