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Alternative Peace
12 Aug 2004
The Separation - Christopher Priest - Gollancz 2004
* * * *
One of Christopher Priest's recurring themes has been the clashes between differing perceptions of reality, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before he got round to writing an out and out alternate world novel. Given my general dislike of things military and the fact that several other writers have done it before (Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle", Robert Harris' "Fatherland"), I was disappointed that he chose World War 2 as his theme, but fortunately he has done a good job.
The book opens, disturbingly, with a writer, Stuart Gratton. I generally dislike authors as protagonists - it's both lazy and pretentious. Fortunately, Gratton's narrative turns out to be a (rather clumsy) framing device for the main part of the book.
Gratton's area of research is the oral histories of ordinary people who fought during "the German War". It soon becomes apparent that Gratton's world is an alternate one - World War 2 ended in 1941, Britain is still a global superpower in 1999, the USA is in social and economic stagnation after a series of wars against Russia and China and Dr Goebbels "became a noted documentary film-maker and newpaper columnist. He retired from public life in 1972". Gratton takes an interest in a remark by Winston Churchill about one J.L. Sawyer, who was apparently both a conscientious objector and a bomber pilot in the RAF. Intrigued by this seeming contradiction, Gratton advertises for more information about him and receives a memoir from a Mrs Chipperton. The text of this forms the first half of the book.
The mystery is rapidly solved - Jack Sawyer, whose memoir this is, turns out to have an identical twin with the same initials (what were their parents thinking of?). The memoir tells two stories in alternate chapters. One is his journey with his brother Joe to Berlin to compete for Britain in the coxless pairs event at the 1936 Olympic Games, their rescue of a Jewish woman called Birgit, and their subsequent falling out when Joe marries her. The other begins with Jack waking up wounded in a military hospital, and tells of the events leading up to his injury (he was shot down during a bombing raid) and what happens to him subsequently. Just one small thing - it becomes clear that Jack is living in a different history from the one established in the framing story. A history, in fact, which is remarkably similar to our own...
I won't say much more about the plot, save that the second half of the book focuses on Joe the conscientious objector's story and describes, in a series of official documents and personal accounts, the events that led to the end of the war in 1941. Clearly we are back in the alternate world of the framing story - or are we?
I have remarked before that Priest is a literary magician, and he uses every trick in the book to keep the reader guessing about what is happening. Apart from the identical twins shtick, there are imposters, amnesia, lucid dreaming, unreliable narrators and hints of crossovers from one reality to the other. Even Priest's famously cold prose style is part of the trick - his calm descriptions of extremely dramatic events prevent them from impinging too deeply on your memory, so you can never be quite sure, when you come across an inconsistency, whether it's inconsistent with what you actually read or with your memory of what you read. This is clever, clever stuff.
Perhaps a bit too clever. The problem with magicians is that you start expecting them to pull the wool over your eyes, so I was disappointed with the grand finale which I expected to be twistier than it turned out to be. Although it provides an explanation for the two versions of history, it is undercut by the way the story has been told and the awareness of this fatally blunts the emotional effect that Priest is trying to achieve. Sadly I don't think that there is a consistent explanation for all the events in the book, which means that the intellectual energy expended by the reader in trying to work one out is a wasted effort.
That said, there is much subversive enjoyment to be had in Priest's alternate world(s). I enjoyed his implied criticism of the bombing raids on German civilians and his alternative take on Winston Churchill (which reflects my own view that he wasn't nearly as great a man as our predominant British narrative makes him out to be). But lest us liberal pacifists start to feel too smug, Priest also questions the morality of the peacemakers - peace is a noble aim, but you have to work with some pretty unpleasant people and strike some decidedly dubious deals to make it happen. What we learn of the alternate 1999 does not suggest that it is a noticeably better world than our 1999, implying that in the long run the work of peacemakers may have little effect. Both Sawyers come across as morally mixed, undercutting the simplistic "conscientious objector good, bomber pilot bad" view that I for one would be inclined to. Nonetheless, I know which I would choose to be, and I think Priest would choose it as well.
