pp89-105

first published in Christopher Priest: The Interaction edited by Andrew M. Butler, London, The Science Fiction Foundation, 2005

Recommended Reading – BSFA Non-Fiction Award 2006

Peter Sinclair had reached the age of 212 pages. As with many other protagonists in the novels of Christopher Priest, from Alan Whitman to J.L. Sawyer, his knowledge of who and what he is is compromised, open to doubts and hesitations. We discover during the course of The Affirmation (1981), for instance, that Sinclair isn’t even sure whether he is 29 or 31. His confidence in his own identity is invested in the manuscript to which he clings obsessively throughout all that happens to him. In this manuscript he has poured out the story of his life, displaced into an imaginary landscape which may be London or it may be the Dream Archipelago. In putting himself within this other place Sinclair has, as he says, ‘imagined myself into existence’ (The Affirmation [A], p15), ‘[m]y manuscript had become a metaphor for myself.’ (A, p23) So fully is the manuscript linked to his identity that the revelation, late in the novel, that the pages are all blank is a devastating revelation of what is going on in Sinclair’s mind. In the end, ‘blank pages lay scattered across the floor, like islands of plain truth, auguring what was to come.’ (A, p212)

There are islands of plain truth scattered throughout Priest’s work. Sometimes these are genuine, sea-girt islands — Wessex, Muriseay — sometimes they are set within a more metaphorical ocean — the Planalto, Earth City. They are not solitary places, Priest has shown no interest in writing about a Robinson Crusoe or a Pincher Martin, a lone figure whose humanity is the key to whether he masters or is mastered by his environment. Invariably, Priest’s islands are socially, politically and morally complex places, though they are also, equally invariably, places that are equated with the identity of his characters, their nature essential in any understanding of how a protagonist writes the story of who and what he is.

And the story usually is written. It is not just The Affirmation in which books play an inextricable part. The written word, in one form or another, reveals or undermines the world in Inverted World (1974) and A Dream of Wessex (1977) as much as it does in The Quiet Woman (1990), The Prestige (1996) and The Separation (2002). Nor should we forget the importance of a novel called The Affirmation in Priest’s story ‘The Negation’ (1978, revised 1999). The world of Priest’s novels is created and understood through the written word, so that the book is one of the three key images that echo and recur throughout his work. The second is the double, whether it is Edward’s brief glimpse of a second Amelia that sets the events of The Space Machine (1976) in motion, Peter Sinclair bifurcating in The Affirmation, the secret of The Prestige, or the twins whose separation splits the world in The Separation. The third is the focus of this exploration: the island. Though to examine any one of these tropes in isolation is impossible; to consider the island in Priest’s work inevitably involves books and doubles, because all three pertain to his investigation of identity. In that other novel called The Affirmation a journey ‘through the exotic landscape of the Dream Archipelago … [is] … also a voyage of self-exploration.’ (The Dream Archipelago [DA], p42)

In accompanying ‘the endless island-hopping of the restless characters … forever seeking a sense of identity’ (DA, p32), our journey must begin with the scientific project, the ‘Concentration’ of Indoctrinaire (1970, revised 1979), the ‘observatory’ of ‘Real-Time World’ (1972), the ‘establishment’ of Inverted World. These are notable for their ‘absolute impregnability’ (Indoctrinaire [I], p7), but it is their very impregnability that cuts the inhabitants off from consensus reality. The less they know about the world around them — ‘We never get to know about the weather down here’ (I, p15), as Wentik comments in a letter to his wife — the less they know about themselves. When, in both ‘Real-Time World’ and Inverted World, the local reality becomes distorted, the residents interpret it as a distortion in the world outside them. They are adrift in a sea of ignorance, not realising that the ignorance is their own. Throughout his career, Priest has found ways to cut his characters off from consensus reality. Even in the post-Dream Archipelago stories where islands as literal settings tend to disappear from his work, there is a sense that his characters are isolated from reality by invisibility (in The Glamour (1984, revised 1996)), by virtual reality (in The Extremes (1998)), by alternate realities (in The Separation) — but it is still the same impulse. Indoctrinaire, his first novel, may explore the idea less subtly than in his later works, but that doesn’t alter the fact that some of the issues of identity and insularity first raised there resound throughout his entire oeuvre.

