The Evidence

by Christopher Priest

Todd Fremde, an author of police procedurals and criminal thrillers, is invited to talk at a conference on the remote island of Dearth, far across the Dream Archipelago. Once there, he finds himself caught up in a series of mysteries.

How can Dearth claim to be completely crime-free, yet still have an armed police force? Why are they so keen for him to appear, but so dismissive when he arrives? Is his sense of time confused, or is something confusing happening to time itself?

And how does this all connect with a murder committed on his home island, ten years before, and seemingly forgotten?

Fremde's investigation and research will lead him to some dangerous conclusions...

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Mystery, Fantasy, Crime, Thriller, Novels

312 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2020

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

[Liviu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A return to The Dream Archipelago in a book that is very hard to put down; The Evidence contains many nuggets (social and political structure of the Archipelago, many interesting musings on the nature of the writer's craft, subtle sf with the notion of "mutability" and its implications), has quite a lot of ironic/darkly funny passages very relevant to our world. However, I think that its main strengths are the flow and the prose as one is really compelled to turn the pages not only to find out what comes next (as the novel zigs and zags) but also for the pure enjoyment of the prose of a master of the craft. As the narrator - a "crime" fiction writer who has recently been more and more interested in the human aspects of the genre rather than a clever plotline - keeps emphasizing, it is the way a novel develops rather than its final destination per se, that is important and The Evidence indeed follows that dictum.

Overall an excellent novel and one of my top 10 books of the year

[Geevee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Underwhelming and poor. I would suggest reading Alteredego's review (31st Dec 2020), which encompasses my own thoughts so well.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

“For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
— Shakespeare, ‘Richard II’

Against his better judgement a crime writer, invited to an overseas conference, attends, and not only has to suffer huge inconveniences but is then reluctantly fed ideas for a plot based on a true crime by a retired cop.

No, that’s not quite the sum of it. In The Evidence we find ourselves on another world, one girdled by an island archipelago, which suffers gravitational anomalies and, in places, something called mutability which somehow changes the reality of events. And while much of the technology feels both contemporary and familiar the social and geopolitical systems are either arcane (as in feudal) or polarised (as in totalitarian versus more liberal systems).

On the other hand – how many hands do we have? – this is pure metafiction: an author describes the processes of writing fiction in this, an actual work of fiction, where sleight of hand, distraction, misdirection and mistaken perceptions are discussed and then perpetrated on the actual as well as the hypothetical reader. You either like what’s been done here or you feel you’ve had the wool pulled over your eyes. Is the narrator reliable or is he too affected by mutability at the deepest level?

First, let’s consider the setting. Todd Fremde is the first-person narrator from the island of Salay Raba invited to give a keynote speech to the University of Dearth Historical and Literary Society. But Dearth Island, unlike Salay Raba, is known to be “positioned on a geological fault above several gravitational anomalies,” as Todd reminds the reader in Chapter 23, resulting in a “mutability” – an enigmatic phenomenon which produces “physical changes that were allegedly real at the time they occurred, but forgotten soon afterwards” (Chapter 18). A Dearth police commissioner, Freja Harsent, informs Todd that “what you call a crime we call a civil transgression,” which seems to be a way of accounting for the fact that actuality on Dearth may, without warning, reconfigure itself at any time.

Still, Todd has, due to the dogged insistence of Freja, been thrown into a situation where he has to consider a cold case, a crime committed many years before on his own island group of Salay. The ramifications of this amateur sleuth’s initially very tentative investigations is that he uncovers a lot more than had bargained for, a situation which threatens not only his own life but those of a colleague and his partner, and perhaps even the financial stability of the Archipelago.

And this is the specific theme he returns to in this novel: how might the conventions and clichés of detective fiction get refreshed when the writer himself is the amateur sleuth or investigator. “Was there still an allowable, plausible way of plotting a crime novel that involved identical twins?” he asks at one point; elsewhere he muses

We all involve ourselves with story. Most people who read books love to think about 'what happened next?', or if they read mysteries 'whodunit?'. They follow the story, enjoy its twists and turns, wait for the final revelation.

The creation of a story, though, is not simply a matter of telling a sequence of events, however embellished those events might become in the process.
— Chapter 8

Christopher Priest evidently had fun writing this novel, meaning that this reader at least also had fun with this page-turner. Though it shares features with The Adjacent and The Gradual, a couple of his other novels set in his Dream Archipelago which I’ve enjoyed, it works as a standalone – even if it requires similar mental adjustments. Priest reprises many of his literary obsessions, such as the notion of people having aliases, and of doppelgängers, or analogues in other worlds, or (as now in his best known novel, The Prestige) twins; there are also the themes of conjuring and illusion which he blatantly revisits here, and which he compares to the art of an author, especially the writer of crime fiction, murder mysteries and thrillers.

