The Prestige by Christopher Priest

Hello, Stranger.

Let's talk about Christopher Priest's The Prestige.

The Short of It

Plot: A simple rivalry between two stage magicians becomes an all-consuming feud. 

Page Count: 372

Award: 1996 World Fantasy Award 

Worth a read: Yes
Primary Driver: (Plot, World, or Character) 
Bechdel Test: Fail
Technobabble: Minor.
Review: A gripping and fun read despite a handful of odd narrative choices. Good characterization on all sides, including multiple accounts and perspectives of overlapping events to flesh everyone out. Writing is good and builds suspense well. Pacing can be a bit off, in particular the use of an unneeded framing narrative, which pads out the book a bit too much on either end.

The Medium of It

Spoiler Free!

Yes, this is the book upon which the Christopher Nolan film is based. It may also be a rare example of the movie being superior to the book, though the book is still good.

The story begins with a framing mechanism: a reporter going off to investigate an odd message he had received. This framing story will be discussed a bit more later; suffice it to say, the actual story begins a bit later, with him reading through the journal of a long-deceased stage magician, Alfred Borden. After touching upon his childhood, Borden's introduction to his account takes a detour. This is a longer excerpt than I usually put in, but the entirety of it is excellent.

Before I resume the story of my life, here is another anecdote that illustrates my method.

When I was younger there was a fashion in the concert halls for Oriental Magic. Most of it was performed by European or American illusionists dressed and made up to look Chinese, but there were one or two genuine Chinese magicians who came to Europe to perform. One of these, and perhaps the greatest of them all, was a man from Shanghai called Chi Linqua, who worked under the stage name Ching Ling Foo.

I saw Ching perform only once, a few years ago at the Adelphi Theatre in Leicester Square. At the end of the show I went to the stage door and sent up my card, and without delay he graciously invited me to his dressing room. He would not speak of his magic, but my eye was taken by the presence there, on a stand beside him, of his most famous prop: the large glass bowl of goldfish, which, when apparently produced from thin air, gave his show its fantastic climax. He invited me to examine the bowl, and it was normal in every way. It contained at least a dozen ornamental fish, all of them alive, and was well filled with water. I tried lifting it, because I knew the secret of its manifestation, and marvelled at its weight.

Ching saw me struggling with it but said nothing. He was obviously unsure whether I knew his secret or not, and was unwilling to say anything that might expose it, even to a fellow professional. I did not know how to reveal that I did know the secret, and so I too kept my silence. I stayed with him for fifteen minutes, during which time he remained seated, nodding politely at the compliments I paid him. He had already changed out of his stage clothes by the time I arrived, and was wearing dark trousers and striped blue shirt, although he still had on his greasepaint. When I stood up to leave he rose from his chair by the mirror and conducted me to the door. He walked with his head bowed, his arms slack at his sides, and shuffling as if his legs gave him great pain.

Now, because years have passed and he is dead, I can reveal his most closely guarded secret, one whose obsessive extent I was privileged to glimpse that night.

His famous goldfish bowl was with him on stage throughout his act, ready for its sudden and mysterious appearance. Its presence was deftly concealed from the audience. He carried it beneath the flowing mandarin gown he affected , clutching it between his knees, kept ready for the sensational and apparently miraculous production at the end. No one in the audience could ever guess at how the trick was done, even though a moment's logical thought would have solved the mystery.

But logic was magically in conflict with itself! The only possible place where the heavy bowl could be concealed was beneath his gown, yet that was logically impossible. It was obvious to everyone that Ching Ling Foo was physically frail, shuffling painfully through his routine. When he took his bow at the end, he leaned for support on his assistant, and was led hobbling from the stage.

The reality was completely different. Ching was a fit man of great physical strength, and carrying the bowl in this way was well within his power. Be that as it may, the size and shape of the bowl caused him to shuffle like a mandarin as he walked. This threatened the secret, because it drew attention to the way he moved, so to protect the secret he shuffled for the whole of his life. Never, at any time, at home or in the street, day or night, did he walk with a normal gait lest his secret be exposed.