Indoctrinaire is the closest Priest has come to a Robinson Crusoe type of island story. Taken from the Concentration by the enigmatic agents, Astourde and Musgrove, Wentik finds himself in the Planalto, ‘a part of the world where you can see in one direction but not the other. A place you can walk into, but not out of’ (I, p19). It is an island of time, stepping out of the Brazilian jungle into the circle of grassland that is the Planalto, the men travel 200 years into the future. The setting alone is enough to give Wentik ‘a hopeless sensation of separation from reality’ (I, p51), but he finds himself further isolated by his sanity as Astourde and Musgrove, themselves becoming increasingly irrational, subject him to bizarre imprisonment and interrogation. When he does eventually reach the future Sao Paulo, Wentik learns that it was a ‘Disturbance Gas’, an off-shoot of his own research, that was responsible for their madness. His entirely peaceful research was used for deadly military purposes. ‘It was all part of the permanent gulf between theory and practice, between the cold clinical light of a research-bench and the blinding heat of an interrogation-room’ (I, p135). The gulf, in other words, between the island of the Concentration and the mainland of Wentik’s family (whom we never see), between asocial insularity and social context, between madness and sanity.

Though there is always some such gulf to be found in Priest’s work, and social connection is always a good, the island isn’t always associated with disconnection. It is, however, always associated with identity. Here, for instance, when Wentik itemises all the people he knew and loved who would be lost in the war, he concludes: ‘But even more than this, a whole set of memories and impressions and images which go to make up an identity. For Wentik to accept the destruction of all this would be to condone the removal of a part of himself’ (I, p163). It is significant, therefore, that having travelled back in time but still not able to rescue his family from the war, Wentik chooses to cast himself away on the island of the Planalto at the end of the novel. He has become a Robinson Crusoe, or perhaps more appropriately a Pincher Martin, because the social context that makes him who he is has already been taken away from him. The island does not isolate him, it is his isolation that leaves him washed up on the island.

All that occurs in Indoctrinaire, the war, the bizarre imprisonment in the Planalto, is a direct consequence of the malevolent insularity of the Concentration. But in Priest’s first novel we hardly have a chance to see how this disconnection from the world distorts perceptions of the world. In two subsequent works, however, the story ‘Real-Time World’ and the novel Inverted World, this distortion would be brought into sharp focus. This is because, in both instances, our attention is almost exclusively fixed upon the closed, insular world of the blandly-named ‘observatory’ or ‘establishment’.

In many ways, ‘Real-Time World’, notably the Tolneuve Theory around which it revolves, encapsulates everything that islands represent in Priest’s work at this stage: ‘people raised in a high-stimulus environment become a product of their society, and could not keep their orientation without some knowledge of what is outside their sphere’ (Real-Time World [RTW], p139). From Indoctrinaire all the way to A Dream of Wessex, Priest’s fiction is filled with people who lose their orientation, their sanity, their sense of identity, through losing their context, their connection with consensus reality. The story is, in fact, an experiment in just such loss of orientation, an experiment that is summarised thus: ‘what, precisely what, would be the effect on a community deprived of news? Or in another sense: does an awareness of current events really matter?’ (RTW, p138).

The form of the experiment involves complex layers of deception. The story is that the scientists are manning an observatory on another planet, though, as in the Planalto, they are enisled by time more than by space due to an effect known as ‘elocation’.

Elocation had about as much relation to time-travel as a flight of stairs has to space-travel … All the elocation field can do is to push the observatory back in time by about one nanosecond. (RTW, p141)

In other words, they are cut off from their reality in every way possible. Their only access to the world outside this hermetically sealed observatory is through a series of personal news sheets which are doled out, once every twenty-eight days, by the narrator, Dan Winter. It is Winter’s job to observe the experiment, plotting the way rumours about what is actually happening on Earth spread through the community. After a while, ‘[t]he rumours lost any basis in reality, became fantastic, wild, demented’ (RTW, p144), but then speculation turned towards reality again, ‘incredibly, the rumours began to anticipate fact’ (RTW, p145). As he follows this bell-curve, Winter believes that he alone knows the truth: that they are not on some distant planet but in the Joliot-Curie crater on the Moon, which is visible from earth only once every 28 days, hence the four-week pattern in receiving news from outside. But as the scientists’ understanding of their world returns towards consensus reality, they realise that they are not on some distant planet, nor on the Moon, but are still on Earth. They simply walk out. Only the narrator, Winter, enmired in his own distorted view of reality and unable to imagine that they are not on the Moon, remains. He cannot walk out because in his reality that would mean dying instantly in a vacuum, so he stays in a social and intellectual vacuum of his own making.