Here then is our real life author, Priest, using the voice of a fictional author, Fremde, beginning to tell us something about not just how fictional authors may tell a story but how us readers may like to regard the story we’re actually being told now, particularly where its inspiration came from and how the writer developed the ideas. The unsurprising answer to where does inspiration originate is ... it’s a mystery. Why? Because the process is organic and, for the writer, internal.

This being so, far be it for me to try to explain The Evidence to you. Here not only is the telling of the story a process, the story itself is the process, anomalies and all. If I’m puzzling out the implausibility of the fictional author having to explain to his readers the political and social systems they already know to be pertaining in their own world, I then consider that maybe this is another anomaly we may have to put down to mutability rather than trusting a possibly unreliable narrator.

Perception is all, certainly where Priest’s fiction is concerned (as I first discovered in his Inverted World). Though there may be none of Shakespeare’s dead kings about whom to “tell sad stories” here, readers of crime fiction will find the murder mystery aspect satisfying, fans of speculative fiction will enjoy the alternative world premise, and devious types like me may appreciate the literary puzzle box Priest offers up for our inspection. Dare one open it?

[Snakes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Set in the Archipelago, this book had elements of science fiction with the mutability and gravitational aspects although these featured very little after introduction; however and despite the murder mystery added in, the action was nil, the pacing was slow, and the book was just too boring.

[Pete Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

So what is The Evidence? Sci-fi novel? Detective thriller? Pastiche of a murder mystery? Treatise on the craft of thriller writing? Exploration of the fate of refugees and their contribution to society? Meta-level novel in which the world changes as the novelist writes? Allegory of our powerlessness in the face of advanced technology and financial power? It seems to me to be trying to be all of these things, but in the end the output is considerably less satisfying than the aggregate of the inputs.

Question 2, is the end of a book made less rubbish by the author stating in advance that it is going to be rubbish? Answer - probably not.

When I started the book I was unaware that I had already come across two of Christopher Priest’s earlier works. A few years ago I read his early novel Inverted World, which I thought was extremely poor, hence my forgetting the name of the author. I have also seen Christopher Nolan’s film of the The Prestige. He repeats themes from both here, stage magic and deceptions built around identical twins recall the latter. From the former, there is a temporal anomaly, called mutability, which seemingly alters space and time, but which at the end is unexplained, inconsistent and unsatisfying.

The words literary science fiction used in the blurb for this book tend to describe two distinct genres. One would encompass John Wyndham, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, Ursula K Le Guin. The other can best be described as pretentiously written poor science fiction. To my mind, the best science fiction can be as fantastical as it likes as long as it does two things, the characters have to behave believably, and the universe has to be internally consistent. The epitome of this is probably Iain M Banks. Here, on the other hand, to give just one example, mutability can change space and time in one place, but be totally unknown on another island a short flight away. Of course mutability could just be a metaphor for the world being a confusing and unexplained place, if so, it’s a pretty unsubtle one. There again, it could also be an element of the meta-text, representing the unseen author re-writing peoples lives. If so, it looks like Priest basically saying “Are you clever enough to work out what I’m saying?”. Sadly my preference is for my fiction not to be some sort of cheap IQ test.

There are two other failures as a science fiction novel. Firstly, the half hearted attempt at introducing an element of hard sci-fi. The changes to space and time are explained by the existence of gravitational anomalies. Er, that’s it. It’s almost as if the author has read in a Sunday supplement article that there is a link between gravity and spacetime, and decided to leave things at that. Secondly, this is a novel of world building, shown by very different geography and the odd unexplained “gravitational anomaly”. But that is it. Everything else is identical to 21st century earth.Why bother world building when you’re not actually going to do anything with it?

A massively unflattering comparison to this book would be Mieville’s The City and the City. Certainly early on, this seems to be aping the superior work, with its faintly Warsaw Pact East European feel and skewed reality. That book however is internally consistent, doesn’t try to be hard SF and world builds for a reason rather than as an intellectual exercise.

There is some fun to be had here with the detective thriller coupled with the murder mystery pastiche, as a convoluted plot involving corrupt police, sibling rivalries and hidden secrets slowly reveals itself. That the final denouement is based around one of the oldest country house murder mystery devices is an act of commendable chutzpah.

However, to return to the negative side, I said that I didn’t, at first, realise that I’d come across Priest before. It was only after I’d read 3 or 4 chapters that the dull mechanical style of writing started to trigger a feeling of familiarity, leading me to look up, with a sinking feeling, Inverted World.