The Separation - Christopher Priest - Gollancz 2004
* * * *
One of Christopher Priest's recurring themes has been the clashes between differing perceptions of reality, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before he got round to writing an out and out alternate world novel. Given my general dislike of things military and the fact that several other writers have done it before (Philip K. Dick's "The Man in the High Castle", Robert Harris' "Fatherland"), I was disappointed that he chose World War 2 as his theme, but fortunately he has done a good job.
The book opens, disturbingly, with a writer, Stuart Gratton. I generally dislike authors as protagonists - it's both lazy and pretentious. Fortunately, Gratton's narrative turns out to be a (rather clumsy) framing device for the main part of the book.
Gratton's area of research is the oral histories of ordinary people who fought during "the German War". It soon becomes apparent that Gratton's world is an alternate one - World War 2 ended in 1941, Britain is still a global superpower in 1999, the USA is in social and economic stagnation after a series of wars against Russia and China and Dr Goebbels "became a noted documentary film-maker and newpaper columnist. He retired from public life in 1972". Gratton takes an interest in a remark by Winston Churchill about one J.L. Sawyer, who was apparently both a conscientious objector and a bomber pilot in the RAF. Intrigued by this seeming contradiction, Gratton advertises for more information about him and receives a memoir from a Mrs Chipperton. The text of this forms the first half of the book.
The mystery is rapidly solved - Jack Sawyer, whose memoir this is, turns out to have an identical twin with the same initials (what were their parents thinking of?). The memoir tells two stories in alternate chapters. One is his journey with his brother Joe to Berlin to compete for Britain in the coxless pairs event at the 1936 Olympic Games, their rescue of a Jewish woman called Birgit, and their subsequent falling out when Joe marries her. The other begins with Jack waking up wounded in a military hospital, and tells of the events leading up to his injury (he was shot down during a bombing raid) and what happens to him subsequently. Just one small thing - it becomes clear that Jack is living in a different history from the one established in the framing story. A history, in fact, which is remarkably similar to our own...
I won't say much more about the plot, save that the second half of the book focuses on Joe the conscientious objector's story and describes, in a series of official documents and personal accounts, the events that led to the end of the war in 1941. Clearly we are back in the alternate world of the framing story - or are we?
I have remarked before that Priest is a literary magician, and he uses every trick in the book to keep the reader guessing about what is happening. Apart from the identical twins shtick, there are imposters, amnesia, lucid dreaming, unreliable narrators and hints of crossovers from one reality to the other. Even Priest's famously cold prose style is part of the trick - his calm descriptions of extremely dramatic events prevent them from impinging too deeply on your memory, so you can never be quite sure, when you come across an inconsistency, whether it's inconsistent with what you actually read or with your memory of what you read. This is clever, clever stuff.
Perhaps a bit too clever. The problem with magicians is that you start expecting them to pull the wool over your eyes, so I was disappointed with the grand finale which I expected to be twistier than it turned out to be. Although it provides an explanation for the two versions of history, it is undercut by the way the story has been told and the awareness of this fatally blunts the emotional effect that Priest is trying to achieve. Sadly I don't think that there is a consistent explanation for all the events in the book, which means that the intellectual energy expended by the reader in trying to work one out is a wasted effort.
That said, there is much subversive enjoyment to be had in Priest's alternate world(s). I enjoyed his implied criticism of the bombing raids on German civilians and his alternative take on Winston Churchill (which reflects my own view that he wasn't nearly as great a man as our predominant British narrative makes him out to be). But lest us liberal pacifists start to feel too smug, Priest also questions the morality of the peacemakers - peace is a noble aim, but you have to work with some pretty unpleasant people and strike some decidedly dubious deals to make it happen. What we learn of the alternate 1999 does not suggest that it is a noticeably better world than our 1999, implying that in the long run the work of peacemakers may have little effect. Both Sawyers come across as morally mixed, undercutting the simplistic "conscientious objector good, bomber pilot bad" view that I for one would be inclined to. Nonetheless, I know which I would choose to be, and I think Priest would choose it as well.