It is not the island of the observatory that physically cuts its inhabitants off from the world; it is the consensus view of the scientists. When their view of the world changes, when their social, political and intellectual context allows a connection with outside reality the scientists are able to move freely between the worlds. Only the narrator, socially at odds with the other scientists, is unable to share their consensus reality and therefore alone is left a castaway.

‘Real-Time World’ is probably the best of Priest’s early stories because of its psychological and moral complexity, but it would soon be overshadowed by another work that employed exactly the same scenario. In Inverted World Priest would once again examine the social insularity of his characters by placing them upon the island of a scientific establishment that is technologically cut-off from outside reality, and again it would be the willingness of the characters to connect with that outside world and share in its consensus that would dictate whether they can escape the dying island of their imaginations for the world of our reality.

Practically the first thing we learn about Earth City, after Helward Mann’s startling and famous opening declaration — ‘I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles’ (Inverted World [IW], p11) — is about its confinement and regulation. Helward’s mother, for instance, had left the city soon after his birth and all he had known while growing up were ‘the confining walls of the crèche’ (IW, p11), but now there are rituals to go through as he enters the highly regulated adult world of the guilds. This emotional isolation is combined with a deliberate intellectual and cultural insularity. Like the scientists in ‘Real-Time World’, for instance, the inhabitants of Earth City understand that they are not on the planet Earth, but knowledge of the planet they are on is withheld from them.

We knew, or thought we knew, much about everyday life on Earth planet, but we were told that this was not what we would find on this world. A child’s natural curiosity immediately demanded to know the alternative, but on this the teachers had kept their silence. (IW, p49)

Although Helward’s future wife, Victoria, will rail against the frustrating limitations of this insularity —

the system which runs my life is itself dominated by what goes on outside the city. As I can never take part in that I can never do anything to determine my own life. (IW, p54)

— nothing is done to understand the world. The guilds, who alone have contact with anyone or anything outside the city, are constrained by their rituals to tell no-one of what they see, even the spiked shape of the sun. More than that, they behave towards the people they encounter with a disdain bordering on disgust that is typical of the reaction of islanders to others in all Priest’s work from Fugue for a Darkening Island (1972) to the Dream Archipelago stories. Reason enough for this disdain is shown in the novel’s bravura central section in which Helward journeys ‘south’ and experiences all the distortions of the inverted world. But it is after he returns, in the war with the ‘tooks’ (as the local inhabitants are called, a name clearly cognate with the ‘gooks’ of Vietnam) that we learn something of the social and political consequences of this isolation.

We have already learned, when Helward discovers the old plan of Earth City, that it had once had several languages, and realise that it has become homogenised. We know, also, that the population is shrinking, and especially that fewer girls are being born. So we have an impression already of a society becoming smaller and narrower, more and more cut off. Now Helward himself, seeing parallels between what he has been taught and what he has experienced, recognises Earth City as the inheritor of an uncomfortable truth about Earth planet, where ‘[c]ivilisation …was equated with selfishness and greed; those people who lived in a civilised state exploited those who did not.’ (IW, pp166/7) Earth City is repeating that pattern: the guilds see themselves as civilised and therefore exploit­ – economically in terms of their labour but also sexually by taking and using their women – the tooks whom they see as non-civilised, their physical isolation is a graphic representation of their emotional and moral isolation, their selfish and self-chosen insularity.