[Etienne · Rating 1 out of 5]

1,5/5. I always like Christopher Priest, or I taught I was because after checking it out, I just read two books from him before that one, which is less than I thought… That being said, I like the first two, but that one didn’t do it for me. I don’t even truly know what I’ve read. Part inside eye on the writer work, part pastiche of the thriller genre, barely any science-fiction at all, a main character that had some potential but that didn’t evolve or bring anything to the next level during the book. Well anything truly work with it! Closing it, I’m still unsure if Priest just pass a failed experiment or a first draft of and idea at his publisher and they decide to go for it anyway. Not worth reading in my opinion, even if the parts on writing were good, and there was pieces of second degree humor here and there, but that’s just not enough. I will read more from that author, but I won’t recommend The Evidence to anyone.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such a disappointment. The plot is rapidly tied up in the last few pages. Up until about 2/3rds of the way through I thought this might have a similar intriguing payoff as The Prestige, it was not to be. The only science fictional element was underused and mostly peripheral to the plot.

Priest has this tendency to add lots of irrelevant detail. I'd hoped some would lead somewhere but they were actually irrelevant details.

He also has a bash at a metafictional element with the narrator (a writer of thrillers) commenting (too often) on how hackneyed a situation he was involved in and that it would never work as a real novel. Oh really?

[David Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, a new novel by Christopher Priest is always an Event and this one had me awake till after midnight: I couldn't stop till I'd finished it.

The Evidence takes us back to the Dream Archipelago, in a story that plays with - and critiques - the rules of detective fiction, as well as taking in feudalism, the world financial system and the literary scene.

Todd Fremde is a successful crime writer, living a comfortable life on the island of Salay Raba, the fourth: a warm and pleasant place, if overrun in parts by financiers and bankers. Certainly a world away from the bitterly cold and industrialised nation of Dearth, where he's gone to give a talk on "The Role of the Modern Crime Novel in a Crime Free Society". This gives Priest a wonderful lunch for the story as we follow the slightly nervous and peevish Fremde on his journey - a two day sleeper ride across Dearth, with a flight beforehand. I'm not a natural traveller and I slightly sympathised with Fremde's niggling concerns - about missing connections, being late, having to travel as advised with extra bulky, thermal clothing, missing his usual routines - while also thinking: two days closeted in a sleeper cabin - what an opportunity to catch up on the reading! At the same time, there are some oddities slipped into the story, and if you read Priest's last Dream Archipelago story, The Gradual, you may feel that the central figure, an artist despatched on a lengthy cultural jaunt, may be something of an innocent abroad, likely to run into all sorts of trouble.

As he does, and there is an element of SF to it, with the mysterious "mutability" which nobody can quite explain but which notices in Fremde's hotel room warn him about - but Priest's writing here almost makes it just one of things that you have to cope with in a foreign business trip. A strange foreign law, perhaps, a way of living, in a distant city, that you don't quite grasp, like the peculiarities of the Metro pricing. Certainly not something to worry about much. Especially not when a senior member of the local police (in a crime free society?) takes an interest in you, and insists on telling you about a strange case she was once involved with.

To begin with, Fremde hates that attention. He's already discussed the philosophy of the crime novel - the aspects which are deliberately unrealistic, the things one avoids as passé (the locked room, twins, the "perfect crime"), features of the market which drive the writing one way or another. Now (and here Priest writes with perceptible feeling) we get that horror of horrors for a writer, the fan who wants to suggest an Idea which surely only needs to written up to make a novel. As well as the palpable sense of unease from Fremde's travails in a foreign land, the book now picks up a dash of humour as Fremde has to try and control his annoyance. Eventually, though, he does become interested in the story he's being told - not so much as material, more from the nature of what he hears, and its connection to his homeland. Can it be a coincidence that he was invited to Dearth in the first place?

What follows is best not described in detail - that would spoil the enjoyment of the plot, which contains many little moments of recognition. I will only say that Fremde's life, and the sort of fiction he writes, seem to be crossing over - at many levels - as a result of his visit to Dearth. The concept of mutability becomes important - Fremde relates it to his writing (what's more mutable than fiction?) but it also proves to have real-world effects, serious ones for Todd and for his island.

In the background, this is the same Dream Archipelago we've become familiar with, the endless war between the two Northern states gridding on and escapees from their conscript crimes. In keeping with the detective theme, we also meet a grizzled ex-policeman with secrets (he, also, keeps trying to foist Ideas on Fremde) and another cop who never travels without an assault rifle. There are written confessions, obfuscated records and hints of a cover-up.

It's an immensely enjoyable book where - in keeping with Fremde's theory of crime writing - the point is less to discover what happened, even where that seems to depend on the most outrageous of crime writing conventions, still less to establish guilt, but to tease out the relationships and personalities involved, to become acquainted with participants and come to know them.

Which is all very well, but there are people it's better not to be acquainted with...

