The Adjacent

by Christopher Priest

Tibor Tarent, a freelance photographer, is recalled to Britain from Anatolia where his wife Melanie has been killed by insurgent militia. IRGB is a nation living in the aftermath of a bizarre and terrifying terrorist atrocity - hundreds of thousands were wiped out when a vast triangle of west London was instantly annihilated. The authorities think the terrorist attack and the death of Tarent's wife are somehow connected. A century earlier, a stage magician is sent to the Western Front on a secret mission to render British reconnaissance aircraft invisible to the enemy. On his journey to the trenches he meets the visionary who believes that this will be the war to end all wars. In 1943, a woman pilot from Poland tells a young RAF technician of her escape from the Nazis, and her desperate need to return home. In the present day, a theoretical physicist stands in his English garden and creates the first adjacency. THE ADJACENT is a novel where nothing is quite as it seems. Where fiction and history intersect, where every version of reality is suspect, where truth and falsehood lie closely adjacent to one another. It shows why Christopher Priest is one of our greatest writers.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Fantasy, Science Fiction Fantasy, Speculative Fiction, Mystery

419 pages, Hardcover

First published June 20, 2013

About the author

Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968.

He has published eleven novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction.

He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). In 2006, The Prestige was made into a major production by Newmarket Films. Directed by Christopher Nolan, The Prestige went straight to No.1 US box office. It received two Academy Award nominations. Other novels, including Fugue For a Darkening Island and The Glamour, are currently in preparation for filming.

He is Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. In 2007, an exhibition of installation art based on his novel The Affirmation was mounted in London.

As a journalist he has written features and reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Scotsman, and many different magazines.

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

The Adjacent - a beautifully written, intricately constructed novel by one of our finest and most imaginative living authors. His name is Christopher Priest.

If you haven't heard of him, you should; if you think he's a mere scribbler of science fiction, you couldn't be more wrong. Christopher Priest's use of the English language and mastery of the novel as a literary form is on a par with the likes of Wilkie Collins, Graham Greene, J.G. Ballard and Martin Amis.

In terms of structure, The Adjacent features eight distinct parts, described roughly in a few words as follows:

One: Distant future. Photographer Tibor Tarent returns to war ravaged England following the death of his wife, a victim of a perplexing explosion attributed to terrorists near the hospital in Turkey where they were residing these past months.

Two: WWI. Thomas Trent, an accomplished stage illusionist, receives an army officer's commission and travels to the front - his mission: to make British war aircraft invisible to German eyes. Tommy Trent shares a compartment on a train with none other than H.G. Wells.

Three: Distant Future. Obeying official orders, Tibor Tarent reports in at a military compound located in England's rustic farm country. Prior to entering the front gate, he witnesses a phenomenal happening and explosion in a field below.

Four: Distant Future: Journalist Jane Flockhart interviews retired Professor Thijs Rietveld, Nobel Prize winning physicist who speaks of the "Perturbative Adjacent Field." As scheduled, a young photographer appears on the scene to take photos of the great man. Jane Flockhart learns the photographer's name: Tibor Tarent.

Five: WWII. Mike Torrance, Aircraftsman First Class, services British bombers at a base in England. He meets and falls in love with a beautiful pilot in the ATA, a woman originally from Poland.

Six: Distant Future. Tibor Tarent confronts a few instances of true weirdness at the rural military compound. Fortunately, in his brief stint at this site, Tibor bonds emotionally with a woman, an attractive, compassionate teacher.

Seven: Photographer Tomak Tallant travels across Prachous, an island within the Dream Archipelago, a world spun from Christopher Priest's fertile imagination. Tomak's travel companion is a woman "spreader of the word." The tale then shifts first to Thom the Thaumaturge, a stage illusionist, and then a visitor to the island, a woman nurse who can fly planes.

Eight: Photographer Tibor Tarent has ample opportunities to use his camera, including a quizzical (understatement) visit to a WWII British airbase. Then an unexpected someone lands a plane at the field.

I can appreciate why a number of reviewers judge The Adjacent a love story. There's little doubt Christopher Priest places love and death, Eros and Thanatos, at the heart of his philosophic tale. I say philosophic for good reason: although the author's language is clear and accessible (in that sense, an easy read), The Adjacent is definitely not an airport novel, not even close. The work's overarching vision is to raise more questions than it answers; offer multiple strands of ambiguity in place of satisfying closure; invite a reader to break a mental sweat, tap realms of imagination to become a psychic, even spiritual, explorer, a cocreator in this venture we call literature.

The Adjacent is the type of novel where a reader will uncover many new subtle connections, rich images and hidden themes with each careful reread. I, myself, keep returning to the following trio of themes:

THE MULTIVERSE
Many scientist in our current 21st century consider we might be living in a universe that extends thousands, maybe millions of times beyond what we can see with our eyes and advanced instruments - vast worlds where diverse physical laws apply, where space, time, atoms, gravity are all different.

Tarent begins grasping the possibility of such a multiverse. "Baffled again, Tarent stared for a long time, wondering what he had seen, or even if his memory had failed him. There were so many contradictions he had to absorb, so much to try and make sense of."

BOUNDARIES AS PERMEABLE MEMBRANES
"Tarent noticed that a placard had been placed on a door at the base of the buildings, warning that the structure was unstable." Ha! The photographer's reading that placard reminds me of a current day spiritual teacher's similar experience when he writes in one of his books: "There was a sign by the side of the trail put there by the park authorities. It read: danger. all structures are unstable. I said to my friend, “That’s a profound sacred scripture.” And we stood there in awe. Once you realize and accept that all structures (forms) are unstable, even the seemingly solid material ones, peace arises within you. This is because the recognition of the impermanence of all forms awakens you to the dimension of the formless within yourself, that which is beyond death."

In the fluid universe of The Adjacent, the key is twofold: recognizing the extent of the fluidity of both time and space and then accepting this manifest reality rather than fighting against it.

ADJACENCY
Tibor Tarent is stunned when he beholds the power of adjacency in action, materializing above a Mebsher (a futuristic Hummer-type vehicle). "The light-point suddenly exploded like a firework shooting three angled white shafts of light directly down to the ground. . . . A skeletal pyramid of white light surrounded the Mebsher, a perfect tetrahedron, and moments after it had formed it solidified into pure light."

As the great physicist in the novel explains: "The quantum adjacency we created can be considered as a tetrahedron of particles."

A word on this three-dimensional geometric shape: the tetrahedron is one of the five Platonic solids. We find the dual of each of the Platonic solids by imagining a dot at the center of every face. Then, if we connect the dots, we create a new Platonic solid - the cube and the octahedron are the dual of each other, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron are the dual of each other but the tetrahedron is unique since it self-replicates, that is, a tetrahedron is the dual of a tetrahedron.

A tetrahedron has 4 edges - and, of course, its dual has 4 edges.
4 + 4 = 8. Recall the novel itself contains 8 parts.