All of this is possible only as long as the City and its inhabitants remain detached from the world through which they travel. As Helward puts it:

Survival on this world was a matter of initiative: on the grand scale, by hauling the city northwards away from that zone of amazing distortion behind us, and on the personal scale by deriving for oneself a pattern of life that was self-determined. (IW, p167)

But already that self-determination, that ‘evident discipline, the sense of purpose, and a real and vital understanding of their own identity’ (IW, p230), is starting to break down. The guilds, with their secret oaths and their sense of being special, are comparable with the sort of fascistic organisation that crops up elsewhere in Priest’s work, in Fugue for a Darkening Island and in The Quiet Woman for instance. But these can survive only as long as all their members are united in the same dream, and as long as they remain inviolate from the influences of an outside world. But on Earth City the sense of unity is already slipping. After attending a meeting of the Navigators, the city government, for instance, Helward concludes that ‘perhaps more guildsmen should attend the Navigators’ meetings’ (IW, p186), suggesting a declining commitment to the group even among the supposedly elite. And when the attack by the tooks opens part of the city to the sky so that even the restricted ordinary inhabitants can see the strange sun, it awakens a wave of protest and rebellion, led by Helward’s former wife, Victoria, who has already expressed her dissatisfactions with the restrictions of city life.

Nevertheless, Helward himself is totally committed to the enclosed world of the city, his experiences in the outside world have convinced him that the disciplined rituals of the guilds are the only possible response to ‘the hostile world that daily threatens our survival’ (IW, p180). And because his own response to the world is determined so totally by the group, his reaction when Elizabeth finally reveals that Earth City is still on Earth, that their distorted view of reality is a physical and psychological effect of the machinery that powers the city, is simply ‘despair’ (IW, p226). So much so, in fact, that he refuses to accept the real world as we perceive it. Our final glimpse of him has him thrashing in the Atlantic Ocean, convinced it is just a river that the city can cross. Like Winter in ‘Real-Time World’, he cannot leave his island because he can see only death outside it. Later, when Peter Sinclair crosses desperately between Jethra and London, unable to accept the non-reality of either, we see it as the breakdown of his own identity. And so it is now, Helward Mann cannot leave Earth City though it might mean death through the horrible distortions he has already witnessed, because to do so would be to abandon his identity which is even more terrible.

After Inverted World, Priest turned from artificial islands to what we might as well call real islands, real in the sense that they are bodies of land surrounded by water, though all are to some degree imaginary, and as they emerge from the dreams of their inhabitants, so they are tied even more closely to the wished-for identities of his characters. But before we consider the related creations of Wessex and the Dream Archipelago, it is worth turning back briefly to one other sea-girt island, Britain, as it appears in Fugue for a Darkening Island. In the early seventies the British catastrophe novel as established by writers such as John Wyndham and John Christopher (to both of whom Priest has acknowledged a debt) was enjoying a late flourish. The previous year M. John Harrison had published The Committed Men (1971), and shortly afterwards Richard Cowper would produce The Twilight of Briareus (1974), and Fugue seems to fit neatly within this pattern: helpless men move in a complex dance through a shattered landscape in which their helplessness, their inability to act, is part of the catastrophe.

In a way that would become characteristic of Priest’s work, he begins the novel by undermining our confidence in the identity of the narrator. The two opening paragraphs of the novel provide echoing descriptions of our narrator, Alan Whitman, but with strange and significant differences: ‘I have white skin… I have no political ambitions’ (Fugue for a Darkening Island [FDI], p5) the first tells us; ‘My skin is smudged with dirt… I do not think I have political ambitions’ (FDI, p5) we learn from the second. In a novel that deliberately eschews a straightforward chronological narrative we soon realise that this is our hero as the story opens and as it closes, so we see from the start how he is changed and how he stays the same. But at the same time the effect is to make us doubt, to establish from the start that this is no coherent and reliable figure. We will see the same undermining of identity right at the start of The Affirmation, and even Inverted World’s ‘I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles’ (IW, p11) tells us not to take Helward Mann’s identity in our own terms. So we have a shattered political climate reflected in a shattered narrative structure which in turn presages a shattering in the identity of our narrator. That our narrator is a comfortably middle class everyman, or at least an every-Englishman, only asks us to accept the shattering of his identity as the shattering of our own.