I simply loved this book. It will appeal to the crime enthusiast, the SF reader, followers of Christopher Priest's fiction (onvioulsy) and those who enjoy an intelligent novel where all isn't as it seems.

[Peter Garrett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ever since being disappointed by A Dream of Wessex, I’m not a big fan of Christopher Priest. Some aspects of the reviews of this book (vaguely Nordic names, the Arctic climate and mountainous topography of the initial setting, the speculative crime mystery format), however, sounded interesting enough to give it a go.

Despite Priest’s rather dry authorial style, in the early chapters the evocation of the setting of the island of Dearth, its contrast with the balmy environment of the narrator’s home island, introduction of an enigmatic character, some well-realised action and the promise of a satisfying plot do manage to engage the reader’s interest. It’s a disappointment that this isn’t sustained.

Priest’s unnecessary authorial intrusions soon become wearing. As early as the second paragraph the narrator tells us that he is “disconsolate”, even though this is already obvious from the action. Early on, frequent info dumps can be seen as consistent with the narrative style and the narrator’s rather didactic nature, but these become more and more common, and lengthy to the point of tedium. The writing style is sometimes irritating: long lists are very often completed by “and so on” (and less frequently “and the like” or “etc.”). This could perhaps be viewed as a deliberate illustration of the protagonist’s dismissive attitude to his own obsessiveness, except that the quirk continues when the narrative voice switches to a different character.

The use of different languages is odd. Many of the names of characters have a Nordic or Turkish feel, but this doesn’t seem to tie in with any cultural alignments. The names of four of the five islands in the narrator’s home archipelago are derived from Arabic (the exception is “Sekonda”), but no special reason for this can be discerned. Every time one of these islands is mentioned it must be followed, increasingly irritatingly, by a suffix such as “the second” or “the fourth”; on the single occasion this doesn’t happen, the reader’s attention is explicitly drawn to the breach of etiquette.

The protagonist – peevish, judgemental and intensely self-centred – fails to elicit the reader’s sympathy. He seems to recognise that his actions, through some kind of arcane mechanism associated with the bizarre phenomenon of “mutability”, may be the reason for mass unemployment, bankruptcy and civil unrest, but he doesn’t even consider taking any responsibility for this. By half way through the book, his dry info dumps are taking up more space than the action. The lengthiest of these take the form of an unenlightening commentary about the structure of crime novels. While it’s more than probable that this is intended to subvert the novel’s own crime thriller format, the similarity in style to other lengthy asides about the war between northern hemisphere nations or the fictional world’s fiscal structures renders this interpretation unclear.
It’s also possible that the notion of mutability, a tendency to vaguely defined anomalies of causality, is intended to indicate that the world of experience is not amenable to logic. This interpretation, though, would be at odds with the novel’s otherwise rather encyclopaedic worldbuilding.

Ultimately the anticlimactic ending is pre-empted by yet another authorial intrusion. Does this metafictional device help the reader to appreciate that the very concept of an end is itself a fiction? And has the journey to this revelation (or lack of revelation) been enjoyable?

The answer to both of these questions is no.

[Paul M · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5/5 majorly disappointing. Tries to be a police / sleuth story but a really uninteresting plot. The SF element is this idea of "mutability" which is never explained or developed, there is so much exposition that adds nothing to the story. Like for a short book do I need 3 pages on the financial history of the island? Maybe, if there's some payoff or later in the book it's important but it's not. So many plotholes too that makes no sense and the ending is 2 pages long, it's like Priest just had a deadline to meet and just ended it in a totally bland interesting way.

[Genevieve Paquette · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hated this, but I think it's probably a good book? I 100% was not the right reader for this one.

[Borja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ojalá la mitad de los libros del mundo estuvieran escritos con la prosa de Priest.

[oh-deanna]

Could not get through this one. DNF @ 24%.

[Konstantinos Georgokitsos · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't visited the strangeness of the dream archipelago in literally decades. Observations and comments on reality, perception and truth (the narrator is a crime fiction author) keeps your brain busy. But the true joy of the book is Priest's prose, which I had mostly forgotten and was anew impressed by. Wonderful page turner.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it!

The Evidence focuses once again on one or two islands of the Dream Archipelago. Dream Archipelago is a series of islands created by Christopher Priest and it has appeared in his novels The Affirmation, The Gradual as well as having it further elaborated in The Dream Archipelago and The Islanders. It is definitely my favourite make belief place because everything strange can happen in these islands.

I love how The Evidence is a mystery novel with references to the strange islands geography and the ever enigmatic brief reference to magic. The pace was good and I finished this in 2 days.

I hope there is more stories from Christopher Priest focusing on the Dream Archipelago!