A farfetched connection? Take the challenge. Pick up The Adjacent and see for yourself.




Christopher Priest, born 1943

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading a lot of Christopher Priest lately and I think there must be some kind of critical mass build-up because I just exploded.

The good kind of explosion. Like, my mind just popped.

This one's a love story. Odd as that may seem, looking like a death and a mystery at the beginning.

At first, I wasn't quite sure what to think. These last few books have all been dealing with the Dream Archipelago, an alternate reality close to ours in so many ways but all the names and locations are different and there are odd tech and weird creatures and fantastically detailed lives revolving around death, unending war, isolated peace, and, oddly enough, dying magicians, artists, writers, and similar.

I expected this to be similar but instead, we deal with the future London with a war to end all wars with truly weird weaponized dimensional tech and a mystery drawn out of Priest's signature depth of imagining for his characters. Melanie's body was never found. :) A charred perfect triangle had scored her right out of the ground.

He's at a loss, and that's just the beginning of the novel, just him trying to pick up the pieces, having this strange war-sagaved London get slowly revealed to him, with new mysteries abounding, where we are the ones doing all the heavy lifting. Poor Tibor is a bit distraught, but he gets there.

This is just the beginning, however, because we get extended scenes from WWI and WWII as well, with characters going through many of the similar kinds of emotional upheavals as Tibor, but with very specific and wonderfully detailed differences that are the Very key to unraveling this whole novel's mystery.

And then, when certain events come around, (no spoilers here) to tie this novel way more than firmly to Priest's The Prestige on both superficial and fundamental ways, only to slam us head-first into the last 3/4 of the novel taking place in the Dream Archipelago... well... by this point I'm snapping at people to leave me alone. I have to finish this because my mind is whirling and whirling and it is so utterly delighted and flabbergasted.

This book actually gives us the best hints as to the nature of the Dream Archipelago and the oddest bits of The Prestige and The Affirmation and it even ties itself to The Inverted World in a truly awesome way. I feel like I'm getting all those totally huge reveals only hinted at and hinted at and hinted at for so many novels. I feel like I'm getting something REALLY BIG HERE, folks.

Priest's writing is always paced rather slow but it's always deeply characterized. The world-building is absolutely phenomenal. The fact that he can string us along, leaving us almost always completely in the dark for what seems forever, is a testament to ungodly skill as a writer.

And perhaps it's just the fact that this has been building to one hell of a screaming crescendo for me for quite some time. I'm truly floored.

I won't say this is a particularly easy read and it requires a lot of extra thought on the side to piece everything together, but for all you folks that love beautiful challenges, but not challenges in writing or getting involved in the text, I totally recommend this. :)

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty enthralling mindbender by Priest, and one that left me scratching my head at the end. Priest divided The Adjacent into 8 parts; one 'central' timeline keeps coming back, but the other parts involve a wide range of timelines, from WWI, WWII and the near future. This starts with Tibor Tarent, a photographer, returning to the Islamic Republic of Great Britten (IRGB) from Turkey, where his wife had a nursing job through the diplomatic branch of the government. Set in roughly 2050 or so, climate change has devastated the world; the Mediterranean basin is largely desert and the nations around it are rife with war and insurgency. The field hospital in Turkey primarily dealt with victims of the war and one day Tibor's wife was killed with some new crazy weapon...

While Tibor's tale starts the book, the real story here involves a new discovery in theoretical physics-- the 'adjacent'. The guy who pioneered the work found a way (via some crazy quantum hand-wavery) to essentially divert things from our universe into one adjacent. The original intent was to create a new peace in the world, as 'adjacent fields' could be set up to 'relocate' missiles and other violent things. Purely defensive of course, until some Brainiac managed to turn it into a weapon. In Tibor's original timeline, London received the brunt of the new weapon when terrorists used it on May 10th, annihilating many blocks and 100s of 1000s of people. Meanwhile, Priest presents a gloomy, depressing near future, with temperate zones of the planet basically unlivable, England getting rocked by major hurricanes on a regular basis, and wars and fighting everywhere. The Tibor section reads a bit like a Kafka novel-- Tibor keeps getting shunted around in England, riding out various storms, and beset by grief.

Just when I though I had a handle on the story, Priest takes us to early WWII, where two gentlemen, an illusionist and H.G. Wells, had been called to aid the British war effort; the illusionist to somehow camouflage planes from the Germans and Wells with some new idea to deal with the mud in the trenches. Then we jump to 'now' with the theoretical physicist being interviewed by a reporter and a photographer (a young Tibor), then WWII-- yeah, the story moves timelines over and over...

The mindfuckery revolves around parallel universes (the adjacent) and it seems Tibor, and his wife for that matter, have 'proxies' in other adjacent worlds and Priest takes us on a tour of their lives before returning repeatedly to Tibor. Priest writes well and the narratives flow nicely, but this is one that needs some patience. Each 'part' reads something like a short story, but you know they will somehow come together in some way. Priest also drops in several Easter eggs here, featuring his The Prestige and The Islanders. A cover blurb captures the essence of the novel: "Haunting mediations on the philosophy of weapons, war, hope, love, and loss." 4 trippy stars!!

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Christopher Priest book that gave me a great reading journey, but also left me scratching my head at the end. Seems to be a theme, but I'm just pulled into all his books.

[Ian Mond · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Adjacent is my first taste of Priest’s work. I know, I know how could I call myself a serious genre reader and yet never cracked the pages of a Priest novel? I’ve always been aware of him as an author – when I was in my teens I knew that Priest had written two Doctor Who scripts for the 4th Doctor that were never made, and, of course, I’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige – but I’ve never felt compelled to read his work. His novels, nearly a complete collection, sit on my shelves in the garage collecting dust. (Priest is not alone. My garage has become a Sargasso Sea of novels and novelists whose books I own but whose work I’ve never read).

When The Adjacent was announced I decided to rectify that state affairs… and then nearly didn’t when I read the closing paragraph to Niall Alexander’s positive review of the book on Strange Horizons:

"Reading The Adjacent is like taking a grand tour of the larger canon Christopher Priest has established over the course of his forty-year career, so no, newcomers need not apply, but old hands are apt to find it massively satisfying."

Newcomers need not apply…

Now that I’ve finished the novel I can appreciate where Niall is coming from. Even with my limited knowledge of Priest’s oeuvre, there’s a feeling that this book is a continuation of a bar conversation that Priest has begun elsewhere. Not in specific plot details, but in the recycling of elements that Priest has always been fascinated with – magicians, aeroplanes, H.G Wells, and archipelagos that exist somewhere to the left of our reality.

I’m sure if you’re aware of all the bits and pieces that reflect and echo previous novels you’ll have more fun with The Adjacent. That’s certainly the impression I get from Niall’s review. But in spite of Niall’s suggestion you shouldn’t be intimidated from picking up the book. That’s not to say The Adjacent isn’t challenging, it forgoes a linear structure and easy answers, but the complexity of the novel are specific to the themes of the book and don’t require previous knowledge.