Again, as in Inverted World, we have an inviolable island whose grip on its own inward-turning reality is dislodged by an intrusion from a greater outside world, by the forced acceptance of a new consensus reality. The inward-turning nature of British reality prior to the ‘Afrim’ (African immigrant) invasion is represented by the largely off-stage rise of an extreme right-wing government. The lesson we will learn from the fascistic inventions of Gordon in The Quiet Woman is that fascism is equated by Priest with dislocation from reality, and so it is here. Whitman, drifting into an unsatisfactory marriage and an unsatisfactory career, has lost his way even before the first of the Afrims arrive, and so has his country. The war that follows, glimpsed only tangentially, appears to be a conventional one of national forces battling invaders, but is marked by disruption to national unity with individual streets barricaded and towns fortified. It is an abandonment of the moral values that might in other terms be considered a part of the national identity: ‘a small and vociferous section of the community … adhered to its moral principles, but more and more ordinary people were coming into direct conflict with the Afrims as the armed insurgence went on’ (FDI, p42). The whole country, in other words, is broken down into individuals fighting for their personal survival. The presence of United Nations personnel manning refugee camps suggests that the rest of the world has not reacted so violently to the influx of African refugees, but there is very little awareness of the rest of the world in this England.

Although the chronology of the novel is deliberately out of sequence, there is a clear dynamic towards greater isolation. Whitman successively loses his work, his home and his family; he leaves the refugee band when it starts to arm itself, but also rejects the seaside town which has managed to preserve old values; in the end he is left standing alone over the bodies of his wife and daughter. Like Wentik, he is cast away upon an island of his own making, for the failure that has destroyed his country is a direct consequence of his own failure. The fascist government that is the root cause of the disruption — ‘Everywhere [Afrims] caused social upheaval; but in Britain, where a neo-racist government had come to power on an economic-reform ticket, they did much more’ (FDI, p69) — has achieved power through an abdication of their social and cultural obligations by people like Whitman. His lack of commitment is described as ‘insularity’ (FDI, p44), of his marriage he says: ‘While we were living at our house we were able to disregard both the fact that our relationship was hypocritical and that the political situation of that period had an effect on us’ (FDI, p47), and even when his father dies ‘I tried unsuccessfully to feel more than a few minutes of regret’ (FDI, p53). When he describes one of the women with whom he has an affair as existing ‘in a kind of personal vacuum … living in but not belonging to our society’ (FDI, p105) we recognise that the description applies to him and to all around him. Each man is an island, and having abandoned society they have abandoned all that contributes towards their security and their identity.

In these early works, from Indoctrinaire through to Inverted World, insularity is seen in broad terms as an avoidance of social or political commitment. The Space Machine acts as a sort of entr’acte. Though not really an island novel, his central characters, Edward and Amelia might be seen as castaways upon Mars, where they are forced to engage politically with the revolutionary Martians while Edward learns to engage psychologically with the more sexually and socially liberated Amelia. From this point onwards, psychological and sexual engagement, and the issues of individual identity implicit in this, become a significant part of the political commitment that is a continuing theme in Priest’s work. Concomitant with this new focus was a new maturity in Priest’s writing, first evident in stories that sprang directly out of the writing of The Space Machine, ‘An Infinite Summer’ (1976) and ‘Palely Loitering’ (1978), but which was more fully expressed in his next novel, A Dream of Wessex.

One shift in attitude is immediately apparent. The near-future England in which the novel opens is undergoing a political upheaval reminiscent of Fugue for a Darkening Island. In the very first sentence we learn that ‘[t]he Tartan Army had planted a bomb at Heathrow’ (A Dream of Wessex [DW], p1) and travel about the country is disrupted by army checkpoints. But where Whitman in Fugue was expected to engage politically to hold together his disintegrating society, Julia Stretton in Wessex is allowed to escape into the personal and psychological commitment represented by the future island. Similarly in The Glamour there are terrorist disruptions to the body politic, and in that novel our viewpoint character, Gray, is appropriately a news cameraman, an observer of rather than a participant in the political scene, who escapes into invisibility.