[Felicia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Where to start? This book is all over the place. It started out interesting enough, but eventually you start to realise that there's nothing there.
I feel like Priest had to deliver a book for his publishing contract and he just churned one out with bits of other stories to get paid.

Firstly, I kept asking myself, does this need to be Sci fi? The supposed Sci fi elements play next to no role in the plot. He tries to shoehorn in some timey wimey stuff with the "mutability" that keeps getting mentioned, but in the end, it plays no role in the plot and ultimately goes unexplained. He also shoehorned in this whole storyline with a financial crisis, which I suppose is meant to either add tension or give the Big Bad Guy a motive for coming out of the shadows, but then in the end it all just sort of goes away. And it's a very weak motive at that.

There were many other shoehorns, like all the political stuff which also played no role in the plot, and the refugee side of things, which just feels like he thought of this idea that he thought was cool and didn't want to waste the idea so put it into a book, any book. He tried to make it more relevant by then end, but again, it was weak.

Then the diatribes. Oh lord the diatribes! I skipped probably a total of 50 pages throughout this book because I feel an unnecessary diatribe coming on about how to write a crime novel, how writers get inspiration, the perfect story, structures etc etc etc.

There wasn't enough mystery to make it a murder mystery. There was enough relevant sci-fi to make it good sci-fi. There wasn't enough political commentary to make it a political thriller. There just wasn't enough of anything. And I kept reading/skipping hoping that it would eventually come together, that he would tie all these threads together and I would finally get it. Sadly, it did not. And the narrator actually warned us that we would be disappointed with yet another diatribe on writing.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3687296.html

Christopher Priest's latest book returns us to the Dream Archipelago, with the story of Todd Fremde (which is almost German for "strange death"), a mystery writer who gets sucked into a real mystery in the course of giving a lecture at a far-off university, in a world which is very like ours, except that a phenomenon called "mutability" blurs reality often and confusingly. Twins and magic pop up again, as they have done in a lot of Priest's other work (notably The Prestige). I see some reviewers complaining that the situation, and the mystery, are not adequately explained at the end, but I felt very much that the journey is its own reward (we are practically told as much in the text). Recommended, though I think I would not tell anyone to start reading Priest with The Evidence.

[Aelfwine · Rating 1 out of 5]

An intriguing setting - something about the mix of modern technology with feudal politics reminded me of Jasper Fforde, only without the humour. Intriguing concepts too, especially around the idea of 'mutability' (and finance!)

But bogged down by incredibly dull prose, endless boring digressions into minutiae of the writing life, and thin-as-cardboard characters. The ending is a huge anticlimax - and Priest signpointing it didn't make it any less painful to read. Big disappointment for me.

[Steve Gillway · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a big fan of "looping" and here the writer gives an immaculate rendition of how to do it convincingly. Bascically, he explains the workings of a crime/ thriller novel by writing a crime/thriller. Priest is not content with achieving that, he also manages to incorporate a measure of unease and eerieness into the story. Great to listen to The Little Unsaid while reading.

[Jack Deighton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the latest of the author’s forays into the world of the Dream Archipelago which he first brought to our attention in 1981 in The Affirmation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aff...) Like our own world, it has changed somewhat in the years since that first appearance. Its invention does though give the author an opportunity to comment on our world while still providing an element of skew. His imagined world is familiar but always perceptibly different from our own.

This slipperiness is not confined to the Dream Archipelago. In most of Priest’s works things tend to be numinous. Appearances can be deceptive, or alter; but in the Dream Archipelago that is literally so. In some locations more than others something called mutability affects the topography but in a way such that afterwards it is just accepted and no-one comments on the change. It is almost as if that change has never been. Later Fremde tells us, “Money and high finance were a system of belief.” And adds that the onset of mutability was a belief system similar to high finance. The events were real, but afterwards only the results counted, so that no one believed the process had really happened; they became abstract.

In many ways reading a Priest novel is exactly like that. Something has happened. You are no longer where you were when you started yet the mechanism of getting there remains obscure. It is a neat trick to pull off but Priest’s glides between realities can be all but seamless.