And what’s it about? Actually that’s a pretty easy question to answer. The Adjacent is a love story. The genius of the novel is you don’t realise you’re reading a love story until the very end. It’s a canny piece of misdirection that Priest foreshadows earlier in the novel. In a scene set during WW1, magician Tommy Trent explains:

"The principles of magic are much simpler than most people think – concealment, production, and so on. They apply to every illusion ever performed. What often looks like a new trick to the audience is a variation of one of these principles; a new way of performing a familiar card trick, a surprise production of a dove or a rabbit, a modified cabinet inside which my compliant niece would seem to be transformed."

The Adjacent is one extended illusion, Priest keeping us off balance as both the setting, and reality itself, shifts and changes. We move from the near future where an Islamic Republic hold powers over the UK, to WW1 where Tommy Trent meets HG Wells to WW2 where Mike Torrance works on Lancasters at an airbase in Tealby Moor and falls in love and then an extended section on Prachous – an Island in the Dream Archipelago – were a pilot searches for lost love.

Love is evident, but it’s fragmentary, a faded memory or a sense of loss. It’s only when Tibor Tarent decides to bring his life into focus – both metaphorically and literally, he’s a photographer – that we understand where Priest has been leading us along. The moment he reunites with his wife, a woman he thought was dead and yet who we only realise at that moment has been searching for him as much as he’s been missing her, is emotional and heartfelt:

"Tibor was holding his wife in his arms. It was so strange to do, yet so right, so unquestionably right. She was folding herself against him as she used to, a she always had, right at the start when they were young, and even later on, whenever they found the time to be alone together, and still loving."

The Adjacent then, is not a book about Islamic Republics that may or may not take over the Western World in the near future. Neither is it a novel about a quantum based weapon called the Perturbative Adjacent Field that was built to end all wars. These are window dressing, “an unexpected pleasantry, to make them look at the wrong object on a table, or to watch an unimportant movement of a hand, or to look in the wrong direction.” Rather The Adjacent is a strange and wonderful story that will leave you with a smile and the realisation that a master illusionist has been holding your hand all along.

[Calzean · Rating 4 out of 5]

I imagine that going to Heston Blumenthal's restaurant and leaving hungry would be like reading this book. There would be plenty of courses, the presentation would be awesome and the food would be full of unusual tastes all mixed together some of which you can't pick. But you left wondering what it was you ate and needed to stop at a kebab shop to fill the void.
"The Adjacent" starts in 50 years time with climate change decimating much of the Earth, tropical storms hitting England, an Islamic republic in government and insurgents with a powerful new weapon. Then we are sent to WWI where a magician and HG Wells meet on a train while being sent on separate secret missions. Back to the future for a while. Then to WWII and a female Polish pilot dreaming of returning to Poland and flying a Spitfire.
Characters, places, timelines become mixed, appear and disappear. Avatars abound. It's a potpourri of ideas and inventiveness. But in the end I have to ask what was it all about?

[Tudor Ciocarlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The dream feeling of this book, the enigmatic characters which are in turn photographers, airplane pilots, illusionists or nurses, the illuminating connections with other novels by Priest, the transcending love story, the perfect prose, the unusual dystopia, the love letters to Spitfires but also to the forgotten pilots of the British bombers, the immersing style make The Adjacent the best read of the year, so far. Christopher Priest is getting better and better and from what his friend M. John Harrison is saying, this is just the beginning and in the next couple of years Priest will blow our minds.

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short review: this is how sf should be written to be interesting, literate and satisfy the desire for "not the same again..."

Longer review: I would first mention that The Adjacent is connected with all the major C. Priest work (Affirmation, Separation, Dream Archipelago, Prestige, Islanders), has a sort of explanation for both the alt-world of Separation and the connection between the Archipelago and our world (hint: the title), though of course nothing is made that explicit

The novel (though again it is highly non-linear) follows the "avatars" of a man who is a photographer or a magician (Tibor, Tom, Tomasz, Tomak, Thom and then Trent, Tarent, Tallant etc) and a woman who is a nurse or a pilot in time and space, all in shorter or longer episodes in our world at important times (WW1, WW2 and a future IRGB - Islamic Republic of Great Britain presented in a matter of fact non-sensationalist/judgmental way amidst huge climate disruptions) and The Archipelago

Just as a small tidbit, there is a passage where one of the recurrent characters flies from the Archipelago and a story similar to the one told by her in our world but set there, to England that is outstanding in execution and reads completely naturally despite the huge suspension of disbelief involved

Again outstanding sf

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is something very appealing to me about the way Christopher Priest tangentially connects his novels. In this one he is at the height of his world-building powers, deftly weaving in elements of The Affirmation, The Glamour, The Islanders, and probably others I have yet to read. His precise, confident prose beckons one along into an uncertain environment of parallel worlds, doubling and tripling in numbers, engendering trust while at the same time stealthily destabilizing one's sense of reality. One feels compelled to follow him regardless of those nagging suspicions that the mysteries that arise will never fully be resolved. To close the cover at novel's end is to wake from a dream, head clouded with hazy, surreal images linked together in a hermetic storyline hovering just beyond reach of full comprehension.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're like me and like your narratives to be mostly resolved by the end of the movie/book/story, then you might want to skip this otherwise excellent and intriguing book. I don't mind some ambiguity, but this was a case where I was definitely expecting some kind of "aha!" reveal moment that never came. Which is not to say that I regret reading the 3/4 of it I loved, but over the last 100 pages the book took it from a best of the year contender to an interesting item I'm happy to donate to the library book sale.

The story opens in a vividly rendered near-future Great Britain, or rather, Islamic Republic of Great Britain, circa 2040 or thereabouts. Global climate change subjects the island to major hurricanes, and an unspecified insurgency subjects the island (and much of the world) to political instability. None of this is spelled out in any detailed way, which I loved. Other authors would have gotten sidetracked for 50 pages establishing the details and background of this setting. Instead, we meet a photojournalist just returned from Turkey, where his wife was killed in a mysterious bomb attack. As he's shuttled around the IRGB to a series of safe sites for debriefing, things get more askew.

Suddenly, in the next section we're with a stage magician traveling to the front in World War I, where he's been asked to try and help camouflage airplanes while they're flying. Along the way, he meets and has extensive interactions with H.G. Wells. Cut to the next section, where we're in WWII, meeting an English bomber mechanic and a refugee female Polish aviator. These characters, places, times, and relationships are all clearly related, but just how is left murky. There's some kind of weapon or something that may or may not act like a mini Bermuda Triangle, removing people to alternate realities or parallel quantum worlds. The themes of what is real and what is illusion and what the nature of either is, runs deep and strong through the story.

In the final quarter of the book, we find ourselves on an island that's apparently part of a chain of islands detailed in some of Priest's other books, such as The Islands and Dream Archipelago (neither of which I've read), where characters and plotlines start to collide more directly. I read eagerly along, waiting for Priest to pull everything together with a twist of the wrist, like one of his beloved magicians conjuring the beautiful woman from thin air. And in a sense he does do this in a literal sense, but one is left scratching one's head at the end -- rather like the characters in the book -- wondering what we just experienced.