The bomb at the start of Wessex is only a part of a world turned upside down. We also learn, for instance, that ‘now in July there had been reports of snow-flurries along the Yorkshire coast’ (DW, p1). In part, of course, this acts as a contrast with the endless summer of Wessex, though it also speaks of a disorder greater than any individual, no matter how politically engaged, could hope to change. Though, of course, Julia’s imaginative engagement within Wessex will eventually mend disorder of a similar scale.

Wessex Island is a projection from the minds of the volunteers of the Wessex Project, it is literally a concretisation of their identities, and because we see it mostly through Julia’s eyes it is primarily an expression of her identity. It is a place of contradictions: politically, for instance, Britain is now a repressive communist state while America is part of the austere Moslem world; yet Wessex Island is an international holiday destination popular with American tourists and a place of open-air cafes, casinos and casual nudity. In part, we can gather from this that old-style party politics are really irrelevant to the social healing represented by Wessex; in part, it simply emphasises that the island is a place apart.

Both Julia and, by inference, the island with which she is associated, ‘seemed degenerate and wanton, giving off an air of anarchy and irresponsibility’ (DW, p20). Much the same is discovered by Peter Sinclair when he reaches Muriseay: ‘The whole city was a new kind of sensation: a feeling of careless indifference to many things I took for granted … a teeming, shouting and colliding city, uneven and untidy, yet charged with life’ (A, p57). Both of these impressions of the island echo something John Fowles says in his island novel of psycho-sexual exploration, The Magus: ‘It was Greece again, the Alexandrian Greece of Cavafy; there were only degrees of aesthetic pleasure; of beauty in decadence. Morality was a North European lie.’ (p249) The Greek Islands, where Britain’s post-war generation shook off their repressions, were an ideal more than a real, a fantasy of liberation. And both Wessex and the Dream Archipelago are representations of the Greek Islands in their warmth, their aesthetic pleasures, their decadence. The specific identification of the Dream Archipelago with the Greek Islands comes later, in The Quiet Woman, when we learn that the old writer, Eleanor, is also Seri Fulton, the name of the woman who personifies the Dream Archipelago in The Affirmation, and that returning from Greece at the outset of war she had an affair with a man named Peter, we presume Peter Sinclair. Here, then, is an ideal setting for sexual liberty, for freedom and fulfilment, a place where Julia’s sexual happiness and the curious sexual experiments of the Dream Archipelago stories rightly seem to belong. But at the same time, it must be protected from the repressions that are being escaped. Hence, as a place apart, an island of desire, Wessex must remain inviolate, shut off to most visitors, a Grail whose achievement is itself a measure of some grace. So it is that, despite David Harkman’s ‘instinctive knowledge that Wessex was a spiritual and emotional home’ (DW, p23), it had seemed ‘a part of the world as unreachable from London as the Presidential Palace in Riyadh’ (DW, p22). The Dream Archipelago, similarly, would be a place where access is restricted, where only the fortunate can enter, and which, like the Planalto, can be entered but not left.

Thus enclosed, protected as much as isolated by the sea that surrounds it, Wessex ‘had a hypnotic quality of peace and security, an ordered languor; it was a restful, secure place... Wessex, tourist island in an imagined future, became the ultimate escapist fantasy, a bolt-hole from reality.’ (DW, p78) To the participants, Wessex comes to seem real, and the world they have fled is shadowy:

Although they were sometimes accused of running away from the real world, the fact was that once they had lived in Wessex the participants became distanced from real life, and there was no need to hide from something insubstantial. (DW, p95)

Into this protected world intrudes Paul Mason, Julia’s manipulative and destructive former lover. Paul is portrayed as intrusive from the first moment we see him. When Julia runs into him at Wessex House ‘it was like the breach of a sanctuary’ (DW, p1) and ‘he had the ability to invade her life’ (DW, p2). If Priest’s books, politically, are about engagement, then in Julia and David we have people who engage with their world, even if it is a world they have created from their own imaginations; but in Paul we have someone who does not engage, but who tries to make the world, any world, over in his own image. Like Niall in The Glamour who sees invisibility as a means of denying the morality of the world (to the extent that he can engage in an invisible rape of Susan), so Paul sees Wessex as a way of twisting the world (and Julia in particular) to his own moral rules. For Julia and David, Wessex is not a perfect place: David is caught up in a dull, grey bureaucracy in Dorchester; Julia is locked in a loveless sexual relationship. Nevertheless, it is a place they can make better through their own personal engagement, such that on their first encounter David feels ‘a need to stay with her, a need to talk and make some kind of contact.’ (DW, p41) Paul, on the other hand, stands for ‘the destruction of her pride, of her sense of identity, of her self-respect’ (DW, p66), and when he does finally breach the sanctuary and enter Wessex he turns this destruction of identity into a destruction of the refuge and the hope that the island represents.