In The Evidence viewpoint character Todd Fremde lives with his partner Jo Delson on the Salay Islands, a group containing five main landmasses, Salay Ewell, Sekonda, Tielet, Raba and Hames, each of which are always referred to in speech as “the island” followed by its ordinal number. For example “Salay Tielet, the third.” Fremde is a writer of crime fiction who has been invited to the northern University of Dearth to give a lecture on “The Role of the Modern Crime Novel in a Crime-Free Society” (which Dearth claims to be,) necessitating an air journey and a long rail trip. His welcome is odd, the instructions for his hotel key cards even more so. One is relatively normal, the other a mutability safeguard. Moreover, everything in his room is to be switched off whenever he leaves. This minor aspect of the novel is an illustration of mutability but is an adjunct to the main narrative. Here it is almost as if Priest is demonstrating his ability to conjure up such concepts, not quite backgrounding for the sake of it, but showing us his world-building. In this regard the society of the Dream Archipelago is structured along feudal lines (but not absolutely rigidly so: for instance here there is no restriction on travel.) Its inhabitants are characterised as Serf, Citizen Serf, Villein, Squire, Vassal, Corvée Provider, Cartage Provider, Demesne Landed, Knight, Manorial Landed, Baron, Seignior. Most of the time this makes no impact on the story.

In Dearth, Fremde is waylaid by one Frejah Harsent, with a tale of a murder - or two - in Salay. Despite himself Fremde is drawn into the who, how, what and why of those crimes. However, a fair part of the text constitutes a disquisition on the purposes and practice of the crime novel and the lot of the novelist. With particular reference to the peculiarities of the Dream Archipelago, Priest, through Fremde, treats us to thoughts such as “All writers are serfs,” and “Writers never fit into a social system,” but “No one tells me when to work, how to work, what I should write in my books, where I might travel.” At one point we even have Harsent give to him “the suggestion novelists never have an answer for, and try to avoid at all costs,” an idea for a story. He tells her, “Story is seen as unique to each novel,” and “people want stories to work properly ... to give a kind of satisfaction,” not to be messy or unresolved as in real life. It is perhaps here that we are being prepared for a diversion from that template as, later, Priest appears to toy with the idea of the narrator becoming the victim only to draw back.

Priest’s work can be full of echoes. The Prestige focused on a rivalry between stage magicians. In The Evidence part of Fremde’s investigation involves the demise of another such entertainer and we are shown the mechanics of how one of his illusions worked.

In Priest’s worlds nothing is simple yet while having a certain kind of flatness and a distancing detachment his prose is clear. What it describes is not. What we see is not necessarily what we get.

Fremde’s cat is called Barmi. We make of that what we will.

[Dan Trefethen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christopher Priest's novels are slippery. He plays with perception. The books can be very metafictional. For instance, this book is sort of a murder mystery thriller that is narrated by a writer of murder mystery thrillers. While the events are occurring, he tells you how thrillers are constructed, and how real life differs from thrillers – or at least they should, until the 'reality' of the book starts to conform to the thriller formula.

The book is set in Priest's Dream Archipelago, where reality is a slippery concept anyhow. There are gravitational anomalies, and 'mutability' effects that warp reality so that what happened before may not be what really happened, or what is recalled. This all calls into question what is happening in the book and what the narrator's understanding of it is.

Priest couches his narrative in a dense thicket of quotidian details, with the narrator providing excruciatingly precise information of his daily activity and what is happening. I believe this is Priest's attempt to establish a normalcy that he can then subvert with the Dream Archipelago's tendency to warp reality.

When done properly, this effect provides the reader with an intriguing sensation of cognitive dissonance (as in his previous novels “The Prestige” and “The Separation”). Although there was some of that here, it was not as effective. However, I did enjoy the idea that high finance is simply a chimera; a consensual hallucination that can blow away in an instant. Here's his take-away on that:

“The onset of mutability was a kind of belief system similar to high finance. There were practical effects and consequences (the effects were real) but afterwards only the results counted, so no one believe that the process had really happened (the events became abstract)...So that money was both real (actual spending) and abstract (a belief system).”

Those of us who have puzzled over the financial implosion of 2008-09 and the disturbing tendency to disagree about basic facts (There is no virus! It's a hoax!) can empathize with Priest's narrator.

[Kal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just started reading this mind boggling Sci Fi romp from master author Christopher Priest. He surely does have a fantastical imagination. The central character Dr Todd Fremde has been portrayed as a nervous, schizophrenic type who gets easily agitated by things he cannot grasp his mind around (the concept of "MUTABILITY" for starters, and those insidious hotel charges that he is FORCED TO PAY). I revelled in the fact that Dr Fremde is a kind of a Dr Scrooge, counting his pennies, even though he is facing the lap of luxury. Another fascinating character is Frejah Harsent, who gave me the impression of being a woman in touch with her sensual side as well as sexual. She sends Dr Fremde a lot of mixed signals, and temptation is always knocking on Fremde's door. The sci-fi premise of the DREAM ARCHIPELEGO is another awesome, mind boggling premise that reminded me of THE PRESTIGE, the film which was directed and brought to life by auteur Chris Nolan. A masterpiece both in literary and film format. I don't know why but as I started reading this novel today, I keep on imaging Hugh Jackman playing the role of Dr Fremde - if ever a film will eventuate. There is just something mysterious and dark about Jackman's performances in THE PRESTIGE, REMINISCENCE & PRISONERS that made me think he would be a perfect fit for Dr Fremde. Oh well, I am 40% of the way through and due for more surprises. Can't wait to see how it all ends. However from what I have read so far, the book surely deserves a sequel or 3. I have a feeling the book's end is an anticlimax which doesn't quite end things right there.