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

(5/10) For most of its length, The Adjacent is startlingly bad, especially for an author as well-renowned as Priest. The science-fictional parts take place in an Islam-dominated Britain right out of a right-wing "Eurabia" screed, while the historical narratives are the usual patter of cameos by famous people and long recollections of backstory. After long hours of reading, none of it seems to be going anywhere.

Things change a bit in the final third. Without going into too many specifics, Priest introduces a parallel world that is strange but also well-developed. There's a lot of exposition here as well, but it's generally interesting exposition. And slowly a grander puzzle begins to come into vision, asking the reader how to relate all of the various narratives contained within the book.

All of which is well and good, but the poorness of these narratives makes piecing them together a more or less unpleasant exercise. There's a suggestion of universal connection and recurring archetypes, but the story that keeps getting told is not an interesting one, and is more than a little misogynist. (Across all of these eras and universes, the one constant is that women are compelled to throw themselves at the nearest male protagonist within five minutes of meeting him.) In the end, The Adjacent moves from "failure" to "interesting failure", but is still a long way from "success".

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was almost halfway through The Adjacent before I realized just how few events had actually occurred. This is not a complaint—rather, it's a tribute to just how well Christopher Priest manages the slow and quietly creepy development of his story.

Tibor Tarent is a successful freelance photographer in what seems like a terribly plausible near future, one that could easily have been imagined by J.G. Ballard or, more recently, David Mitchell, working with his wife Melanie in a desiccated Turkey that's been devastated by global climate change. Melanie disappears, suddenly, mysteriously, leaving behind only an area of charred black earth in the shape of a perfect equilateral triangle.

What on Earth is going on? No known weapon, either in our present day or in Tarent's future, leaves a triangular scar...

Tarent returns to an England effectively under martial law, beset by devastating storms—hurricanes in all but name (they are disingenously called "Temperate Storms" by the authorities, who give them the names of long-dead authors)—and experiencing its own rash of mysterious black triangles. Crawling across the countryside in an armoured vehicle called (for some reason which I never figured out) a Mebsher, Tarent witnesses more strange events, and comes tantalizingly ever closer to understanding what's going on...

Tibor is only a part of The Adjacent, though. There's also Tommy Trent, a stage magician who's sent to the Western Front (and who on the way encounters a rather interesting traveling companion) to try to do something about camouflaging British aircraft... and Thom the Thaumaturge, about whom at this point the less said the better. The events of The Adjacent go back and forth in time, you see, and eventually wander much farther afield than the cozy (albeit less cozy than our own) English countryside through which Tibor is traveling.

One of the things I really liked about this book—and I'll admit that it took awhile for this to dawn on me—was the subtle way in which Priest handles the adjacencies themselves. The connections between the novel's parts aren't always obvious, but they're there, and one's patience and attention do get rewarded.

In short, The Adjacent is much deeper than it appears, and upon reflection I believe that it is exactly—or is at least one way—that sf should be.

[ash | songsforafuturepoet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and measured prose by Priest, as always. What I appreciate from Priest's work is that he manages to use juxtapositions and clever parallels in every aspect of his novels, some unexpected, such that when you get a moment of "oh... wait" halfway through reading - it feels so satisfying.

I love how his careful and detached style of writing is able to somehow capture emotion. He deals with heavy technical descriptions with crisp and simple language. Throughout the book, he uses the same intimate relationship between a man and a woman - a simple, focused, and universal relationship - to worldbuild and capture the complex state of the world around them. He peppers the same familiar relationships throughout the book through different eras and different stories, eventually tying up the story with them. I personally love little clever details like that, and Priest is a master with them.

Although this novel is made up of different storylines, he manages to tie them up nicely. It is also characteristic of Priest to be vague in his endings or revelations, letting the reader guess their own conclusion, and I enjoy that. However, The Adjacent is too vague. At some point of the story there were too many characters to keep up with and I constantly had to refer back to previous chapters to remember their names. Little is said of the actual invention of the story, the adjacency. When the story got to the island I lost the thread of the story, because it's a lot to take in, and details about how the characters got there were not too many.

Still love Priest, although I wouldn't recommend this book to a new Priest reader. This is my second book of his, and I'm looking forward to read the Islanders, as I heard it's tied into parts of the storyline in The Adjacent.

[Saxon Bullock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful. Confounding. Disturbing. Elliptical. You could throw lots of words at The Adjacent and not quite capture the peculiar magic that it generates, simply because there isn't anyone who writes novels quite like Christopher Priest. It's also a book that takes themes and motifs he's played with before (from the magic of The Prestige to the wartime drama of The Separation) and explores them in new ways, and the end result is fascinatingly weird, even if I've no idea how this would go down with someone who hasn't read any Priest novels before. The journey through different sections of the narrative and the gradual, dream-like connections that build up between them are fascinating - but they don't lead in a traditional storytelling direction. Priest seems to habitually write novels where instead of an ending, the story just seems to wander off into the distance leaving you rather bemused, and The Adjacent is this to an even greater degree (There''s also a few aspects to the depiction of a near-future Great Britain as an Islamic Republic that I felt a little troubled by, in that I wasn't exactly sure what Priest was trying to say with it). The Adjacent feels like a novel I may have to read again in order to fathom out more of the unsettling links and interconnections - but for those willing to be left with more questions than answers, it's an intimidatingly well-crafted and fascinating novel.

[Simona B · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is one of those books that don't really make sense except in the mind of the author--you can sense that there is a design underlying it all, but it's just too vague for you to really grasp. What is more, as someone who has been reading a lot of Priest's fiction recently I feel like The Adjacent doesn't add anything actually new to what we might call Priest's 'poetics': it rehashes typically Priestian themes but without, it seems to me, offering a truly fresh take on them. All in all, an okay but skippable read.

[Forrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this book. It reminded me of certain classes in Millhauser's creative writing class. In the end though, I really don't know what to make of it. The Prestige really comes together in an intellectually satisfying way, this does not.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We were naïve, all of us but especially me -- we thought we were making a breakthrough into something that would neutralise weapons. It would always be safe to use, non-aggressive in nature, harmless because it would remove harm. But what we all feared soon came to pass: minds other than ours worked out how to make quantum adjacency into a weapon of war."
-- Professor Thijs Rietveld, discussing Perturbative Adjacency Field.

This is a novel of ideas, of obsessions, and of the emptiness when a loved one disappears. It's a work of speculative fiction, but one in which one mustn't look too closely at the science nor expect any magic (except that being accomplished by smoke and mirrors). It's a narrative that jumps around in time and space, told in both the first and the third person, in which we encounter many individuals; but ultimately there is one thread and one couple on which our attention is focused. It's a novel that is by turns illogical and alienating but yet strangely satisfying.