Such is the nature of a man who acts the role of sorcerer.

Audiences know well that a magician will practise his illusions for years, and will rehearse each performance carefully, but few people realize the extent of the prestidigitator's wish to deceive, the way in which the apparent defiance of normal laws becomes an obsession which governs every moment of his life.

Ching Ling Foo had his obsessive deception, and now that you have read my anecdote about him you may correctly assume that I have mine. My deception rules my life, informs every decision I make, regulates my every movement. Even now, as I embark on the writing of this memoir, it controls what I may write and what I may not. I have compared my method with the display of seemingly bared hands, but in reality everything in this account represents the shuffling walk of a fit man.

An astounding amount is established in these few pages.

1. The notes about the fetishizing of Asian culture gives us a more solid historical context in which to place all of the events that we're seeing.
2. Referring to a location by its place within a city - and not the city - indicates that we're going to spend a good amount of time in London.
3. Borden demonstrates how very meticulous he is with everything.
4. He was famous enough that he was recognizable from just a business card.
5. We are shown that Borden has a remarkable level of understanding of the tricks performed by others.
6. Borden has extremely high respect for professional ethics, as demonstrated by his only revealing Ching's secret following his demise.
7. Most important: Borden has a secret that is the cornerstone of his daily life, that impacts everything and anything that he does. 

Add in everything else about style and characterization, how Borden presents himself, the self-confidence and ego that bleed through the page... that's how you start a book. 

Well, that's how you could start a book. This one actually beings with Andrew Westley on a train to go investigate the odd occurrence of a cult leader being seen out and about - while he was certainly in prison. And we spend a while with Andrew, and his musings, before we get to Borden's journal. Andrew Westley does not need to be here at all, and taking the first 40 pages to actually get to the real story severely undercuts pacing from the start. Alfred Borden: Confident, clever, cool, stage magician. Andrew Westley: Also present.

The core conflict is the rivalry between Alfred Borden and another magician, Rupert Angier, whose journal we read as well. Early on we learn that both magicians have a signature trick: the magician somehow teleports. And neither one knows how the other does it. The journals are a neat strategy for getting inside the heads of both characters: their anger, their regrets, the occasional note from each that this feud has gone too far... before escalating it again. 

There are plenty of suspense and mystery books where a single question drives the whole affair. Priest does remarkably well with instead answering mysteries as he goes, with each prompting a new question. And the glue that holds these together is strong characterization. Both characters are equally likeable and dislikable - there is no clear good, no evil. Just two egos at odds. 

It is only in the unnecessary and tiresome framing that The Prestige struggles. It is interspersed throughout, and both opening and conclusion are in the present, many years after the heart of the story occurs. It's still worth the read, but it's unsurprising that this was removed in the film adaptation.

The Long of It

Spoilers Ahead!

I always liked the movie, but thought that the twist was dumb as hell. It works significantly better in the book, as both magicians emphasize over and over again that all tricks are simple, it's just a question of seeing things in a bit of a different manner. 

That said, there are a lot of bizarre authorial choices here that make the twist messy. The very first page of Westley's account includes his explanation that:

All my life, as long as I can remember, I have had the feeling that someone else is sharing my life. As a child, with nothing to go on apart from the actual experience, I thought little of it and assumed everyone else had the same feelings. As I grew older, and I realized none of my friends was going through the same thing, it became a mystery. Reading the book therefore came as a great relief as it seemed to explain everything. I had a twin somewhere.

Twins keep on being brought up, over and over again. This is authorial foreshadowing that does not really make sense in context - just hammers in that twins are important. So, we, as readers, understand that the way this trick must be performed is with a twin. But alas, it is impossible.

Sense did prevail once more. No magician gives away the secret of another.