[Carl Barlow · Rating 3 out of 5]

A crime writer becomes embroiled in the unravelling of an actual crime, and, well, writes about it. He also tells us everything we might want to know about crime writing, all the tricks of the trade, all the clichés, all the over-used and under-used character-types, all the right and wrong ways to go about it... and then proceeds to include all of them in the retelling of his experiences (there's even a Noire sequence!).

But these aren't the only complications within The Evidence. For this is Christopher Priest, and the setting is his extraordinary Dream Archipelago, where nothing is what it seems - except that, if the world appears to be out to get you (and only you), then it probably is.

Strange gravity spikes cause distortions in reality, subtly -and not so subtly- altering reality, changing the past and the passage of time. A sealed troop carrier transporting conscripts to die in an arbitrary war runs aground and is reported all over the news - and then almost exactly the same incident is later recounted but from decades in the past. Mysterious hotel software on an electronic door key seems to cause a financial crash on the other side of the world.

But, ultimately, there's not enough of this - not enough Weird. There's too much Crime Thriller (and of that a rather gentle, pedestrian sort - interesting and -of course- exceedingly well-written, but not really my cup of Yorkshire). I kept waiting for some major revelation, one of those eerie, unsettling twists or hints Priest is so well know for. But there wasn't one. Unless I missed it. Unless it only seemed there wasn't one...

[Dave Morton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Priest's range is astonishing. I have recently finished "An American Story", written against the background of the 9/11 attacks on the USA. In 'The Evidence', the author returns to his Dream Archipelago for what looks like a whodunnit.

'Looks like', because you never know with Priest. I am currently on page 144, and I am not attempting even to guess where the story is heading. The protagonist is a writer of crime fiction, a man who lives on one of the pleasant, warm islands of the Archipelago, who has travelled to Dearth, an unpleasant island in polar latitudes, where he is giving a lecture.

Dearth suffers from the familiar and disturbing time effects of the Archipelago, and also with spacial anomalies. At one point, his train is held up because the gauge is incorrect, and he is given a spare hotel key, in case there should be a 'mutability' problem there also. After a few drinks too many, he uses the wrong key, with serious financial consequences to him.

He is rescued by a senior police officer, who was present at his lecture. She drives him hundreds of miles to the airport and, on the way, tells him of a murder she investigated fifteen years earlier back in his own country. The story involves the murder of twins, a familiar Priest theme (twins, not murder), five years apart, though one has been written off as suicide, despite the victim having his head bashed in by a baseball bat. The twin who was indisputably murdered, turns out to have been a stage magician, another recurring theme with this author.

Halfway through the book, almost, and back on his home island, the protagonist is investigating these historic twin suicide / murders, with the help of a retired detective, and with a view to basing a new book on the events. Anything can happen.

I am completely hooked and intrigued, as always with Christopher Priest.

Update, and a bit of a let-down, the second half of the book. I got bogged down in the story's complexity, even though I took notes, and I never quite felt Priest nailed the character of his mystery-writer protagonist. This is usually one of his strengths, but absent this time, despite the promising and intriguing beginning.

So it's only a 3-star. I didn't much like 'The Prestige' nor 'The Space Machine'. Otherwise Priest has always been 5-star for me.

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating, increasingly entrammelling chapter, when back home, with all manner of clues as to frustrations and dislocations and putting out of mind of the Carnival Museum Murder, a crime now with a spur to things of its possible financial implication, and realisations that I am a bit of a reviewing fraud and have always been aware of the correct spellings of certain names, and I somehow recognised Fremde’s tapping into ‘mutability’ itself to write his latest crime fiction with developing characters and the eventual culprit, and later there is possible quarantine or viral infection on his computer stemming from a key from the Dearth hotel that it still knew he possessed. The hotel at which he had stayed, I now recall….and how this book is infecting my own computer by transposing my thoughts to it about the book, infecting my computer if not my brain, say, with the dawning enormity of the Archipelago as a group of endless-seeming islands, the divorcement of authors from some pragmatic verities …. and how I once worked in high finance, as this author claims he didn’t. You are where you are and nowhere else.


The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is one of its observations.