Told in eight parts, The Adjacent begins in a dytopian 2030s. Hopping between Anatolia and the Islamic Republic of Great Britain we come to realise that the world is in the grip of two crises, one of extreme weather brought about by rapid climate change, the other produced by random terrorist strikes using a frightening, almost apocalyptic, weapon. It is this last that has apparently caused the disappearance of Melanie Tarent while on relief work as a nurse in Turkey, to the distress of her husband Tibor, a freelance photographer, who travels back to the IRGB, towards Lincolnshire and Hull, then one of the seats of government.

Thereafter, while continuing to follow Tibor's story we also find ourselves travelling to the western front during the first world war with stage illusionist Tommy Trent and H G Wells, then to the home of Nobel prizewinner, the physicist Thijs Rietveld in East Sussex, where he is photographed by a younger Tibor; this is followed by a Second World War airfield for Lancaster bombers in the Lincolnshire Wolds (modelled on RAF Binbrook) where we meet Aircraftman Mike Torrence, and then the apparently fictitious island state of Prachous where we follow the career of Thom, a stage magician, and Tallant, an overseas visitor. What is the connection, if any, between all these individuals with curiously related names; and of the women whom they meet, whose names equally seem to share resemblances?

Where to start with answers, if indeed there are any? Let's begin with the Platonic solid called the tetrahedron, a pyramid composed of four equilateral triangles with four corners and six edges in common. Traditionally the solid is associated with the element of fire, and is even used these days as a diagram to educate about fire safety and fire prevention, with heat, oxygen, fuel and chemical chain reaction represented by each one of the triangles.

The tetrahedron is the shape appearing both explicitly and implicitly through the 400-plus pages: in the triangular craters associated with the terrorist attacks, the space enclosed by cables in the suburban East Sussex garden of Thijs Rieveld (the Dutch name means Matthias Reed-field), and in the optical perturbation seen from the air over the vast area of reedbeds in Prachous. Dare I also see an echo of its influence in the various involuntary love triangles of the narrative?

Unfolded, the pyramid can form a large equilateral triangle, but can also be presented as a reticulated parallelogram, a little like the wing of a plane. This brings us to another connecting thread: the author is clearly a superior aircraft buff because not only does he introduce us to early warplanes (during the episode set not far from the Allied trenches of the Great War) but also Lancasters, Spitfires, Ansons and other European planes (during the parts set in wartime Poland, Romania, Lincolnshire and, surprisingly, Prachous): we even vicariously take an extended ride in a high altitude photo reconnaissance Spitfire.

Yet another narrative thread comes with cables: the communication device that H G Wells unsuccessfully tries to introduce to the trenches, the homemade support for Rietveld's Perturbative Adjacency device, the principal prop for the Indian rope trick that Thom the stage magician uses in Prachous. And with conjuring we come full circle: the whole art is to do with illusion, with distraction, with misdirection and with adjacency. After all, it's that sleight of hand that the author subjects us to as we try and make sense of what he presents, all the while wondering what is real in this fiction and what is illusion.

With the notion of illusion we have a final link with Plato, whose allegory of the cave, the prisoners, and the shadows assumed to be reality perfectly illustrates how we routinely deceive ourselves. It's no coincidence that the various male characters occupy themselves with the pretended semblances of reality -- camouflage, photography, conjuring -- and that many of the female characters are not what they seem, or operate under different names. The author will have known that the root of words like 'illusion' and 'delusion' is the Latin verb ludere, 'to play'.

So, a novel of ideas, as the above suggests, and also obsessions, as many of the topics touched on -- conjuring, aircraft and misperceptions, for instance -- appear in Priest's other novels, such as Inverted World (1974) which involved a whole group of people not seeing the world as it actually is. (Or may be, because who's to say our perception is any less distorted?) But intriguing ideas and overriding obsessions do not necessarily a good novel make, and especially one like this where the narrative is deliberately disjointed.

What works for me, I think, and helps make The Adjacent an impulsive read, is that we are interested in what happens to the characters. The main protagonists are almost just as confused as we are, and like us are trying to piece together clues. Yes, some of the women are enigmatic (and a little too liable to throw themselves at whoever the principal male is) but others are more than two-dimensional: the Polish airwoman Krystina Roszca and the American journalist Jane Flockhart, for starters. If the men feel alienated within their various worlds, perhaps indulging in displacement activities, the women are more emblems of hope and growth, connected as many of their names are with concepts of plant growth -- Malina (the Polish for strawberry), Flo, Firentza.

Behind all of the characters is the ache that Tibor feels for Melanie, so cruelly snatched away from him, and the guilt he has that he didn't patch up a quarrel they had before she disappeared; and the similar emotions Melanie's counterpart feels for her missing Tomak. If not everything is ever explained in The Adjacent this at least is something we can hang onto: the love that can hold us together, come what may.

After composing this review I did find further clarity in a few other online reviews and discussions, such as here, here and here.

[Bjorn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thinness, the repitition of history. Palimpsests.

The unfathomability of loss, of absence.

The war to end wars. It's very much a novel of the War on Terror, while nothing in it is about that. War becomes a permanent state of fighting itself. Parse that sentence anyway you want.

Wormholes. Illusions. Tricks.

Magicians. Mechanics. Nurses.

The Spitfire Mark XI doesn't have any guns. It just has a camera, to document what happens, to remember. It's powered by a Merlin engine.

The Adjacent is a terrifying novel. A frustrating novel. It's one of the most beautiful novels I've read in a while. It makes very few attempts to explain itself; it just weaves, cuts, overwrites, repeats, retakes, dreams.

[Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plain and simple, Christophers Priest’s The Adjacent is a puzzle. With every succeeding chapter Priest sparingly tosses out another puzzle piece to his reader. Unfortunately, if this is a 20 piece puzzle it feels like Priest only included 14 of the pieces. There are many connections and correlations to be made; however, in my case, a prominent feeling of frustration arose because I could not make critical connections. I appreciate the author’s ability to challenge his reader but I wasn’t able to connect enough dots. I’m sure the puzzle's code could be cracked with additional reads but neither story nor characters were intriguing enough for me to want to read again.

Thank you Goodreads First Reads and Titan Books for a free copy of this book.

[Marc Nash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Despite some nice detail and a couple of bravura set pieces, the book didn't really go anywhere. The interconnections between people and times were pretty transparent to spot and yet equally they weren't really elaborated on fully in a satisfying way to tie them altogether other than, well, their adjacency, as in proximity.

Did Tibor's quantum camera instigate the leaps into adjacency? Is that why they were near him but never really targeting him? Why did this only start now, what about all those other photos he took prior?

I did like Priest's concept of an Islamic republic Of Great Britain, that was well rendered and the descriptions of world war 2 bomber airfields suffered by comparison because much oif that detail is already know and less open to a creative imagination.

[Espana Sheriff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Apparently this is a terrifically clever book full of intertwined plotting and callbacks to previous Priest novels.

