The Prestige by Christopher Priest Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Prestige
Book Review: Page Turner Disappointment
Summary: 3 Stars
I saw the movie and when I found out that it was based on a novel, I wanted to read the book because "The book is always better than the movie". Not in this case. Ultimately the movie and the book are quite different and they both are good. The movie is good *period* where the book starts out good and ends badly. I would agree with other reviewers that the current day characters and narration are unnecessary, they make up less than 1% of the story and are completely irrelevant to the core of the story. It almost seems like the author had a great idea for a story but the editor cut out everything but the back-story. The editor was right but should have kept cutting until only the period piece was left. The present day arc is just too thin to contain the mass that is the core of this tale. The ending was. I think that grammatically that is a sentence, but just barely. The ending was an ending principally because there was no more text included in the book. I looked for more text.... twice. Most abrupt. There was more meat left to pick off the bones but we didn't get any of it.Book Review: Save Your Time and See the Film
Summary: 3 Stars
As someone with an interest in the adaptation of books and stories into films, I often read a book and then watch the movie or movies to see how various screenwriters have reshaped the material. In this instance, seeing the movie pushed me to finally read the book that had been sitting on my shelf for two years. One always hates to be a heretic, but this is one of the very rare cases where the movie improves on the original.
The premise of this World Fantasy Award-winning novel is certainly an intriguing one: two English magicians of the Victorian era, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier, engage in a lifelong rivalry to outperform each other, a rivalry which at times leads to life-threatening sabotage. Their story is told partially from the modern perspective of their great-grandchildren, but mainly through their own diary entries. The narrative framework is the first area in which the film is a vast improvement. The modern storyline serves almost no purpose and the filmmakers wisely jettisoned it. Similarly, the diary entries are entirely unconvincing as Victorian documents, and play a much-subdued role in the film.
However, the main problem of the book is that the feud is never given much of a basis -- in other word, there are no stakes. The one fairly egregious act early on is done by Borden to Angier, but when Angier eventually turns the other cheek, Borden keeps at it. Indeed, the feud seems to periodically die off, only to inexplicably flare up again over the course of twenty years! The filmmakers recognized this problem and came up with a much more convincing back story to explain the start of the feud, and then very carefully calibrated its escalation over time.
Another problem the book has is that for the reader to really buy into the notion that these two magicians are obsessed with each other, the protagonists must be equals. However we learn much more about Angier than Borden, and indeed, while Angier is a bit of a schmuck, he comes off far more sympathetic than Borden. Again, the film does a much better job of making the two men equals in stature, and very different in nature. It also does a good job of streamlining their family lives, which are rather convoluted in the book.
There are plenty of other more mundane instances where the film comes out looking better. For example, in the book Angier consults with the real-life inventor Nicola iTesla. Tesla builds him an apparatus which can replicate matter, lectures Angier about how he should not use it to counterfeit currency, and then proceeds to abandon his lab due to bankruptcy! The film takes the much more interesting and plausible approach that Tesla disappears because Thomas Edison's goons have finally tracked him down and torch his lab. And ultimately, Priest commits the sin of making the story's two big twists all too obvious to the reader, thus removing any sense of wonder or suspense. Meanwhile, the film does a great job of holding off on revealing the twists until the last possible moment, and actually adds one or two.
Ultimately, it's hard to recommend the original book version of this tale -- with its clunky framework, poor pacing, uneven characterization, vague motivations, and tipping of its hand -- when the film version exists. Instead of spending six hours reading this, watch the movie and use the other four hours on another book.
Book Review: Sci-Fi tinged story of magicians rivalry gets new life thanks to film of the same name
Summary: 5 Stars
The story of rival magicians told via diary kept by Alfred Borden about the feud between Borden and rival magician/spiritualist Rupert Angier. As with the film The Teleported Man act that Borden develops plays a major part in the story as does Tesla so the basic premise is the same although it is played out differently here and equally as compelling as Nolan's film.
"The Prestige" is well written with rich characters and Priest captures atmospheric turn-of-the-century England quite well. The film is a nice companion piece to the novel with using the same basic plot to tell the story in a different medium but Priest's novel does allow better insight (no surprise since it's written and internal thoughts and feelings are quite difficult to portray on film)into the motives and issues between the two. Some of the twist and turns of the plot here resemble ended up in the movie while the movie makes some radical departures in comparison. What worked for the movie wouldn't work for the book and vice versa so just be prepared for a different experience. I will warn you that some expecting a fast paced thriller will be probably be disappointed as this is the type of novel that you invest in but the results are rewarding.
World Fantasy Award winning writer Christopher Priest first published "The Prestige" in 1995 and with the release of the movie interest has picked up so hopefully those who missed the novel the first time will get a chance to enjoy it. As to the differences between the novel and film there will be those that the novel is better--I'd argue that it's different (it was once said by director David Cronenberg that the best way to remain faithful to the book is to be as unfaithful in telling the same story as possible because of the different formats).