[Simon B · Rating 3 out of 5]

Christopher Priest's new novel returns to a setting familiar to readers of his past novels, the sprawling Dream Archipelago. But as is often the case with Priest, the familiar is tinged with eerie strangeness and the strange feels somehow familiar. A successful crime writer stumbles upon an unsolved murder that he thinks might become useful source material for a future novel. Yet the situation is different and more complicated that he was first led to believe and after subsequent investigations he reluctantly becomes embroiled in helping to solve the mystery. Complicating everything is the phenomenon named "mutability", which afflicts some islands of the archipelago due to opaque gravitational forces. Mutability causes things (ranging from mountain ranges to large buildings to household furniture) to change function and shape, with often disastrous results. But the other aspect of mutability is that it is difficult to detect - after it occurs most people eventually conclude that it never took place. At first I felt that the novel's denouement was a bit of an anti-climax but, cleverly, Priest also leaves open the possibility that something much more dramatic and different took place but the narrator, affected by a localised mutability event, has convinced himself otherwise.

[Kiril Valchev · Rating 3 out of 5]

С " The Evidence ", Кристофър Прийст ни захвърля отново сред неподдаващия се на осмисляне Архипелаг на сънищата - чудат, енигматичен и пропит със сюрреализъм.
Тод Фремди, автор на криминални истории, е поканен да изнесе лекция на непознат нему остров, претендиращ, че е лишен от всякаква престъпна дейност. Разбира се, както във всяка уважаваща себе си мистерия, на сцената се появява убийство. Да, извършено преди десетилетие и на другия край на света, но за място, където нищо не е, каквото изглежда и където дори четвъртото измерение - времето, не се държи по свойствения за него начин, това не е необичайно.
За разлика от другите странствания сред островите на Архипелага, това не ми се понрави особено. "Островитяни" (издателство "Август", 2013г.) се превърна в любимо заглавие, "The Gradual" също ми хареса страшно, но тук нещо липсваше, а от друго имаше прекалено много. Онова чувство за безвремие, което създаваха споменатите книги, тук липсва. Няма я и онази логика, която само сънищата могат да следват. За сметка на това, има твърде много (поне за моя вкус) "мета"-разсъждения за природата и структурата на криминалните романи и писането като цяло. Както и да е... Винаги ще ми бъде приятно, да се завръщам в този свят.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Evidence is about Todd Fremde, a crime fiction writer who is invited to speak at the southerly island of Dearth. He meets an unusual woman who drives him home, and on the way provides details about a past murder - than results in Todd investigating much deeper.

I'm in two minds about this novel - I loved the first thirds or so - the trip to bitterly cold Dearth, the strange customs of the inhabitants, and especially the gravity nodes across the island with peculiar effects on gravity, time, and electricity - expressed as "mutability".

But for much of the remainder of the story there was quite a bit of standard fair crime investigation (which I'm not a huge fan of), and I also found there were many instances of the author veering into explanations of why and how crime novels should or shouldn't work - I really wasn't that interested.

At least his prose was in his usual easy to read style, and the ending was built up well (though I thought two character's abrupt turn was a bit implausible). I was really hoping for more on Dearth, mutability and it's effects on people, but thought too much of it felt like general (crime) fiction.

[Hakim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Christopher Priest offers us a compelling mystery here, as he usually does. The novel starts in one of my favorite fictional settings: the Dream Archipelago. It is an extremely ethereal, enigmatic, and unpredictable place.

The protagonist is a crime writer who arrives on the island of Dearth to speak at a literary conference. The character experiences episodes of “mutability”, a weird condition in which time and matter seem to warp and shift. Though primarily a plot device, it adds a powerful sense of mystery to the story, serving as a thread that runs through the entire book. There, Freida, a retired Dearth police officer, tells him about a cold case involving twin murders that he might want to use in one of his books. Later, when he investigates, Todd discovers that much of what Freida told him is unreliable or untrue.

The Evidence is tense, fast-paced, and hauntingly otherworldly. I enjoyed every page, and found myself wanting a lot more. It didn't really hit every mark for me, leaving too much unsaid and unresolved, it is still a solid mystery thriller with a lot of intellectually stimulating elements.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 3 out of 5]

Priest has long belonged to different literary worlds, and this latest seems to be engaging with yet other issues that would almost turn it into a realist novel...
There's obviously a line in there about artists in our world, and how Art is a commodity like any other, not rewarded for its intrinsic merits but for the commerce it represents. There's obviously a line about banks, and world economic crises. There's something about emigration, and totalitarian regimes (a theme already seen in his other works). There's some magic-related plot bits (recalling an earlier Priest novel), and a narrator reflecting on his world in a semi-detached yet pretty personal way.
All in all, an atmospheric novel using a detective trope to give rise to situations and enable travel. Some strangeness (time fluctuations) remains unexplained, which is completely fine since its point is psychological, not scientific.
Not the best Priest, but perhaps the signal of better things to come?