It didn't work for me, though. Despite a couple of intriguing chucks (the trip to the front lines and the Polish pilot) the rest dragged. The central mystery seemed to have too much vague hand-waving and very little payoff.

Perhaps if the story had less science fiction trappings it would have bothered me a bit less, but we are set up with a very specific technical focus that then seems to have only the most tangential connection with the strange goings on.

Maybe there's just some piece of the puzzle I missed.

[Keith Stevenson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review originally appeared on the Newtown Review of Books (www.newtownreviewofbooks.com)

I’ve read a few books by Christopher Priest now, and I have to confess that often I don’t really understand what is going on in them; but still I read them, and look forward to reading more. This was certainly true of the Hugo Award-nominated novel Inverted World, where a lot of very strange (but entertaining) stuff goes on: I finished it without any solid idea of why or how the events portrayed had happened.

Reading The Adjacent, Priest’s latest, I was similarly confounded. And that feeling leads to a fundamental question about the nature of this or any novel. Namely, for a novel to be ‘successful’, must it contain enough information to ensure the reader is clear what its purpose is, or what the purpose of the author was in writing it?

If you’re not the type of person who likes to be confounded, then The Adjacent is not for you (or Inverted World or The Separation). But if you don’t mind feeling off-kilter all the way through reading a novel, and you don’t expect easy answers (or any answers at all), then The Adjacent may contain some special delights.

The book opens with photographer Tibor Tarent returning home to the IRGB (which we can infer – although we are never told – stands for the Islamic Republic of Great Britain) after his wife Melanie has been killed by terrorists using an ‘adjacency weapon’ while she was working as a nurse in war-ridden Turkey. The fact that this future Britain is under Islamic rule is merely mentioned in passing. The sky hasn’t fallen in as a result, although the country is wracked by tropical cyclones due to inevitable climate change, which has lead to an exodus by the national government to less storm-torn regional centres.

Tibor is being transported to a government centre in the north of England for debriefing:

They passed through increasingly built up areas, approaching the capital. The younger official leaned forward to the driving compartment, said something quietly to the driver, and almost at once the smoked-glass effect deepened on all the windows as well as the dividing glass, making it impossible to see outside. Two dome lights in the car’s roof came on, completing the sense of isolation.

‘Why have you done that?’ Tarent said.

‘It’s beyond your security clearance level, sir.’

‘Security? Is there something secret out there?’

‘We have no secrets. Your status enables you to travel freely on diplomatic business, but national security issues are a matter of internal policy.’

‘But I’m a British citizen.’

‘Indeed.’

He visits Melanie’s parents on the way and we learn her father is Polish by birth and had changed his name from Roszca to Roscoe when he resettled.

Tibor’s story abruptly ends while he is still trying to reach his destination, and we follow the fortunes of stage magician Tommy Trent heading to the front during the First World War and encountering HG Wells on the way (Priest is the vice-president of the HG Wells Society). Both men are on missions to improve the war effort. Tommy has been engaged to develop a camouflage system to protect spotter planes as they fly above German lines. He ponders the potential use of misdirection to make enemies look elsewhere – at an adjacent space – whenever a plane passes overhead. But his mission comes to an abrupt end when the pilot who sponsored his trip is killed as soon as Tommy arrives.

Next we’re with journalist Jane Flockhart, who’s doing a piece on theoretical physicist Thijs Rietveld, creator of the Pertubative Adjacency Field. Flockhart is joined by a young Tibor at the start of his career and Rietveld demonstrates the adjacency theory which allows him, like a stage conjurer, to make a conch shell appear in one hand, then the other, then disappear altogether.

After that we follow the fortunes of Mike Torrance, an ‘instrument thumper’ working on Lancaster Bombers during World War II, who meets, and falls in love with, a young female Polish pilot – Krystyna Roszca – delivering new planes to his squadron. Krystyna yearns to know what has happened to her lover Tomak, who was separated from her during the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Then Tibor Tarent resumes his story and is trapped in a government facility by another tropical cyclone. This is followed by Tomak Tallant’s journey through the imaginary island of Prachous …

You can see what’s happening here. Story strands, names and people are bleeding into each other, echoing or retelling occurrences with subtle variations. Nothing is certain and every observation, every utterance, seems suffused with meaning as a result. It’s all very strange and the characters feel that too, sometimes leaning outside the novel’s frame of reference and addressing the reader:

I feel as if this country has changed out of all recognition. I assume it’s just the way I see it now. I feel stuck in the past, but in some way I find completely confusing it’s a past I never actually knew – Tibor Tarent, IRGB

There were times in the past when he had not been here but his memories were textureless, uninterrupted, a smooth continuity. He felt an agony of uncertainty, memory being tested by rationality. ­– Tomak Tallant, Prachous

Something lay between us. It was intangible, inexplicable: we seemed to be shouting to each other across a divide. It was as if we were in sight, physically close, adjacent to each other but separated by misunderstandings, different lives, different memories. – Kirstenya Rosscky, Prachous

The resonances between these different stories multiply, calve off like icebergs forming or crash into each other. Tibor the photographer witnesses a collection of dead bodies being loaded onto a truck containing the corpses’ very much alive doppelgangers, he sees buildings that others around him cannot see, and travels to a time and place that predates his birth. Again and again there is the feeling that something significant is going on beneath the surface narratives. You can look for confirmation of what that something is in vain, and yet the feeling persists:

At some points, from some angles, the triangle contained the buildings of a city – from other views it became once again that terrifying place of zero colour, black non-existence. Whenever I was close to the apexes, the sixty-degree angle at each of the triangle’s corners, the image began to flicker with increasing rapidity. As I banked around the angle, the shift between the two became so rapid that it seemed for a moment that all I could see was a part of the reedland, but then, as my course took me along the next side of the triangle, the shifting between the two began to slow, and at the halfway mark what I could see was a steady view: from some sides it appeared as the black triangle of nothingness, from others it would again be the image of the city.

The Adjacent also visits a lot of the places and concepts that Priest has explored in other novels, for example, the Second World War squadrons that form the backdrop for much of The Separation (and in fact The Adjacent carries a name check for one of the main characters in The Separation), magicians and illusions familiar from The Prestige, the strange archipelago islands of The Affirmation and The Islanders, and the HG Wells-related The Space Machine. It’s as if Priest is visiting the back stage of his ‘mental novel-writing landscape’, brushing against scenery here, picking up an often-used prop there and creating an amalgam that blends and flows across lines he’s previously drawn between his books.

Maybe that’s what’s happening here. Or maybe it’s something completely different.

The fact is, I don’t know, and perhaps no one can except the author. But what Priest has achieved is a novel structure that provokes us to interact with it from page to page, constructing meaning, reaching for and discarding theories, trying to figure it all out. Ultimately we may fail to grasp what’s going on. I certainly did. But perhaps that’s not the point. Perhaps Priest simply wants to create that interaction, to make us engage and not just sit back and let the novel wash over us. If that’s the case, he manages it masterfully.