The changes that Paul brings to the island are signalled by a change in the weather. The summer idyll, a fragment of the Mediterranean relocated in southern England, is replaced by cold and wind and rain, noticeably similar to the unpleasant weather Julia had left in her present at the beginning of the book. Paul is symbolically bringing all the ills of the present, including the psycho-sexual ills of his relationship with Julia, into the idealised island escape of the future. The change in climate is followed by a change in the purpose and character of Wessex, the warm holiday retreat is replaced by an unwelcoming and environmentally heedless industrialisation: ‘The smoke from the oil-refinery poured over the town, dark and depressing and greasy’ (DW, p143). When Julia and David triumph in the end the oil refineries and factory chimneys disappear from the view, sunshine returns. This is not only a restoration of the Wessex of their original idyll, but a healing as great in its way as if Julia had been able to correct the unseasonal weather that opens the novel. It signals the completeness of their engagement with each other and with their world.

She had ceased to be an organic part of the real world from the day she had first entered the projection. She belonged to the future; life could never again be stable except in the Wessex of her mind. (DW, p174)

Whether it is now a projection of their imaginations or reality is irrelevant, such distinctions have been removed. ‘It would be real, or real-seeming. It made no difference. It would be as it was, or as she expected it to be … and it therefore was of no importance’ (DW, p179).

This question of the reality of Wessex is, of course, important in any consideration of the island as a representation of the identity of the characters. When one of the participants is out of the projector they leave a doppelganger in Wessex, like a bookmark preserving their place in the story of the island. This persona is shadowy, so that when David continues his romance with Julia’s doppelganger ‘he did not experience her. He remembered her into existence’ (DW, p119) but when she returns to the projection ‘[r]eality began at this instant, at every instant, and the past became false’ (DW, p124). How real the world is depends on how thoroughly one is engaged with it. Significantly, mirrors are used to recall people from the projection, you see yourself and hence see where you belong; but the mirrors do not work on David, he sees himself and knows himself in Wessex. He is so thoroughly engaged with this world that it is no longer a projection, it has become his reality, an echo of what we will later see in the shift to virtual reality in The Extremes.

Then David discovers a newspaper article. It is important to note the role that texts play in Priest’s work. Only the fictional work, The Affirmation, in his story ‘The Negation’, unequivocally reveals the truth about the world. Every non-fiction, from Destaine’s Directive in Inverted World to the various texts that make up The Separation, may seem to state a simple fact about the world but actually serves to undermine our notion of what is reality. As Peter Sinclair says in The Affirmation:

If I could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception. (A, p1)

So it is with the clipping David finds in which the project is described thus: ‘we are imagining a future world, which is made palpable to us by the Ridpath projector’ (DW, p138). The photographs of himself and Julia accompanying the article force David to confront what Helward Mann has already faced in Inverted World, and that other of Priest’s protagonists will also face: the fact that his reality may be a creation. It is notable that it is only after this discovery, after David’s faith in his world is shaken, that the degradation of Wessex that marks Paul’s assault on the identity of Julia and of David, begins to be noticeable.

When Paul inverts this world, sending the participants back through the Ridpath projector, they emerge severely damaged. ‘The loss of memory was like the loss they all experienced inside the projection: a total severance from their real lives’ (DW, p177). Only Julia emerges intact because, through her love for David, she is now grounded in the reality of Wessex. And it is the strength of this engagement with each other and with the world that allows them to overcome Paul and remake Wessex.