Book Review: Science (fiction) as magic explained
Summary: 5 Stars
First presented to their audiences was a promise of misdirection that seemed to confirm what those in attendance knew.
Then came an execution of a seemingly impossible act.
Immediately thereafter - the prestige, that astonishing and inexplicable result of a successful illusion.
Necessarily, the titular third stage of this achievement is of paramount importance, its success dependent on the secrecy of a comparably ordinary act. Yet if the deed itself is just so extraordinary as the prestige, if magic beggars illusion as a presentation veracious to the senses, then what is magic if not the introduction of the unprecedented?
Nine decades after the successes of two rival Victorian stage magicians subsided to obscurity, their descendants - an unimaginative journalist and a peeraged inheritor - are brought together by the latter's deceit to solve a weird and terrible mystery in consequence of their ancestors' bitter feud. In the course of their lengthy written accounts, one of these prestidigitators is revealed a principled, industrious thaumaturgist of working-class stock, the other an equally sedulous showman of aristocratic lineage and visionary inspiration. Proving with finality that what was once imagined can be realized in actuality by dint of electromotive appurtenance, one of these obsessed entertainers duplicates the other's ingenious trick by means as extraordinary as its effect, for which both men and their descendants suffer fatal and enduring tragedy. Engaging their common profession and one another with fundamentally dissimilar tactics, neither man fully comprehends how flawed, vulnerable and ultimately proficient the other is until both have fallen inexorably to ruin.
Boasting characterization far more involved and ramified than its speculative elements, Priest's novel was written almost entirely in the first person. Uniformly organized, its narratives are comprised of the following contents: an introduction by the reporter which initiates the book's frame story; a brief autobiography scribed by the workingman performer; an unsettling anecdote disclosed by the patrician scion that supplements and furthers the frame; the diaries of her accomplished forebear; a thrilling conclusion in which the last of many ghastly and wondrous secrets are laid bare.
As usual, Priest's prose throughout is easily read. Though the mundane journalist refers to the polish of his Victorian progenitor's writings as labored, both his vernacular and that of his sworn opponent evinces a balance of contemporary accessibility and some verisimilitude of Victorian eloquence.
Through his characters' exploits, Priest assays personal themes pertaining to duplicity and obsession, as well as greater cultural concerns of the period - entrepreneurial ambitions, advancements of entertainment and the wonders of emerging technologies at the dawn of modernity.
Resonant with a fin-de-siècle ethos, this tale's protagonists and their feats bespeak an influence owed the era's luminaries of legerdemain: John Nevil Maskelyne, the Davenport Brothers, Ching Ling Foo and his famous competitor, William Robinson. Faith, both men's careers are advanced and forever altered through fictional interactions with Maskelyne, Foo and especially one Nikola Tesla, colorfully though credibly depicted as the unwitting originator of his employer's supreme achievement and grisly downfall.
Readers who open this volume expecting a narrative identical to that of Christopher Nolan's exceptional feature film adaptation are likely to be surprised and pleased by how very different these two tellings are. Unsurprisingly, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan's screenplay further exploits the virtues of its medium with an array of visual metaphors and a painstakingly intricate - though wholly accessible - narrative bereft of linearity. To confound expectations of those who read the book, the Nolans also altered numerous key plot points, excised and modified many characters, and jettisoned sub-plots and frame story alike. Hence, Nolan's picture is a sleek, plot-driven condensate of Priest's phenomenal totality.
Hardly enough contemporary science-fiction literature exists which elicits horror, awe and inquisitiveness from its readers. His best work confirms that Priest knows full well what the genre deserves and how any given subject is best broached in a context of spectacular possibility. "The Prestige" is more than a love letter to an age of unparalleled progress and those assiduous practitioners of its most mysterious entertainment. In those thematic and stylistic traditions established by Wells and Lovecraft, it's also a tribute and cautionary yarn to the obsession of excellence.
Book Review: Spellbinding!
Summary: 5 Stars
A part of the urban fantasy subgenre of contemporary fantasy, The Prestige tells the story of two illusionists of the early 1900s. For various reasons, these two magicians, of wholly different characters, have fallen into a feud, each trying to outdo the other on stage and in their personal lives. Alfred Borden is a magician of the old style, naturally gifted in magic, a stage magician who despises those who use magic tricks to pretend to real magical ability. Rupert Angier is a magician down on his luck that turns to pretending to be a spiritualist to make ends meet (although eventually he does make it to the stage). It is from this their feud stems, but it eventually goes way beyond that.
I recommend this book be read by those who like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke. The history filled with magic plot line will appeal to Clarke's readers. I recommend that those who like reading the old pulp magazines give The Prestige a shot also. If you like a good mystery and don't mind a sort of incomplete ending you might like this book as well. I enjoyed it, although I was disappointed in the ending, but then, I like my books to feel like the story is complete, and this one will leave you wondering.