[Nigel Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to review, because I imagine it would be very polarizing. Some people would love it, and some people would hate it. I personally fell on the side of loving it. But I admit, it's unconventional.

"The Adjacent" is one of the most unusual books I've ever read. It's not that the story is confusing. It's not that the story is mysterious. It's not that the story defies definition. It's not that the ending is shocking. It's that the novel is all of these and more. It's more like a series of short stories than an actual novel. However, the stories are all interconnected in terms of sharing common characters and themes. But at the same time, some of the stories place characters in different locations and times, and even contradict each other.

Most of the story takes place in the future, where the world is in the grip of mysterious terrorist attacks. A powerful beam of light strikes a perfectly triangular area and incinerates everything within it. One attack took the life of the wife of Tibor Tarent, a photojournalist. He's on a journey through a dystopian Britain, controlled by an Islamic government, to be debriefed about the attack while mourning his wife. At the same time, we meet Tommy Trent, a magician in World War One. He's been recruited by the British Air Force to find a way to make planes invisible. While he enjoys the prestige and getting to meet his hero H.G. Wells, he struggles to perform a magic trick that could save or cost lives. And if that's not enough, we also jump to World War II, where an RAF technician falls in love with a beautiful pilot, who's seeking out her lost lover. Oh, and we also go to the Dream Archipelago, a fictional island where a young man dares to become a magician, in a city where such abstract performances are frowned upon.

If the story lines seem entirely unconnected, then you see the genius of Priest. The stories start out feeling like a series of discordant short stories, but common themes begin emerging. Like all the main characters have names that start with the letter "T." As the novel goes on, we see more and more connections. Events in one story are referenced in another. Characters from one appear in the others. But just when you think you've figured out the connection, things start changing. And then Priest throws in parallel universes. I don't want to say too much, but I will say the novel is mind-blowing at times. In a good way.

At times, the novel is hard to follow. But what I loved about the book is that Priest makes no apologies. He could have chosen to turn any one of the storylines into its own novel, but combines them together in ways that are surprising and entertaining. He's making a statement about the interconnectedness of time, space, and life itself. I could see how some readers might be frustrated, but I liked that Priest allowed the story to challenge. Especially towards the end, when things get downright bizarre.

My only real complaint is that the novel doesn't really end in a simple way. There's no attempt by Priest to explain everything that happened. For example, he never explained why the future Britain is depicted as an Islamic state. Some of the storylines also end without their own sense of closure. And the final pages are completely disorienting without any easy answers.

But that's what I loved. I enjoy stories that make me think, and this novel made me think a lot. It's also beautifully written with wonderful characters. It's definitely one of the more extraordinary sci-fi novels I've ever read.

[Alexandre · Rating 3 out of 5]

J'ai hésité entre trois et quatre étoiles. Le match était entre l'intention de l'auteur, que l'on sent très ambitieuse dans ce roman, et le plaisir de la lecture, ou plutôt le sentiment d'accomplissement que nous pouvons ressentir en refermant un livre.
Sur l'intention de l'auteur tout d'abord : je connais peu les autres ouvrages de C. Priest, ayant lu principalement Le Monde Inverti, que j'ai beaucoup apprécié, cependant d'après ce que je connais de l'oeuvre, tous les thèmes chers à l'auteur semblent abordés dans l'Adjacent. La prestidigitation, les avions de la seconde guerre mondiale, des mondes fondés sur des illusions,...
l'Adjacent se présente comme une somme de toutes ces obsessions. Avec cette approche, il est possible de comprendre finalement le principe de l'adjacent (moyen avec lequel un prestidigitateur détourne l'attention du public pour faire disparaître un autre objet) comme une métaphore de l'écriture elle-même. L'écrivain-illusionniste.
En ce sens, ce livre est un véritable succès : Priest jongle avec les mondes, traçant des liens ténus entre eux. il s'agit du même univers, mais truffé de mondes différents, comme autant de livres écrits par le même écrivain. J'aime particulièrement ce rapport entre Science, Illusionisme et littérature qui est particulièrement intelligent. L'illusionisme constitue la passerelle entre deux disciplines que nous avons aujourd'hui tendance à opposer d'une manière trop artificielle, en associant le merveilleux du résultat à la technique nécessaire à la réalisation du tour. La science et la technique peuvent également être source de merveilleux.

Ensuite, sur le plaisir de la lecture. Certaines pages sont grandioses (grosso modo toutes celles sur la magie et les avions), il est également possible de trouver des pépites d'émotions, à peine polies.
Mon reproche à l'écriture de Priest est principalement son côté trop séquentiel et factuel : nous passons des pages à suivre les protagonistes effectuer des tâches du quotidien. C'est long parfois... surtout que cela n'a pas d'impact direct sur le récit (mis à part de rendre le monde plus crédible peut être). Par ailleurs, sans dévoiler quoique ce soit de l'intrigue, le tout reste particulièrement abscons et le lecteur pourra tirer beaucoup de conclusions sans pour autant que l'une soit plus valable qu'une autre. Difficile de débattre de ce sujet sans gâcher le plaisir de lecture des futurs lecteurs. Aussi je ne m'étendrai pas. Mais c'est principalement cet aspect qui m'a retenu d'attribuer à ce livre sa quatrième étoile. Un sentiment d'inaccompli, une tâche que l'auteur n'aurait pu mener à son terme.

[Chuck · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book isn't so much a narrative as it is a puzzle to be solved. As such, I found it to be confusing. Besides a certain parallelism in the stories, I couldn't determine what the various chapters of the book had to do with one another. One in particular, where a stage magician meets H.G. Wells during WW1, seems to have nothing to do with anything that goes on in the rest of the book.

The only thing I can figure about what was going on in this novel was that some physicist had discovered a weapon that transported a triangular portion of the earth into an alternate dimension. However, Priest isn't consistent about the way he portrays that. Until the last chapter, the characters who have been transported into a different reality don't know where they've come from or how they got there. They aren't even cognizant that they've been transported, and they are fully a part of the new world in which they find themselves. However, in the last chapter, two characters from the future are in WW2 Great Britain. They don't know why or how they got there, but this time, they're very much aware that they don't belong. In addition, the people around them aren't even aware of their existence. Why did things so suddenly change? No explanation is given.

Like I said, this story is a puzzle to be solved. To do so, I feel like I would have to read it again, but I frankly feel like that would be a waste of my time.

[Charles Dee Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

With just under one hundred pages left to go in Christopher Priest’s new novel, readers come upon a chapter titled “Closure.” I assumed this was Priest having a bit of fun, since closure is not a familiar trait of his fiction. The only other Priest novel I have read is The Islanders. It takes place in a realm known as the Dream Archipelago, is organized as a gazetteer, and leaves the reader pleasantly at sea with regards to most of the dozen or so narrative balls Priest keeps in the air. By comparison, The Adjacent might seem almost straightforward. The story is spread across about 150 years and at least two contingent universes. A handful of characters seem to be variations on themselves, whether they are living during World War I, World War II, or in the near future Islamic Republic of Great Britain -- a future marked by catastrophic climate change and continual terrorist attacks. There is also a detour to the Dream Archipelago of Priest’s previous novel.