At length I said, “There are ways and means. An illusion is not what it seems. A great deal of practice and rehearsal—”

Whereat the youthful reporter practically leapt out of his seat.

“Sir, you believe he uses a twin double! Every magician in London thinks the same! I thought so too when I saw it the first time.”

“Yes, that is his method.” I was relieved to discover how straightforward he was being.

“Then, sir!” cried the young man. “You are wrong like all the others, sir! There is no double. This is what is so amazing!”

“He has a twin brother,” I said. “There is no other way.”

“It is not true. Alfred Borden has neither twin brother nor a double who can pass for him. I have personally investigated his life, and I know the truth. He works alone but for the female assistant seen on the stage with him, and a technical manager who builds his apparatus with him. In this he is no different from any other in your profession. You too—”

“I do have an ingénieur ,” I confirmed readily. “But tell me more. You interest me greatly. You are certain of this information?”

“I am.”

“Can you prove it to me?”

“As you know, sir,” Mr. Koenig replied, “it is not possible to prove that which does not exist. All I can say is that for the last few weeks I have been bringing journalistic methods to the investigation, and have not found a single jot of evidence to confirm what you assume.”

At this point he produced a thin sheaf of papers and showed them to me. They contained certain information about Mr Borden that I found instantly intriguing, and I begged the reporter to let me have them. 

Well, then it must not be twins. Until...

“May I ask,” I said eventually, “to what I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

“I've come to apologize in the matter of Mr Borden, your rival. I confess that all my elaborate theories about him were in error, while your theory, blunt and simple, was correct.”

“I don't follow you,” I said.

“When I came to see you before, you will recall I held some hifalutin theory of Mr Borden performing a greater magic than any that had existed before.”

“I remember,” I said. “You wisely convinced me of it. I was grateful to you—”

“You, however, had a plainer explanation. Borden is not one man but two, you said. Twins, you said. Identical twin brothers, each taking the place of the other as required.”

“But you proved—”

“You were right, sir! Mr Borden's act is indeed based on twins. Alfred Borden is a name conflated from two: Albert and Frederick, twin brothers, who perform together as one.”

“That's not true!” I said.

“But it was your own theory.”

“In lieu of any other,” I explained. “You swiftly disabused me. You had evidence—”

“Much of which turns out to have been circumstantial, the rest of which had been falsified. I was a young reporter, not then fully practised in my profession. I have since learnt to check facts, to double-check them, then to check them once more.” 

Yo, it's just not good writing to have a character straight up lie to the reader in order to throw them off the scent. That's just silly. 

This, in conjunction with the bloated framing, left me feeling a bit unsatisfied at times. However, the excellent back and forth between Borden and Angier redeems it. We spend a lot of time with Borden first, and he sets up Angier as a great rival and villain. When we then shift to Angier's perspective, it's remarkable how different he is.

I love to perform. I study the craft of using a stage, of presenting a show, of entertaining an audience with a stream of witty or droll remarks… and I dream of laughter, gasps of surprise, and tumults of applause. I know I can reach the top of my profession simply by the excellence of presentation.
My weakness is that I never understand the working of an illusion until it is explained to me. When I see a trick for the first time I am as baffled by it as any other member of the audience. I have a poor magical imagination, and find it difficult to apply known general principles to produce a desired effect. When I see a superb performance I am dazzled by the shown and confounded by the unseen.

The pivot from the brilliant Borden - who has less flair - to the true showmanship of Angier works wonders. Suddenly neither is a giant: they are both petty people, who are stuck in a rut, neither one willing to let the other come out on top. And willing to hurt others and let their loved ones suffer because of it. It is not a glorious clash: it is a sad and ongoing feud. It is only fitting that Borden's strategy is simple magic: a perfectly executed illusion, as simple as can be. And Angier's method has no explanation - it is just what it appears to be, but using technology far beyond his comprehension.

Anything up your sleeve, Stranger?

And don't forget to read a book!