This is a love story, but the romance is disturbed by the Perturbative Adjacent Field theory, a leap in quantum physics whose great promise has been weaponized within a year of its announcement. Priest works in elements of stage magic, the Nazi invasion of Poland, some pretty good sex scenes, and a nightmarish vision of bureaucracy in a time that Britain has come to realize it is fighting a war it cannot win. And even among all the loose ends he reaches an emotionally satisfying final scene.

[M. Gem · Rating 1 out of 5]

About a hundred pages into The Adjacent I decided to stop reading it; from the very beginning it dragged, and it wasn't showing any signs of improvement. But after checking out some reviews I picked it back up again, hoping that, as promised, once I reached the last quarter it would become interesting. Unfortunately, it didn't happen for me.
If I had to use one word to describe this book, it would be tedious. The stories are drawn out and honestly kind of dull and leave you with very little reward for struggling through them. There's no life in the writing. Every character's voice sounds the same and consequently they barely even have individual personality. Their relationships are unconvincing and the women's motivations in particular make no sense; it's pretty obvious that the author is a man. The concept of the Islamic Republic of Great Britain is straight out of some right-wing fearmongering, and the lack of hints as to how it came about just says to me that even Priest knew there was absolutely no plausible explanation. Even the last part of the book, while marginally more interesting, is essentially more of the same. It felt more like I was slogging through this book than reading it, and the end left me wondering why all the filler was necessary.
The sci-fi elements of The Adjacent are the only really engaging parts of the book, but scarce as they are, they end up buried in endless bland descriptions.

[Robin Burks · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has a lot of nice ideas, although there isn't enough science behind the science fiction for my taste (a little science definitely makes a story more believable). The book does a good job of exploring options of alternate universes, but gets convoluted when it decides to also explore alternate periods of time in alternate universes.

The thing that killed this book for me, most of all, though, is that it has absolutely no plot. The smaller storylines (and believe me, I'm using that word loosely) don't come together to form a whole and the ending is a complete let-down because NOTHING ACTUALLY HAPPENS IN THIS BOOK.

This reads like a dream sequence (a long one, full of needless descriptions), but not much more. As there is no story, it's very hard to care about any of the characters or what happens to them in any of the universes they exist in.

(Note: I received a review copy of this book.)

[Unai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Retoco mi valoración tras leer "Mundo Invertido" y con ello entender bastante mejor esta novela.

No me ha llegado a dar todo lo que esperaba, pero el viaje ha sido suficientemente entretenido como para darle un Ok.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Priest’s new novel follows hot on the heels (for him) of The Islanders (2011). Two novels in three years: result happiness. Have we been here before? Stories that bear a ‘The [insert a word here]’ title can promise anything. But as is usual with Priest’s work, less (that title) really is more (what’s folded into the novel). And we do get what’s described; we just have to work at it too. It’s a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. But perhaps there is a key (Winston Churchill gets a mention but isn’t the major character he was – they were? Oops, that’s torn it – in Priest’s 2002 novel The Separation). The Adjacent does have that more (and it’s a lot) contained in the apparent less. Priest’s recurring themes are there. In this performance – again – there is no let-down, no disappointment. Let’s explore a bit, backstage if possible.

In the not-too distant future, climate change is wreaking havoc throughout the world. Britain is now regularly beset by hurricanes and other extreme weather, disrupting infrastructure and making travel perilous. And there is an insurgency going on. Tibor Tarent, a photographer whose cameras use quantum lens technology, returns home from the drought-ridden hell of Anatolia where his wife Melanie had been killed, apparently in an insurgent incident. Her body utterly vanished in the explosion, which left a triangular crater. Tarent’s superiors want to debrief him, so after an awkward visit to his in-laws is put on an armoured transport (the only decent protection available against weather and attack) and sent to Warne’s Farm in Lincolnshire.

The next part is narrated by Trent. During World War I he is sent to France to help the fledgling RAF with ideas for camouflaging its aircraft. There is talk of transforming objects through deception, the misleading and distracting of onlookers. Back in the IRGB Tarent reaches Warne’s Farm where he witnesses the destruction (‘annihilation’) of the transport and all remaining on board. A triangular scar remains. Tarent is stranded until he can leave on another transport. Flashback twenty years: a journalist interviews Thijs Rietveld, developer of the Peturbative Adjacent Field. The new adjacency technology, it was claimed, would provide ultimate passive protection, making wars impossible. Someone called Tarent is the photographer assigned to the interview, but he might be seen through the illusionist’s sheet of glass. Certainly onlookers are distracted and misled.

At Tealby Moor in Lincolnshire during World War II, Michael Torrance falls in love with Krystyna Roszca, a Polish ATA pilot whose secret name is – we won’t go there (you can). Torrance reminds her of Tomasz, the fiancé who stayed behind. When her aircraft vanishes on a routine flight Roszca is recorded as missing, presumed dead. Decades later Torrance travels to Poland but can find no evidence for any of the people or events she told him about.

Tarent is still at Warne’s Farm in Lincolnshire where it seems all traces of the violent events that accompanied his arrival have utterly vanished. Without missing a beat we meet Tallant on the island of Prachous in the Dream Archipelago. This non-comfort zone is a Priest hole easier to get into than to leave. Also sliding in is Thom the Thaumaturge, who gains a local following until an illusion goes wrong. Thom resembles a sought man called Tomak; hey presto the invisible curtains swish open, close, then open again and what of any trick, the illusion? Mellanya, still seeking Tomak, repossesses her aircraft and flies away: we’ve come across the type of plane, but it wasn’t in the Archipelago, was it?

Throughout, although all is apparently unchanged, the shifts take place. Finally, seamlessly, the key unsticks and perhaps pieces fit into place newly, with the jagged edges planed smooth: as they should be. But there are still sharp jabs, where the fit is still rough and only approximate, a squeeze-in, causing wounds with blood. It is the wounds, blood, and imprecise fittings that give The Adjacent its impact. And throughout Priest’s fiction: all the time it’s people that matter, not just places and events. Exactly where and exactly when Tibor and Melanie end up – or rather in which possibility or reality does Priest make us take leave of them (and it is them as a couple) – is probably not possible to say.

With The Islanders, The Separation, and The Prestige (1995), The Adjacent can, perhaps, be experienced as the fourth facet of a tetrahedral work. (Read the book, you’ll find out.) Crystals have multiplied, parallels have met and the illusionist walks off having given the audience its money’s worth. How much has been going on and we haven’t really noticed? So what. The Adjacent is rich for re-readings and re-evaluations. It might be a fourth story but it is also four (at least) stories packed in one. Christopher Priest has done it again. Cue applause: applaud please!