At the end of A Dream of Wessex, as Julia and David possess their newly remade world, there is a lingering question about its status: ‘Where was the present from which Wessex was being projected? Were they the same … or was the system now closed?’ (DW, p188) Priest has created a loop, the real world feeds into the dream, the dream world feeds into the real, engagement with another equates with engagement with the world. This turn in the mobius strip which makes it impossible to tell where one reality ends and another begins is a pattern that will become familiar in the ending of books such as The Extremes and The Separation and especially in The Affirmation.

In many ways it seems that A Dream of Wessex set a pattern, or rather a series of patterns, which have been further explored and elaborated in the novels that followed. The triangular relationship between Julia, David and Paul, for instance, is repeated in The Glamour, and echoed also in The Extremes and The Separation. More significantly, as is evidenced from the way that references to The Affirmation have wound themselves inextricably through this discussion of A Dream of Wessex, is the way Wessex would transform into the Dream Archipelago.

The Dream Archipelago, the setting for some of the most darkly unsettling of Priest’s fictions, first appeared in a series of four stories published in 1978, the year after Wessex. A fifth story, ‘The Miraculous Cairn’, appeared in Granta in 1980 as part of the promotion of the Best of Young British Writers in which Priest was featured. These stories were all slightly revised for the collection The Dream Archipelago in 1999, with a brief scene-setting piece, ‘The Equatorial Moment’, added. A further novelette, ‘The Discharge’, was published in France in 2000 and subsequently appeared in an English version. Each of these stories, along with Priest’s novel The Affirmation, appears to share the same geographical setting: the archipelago is always an innumerable swathe of islands that girdle the equator, so many that there are always several other islands visible from whichever island you are on; they separate a technologically sophisticated northern continent whose nations are involved in a seemingly endless war, from a barren southern continent where the war is fought (the North Africa campaign of the Second World War seems to be the model here); the northern city of Jethra and various islands such as Muriseay recur. Yet for all these repetitions, the infinitude of islands seems to be deliberately exploited to allow an infinitude of settings. The religious institution in ‘The Miraculous Cairn’ does not cohere with the funeral rites of ‘The Cremation’, whose sexual predation is very different from the sexual predation of ‘Whores’, while the refuge to soldiers in that latter story seems a world away from the refuge to civilians offered in ‘The Watched’. And so it goes; what really ties these stories together is their insularity, the island setting allows Priest to separate his protagonists from the familiarity of their world and cast them away in a place where their own darker imaginings come to haunt them. Where the Dream Archipelago resembles Wessex is in its evocation of Greece, a realm of sunshine, of moral and sexual liberty. But where this liberty allowed David and Julia to discover love, freedom and escape, these self-same liberties in the Dream Archipelago lead to nightmare as the various protagonists discover that freedom on their terms means freedom on other people’s terms also, and they are not equipped to cope with that.

It is notable that the main point of ‘The Equatorial Moment’ is to point up a curious temporal effect experienced by those flying over the archipelago (most of the minor changes made to the stories for The Dream Archipelago introduce passing references to this effect). In other words, like the Planalto in Indoctrinaire and the observatory in ‘Real-Time World’, the Dream Archipelago is isolated not just by the sea and by the forced neutrality of war but also by time.

With a sense of future removed the past became irrelevant and those who came to the Archipelago, choosing the permanence of neutrality, made a conscious decision to abandon their former lives. (DA, p191)

In fact, the isolation of those who visit the islands is stressed all through these stories. In the stories of Moylita Kaine in ‘The Negation’ it is a place of walls. Graian Sheeld in ‘The Cremation’ finds ‘a sheltered, oppressive place’ (DA, p73) where everything is exotic and difficult and ‘[h]e felt isolated and cast adrift in the islands’ (DA, p72). This is partly a cultural effect; Alanya’s frank stories ‘only helped to cut him off further from the other guests’ (DA, p76) so that in the end Sheeld becomes the victim of ‘the general paralysis of his culture shock and social alienation’ (DA, p78).

The islands are places of allure only to those who have not been there (Dik in ‘The Negation’), but to those who do go there they become places of mystery, of inexplicable threat, of alienation. But it is an alienation that cannot be escaped: the law says that those who move to the islands cannot return, and in fact they offer no opportunity to return for there will always be some new seduction that leads on to the grave. Even if you get back to Jethra, as the narrator in ‘The Mysterious Cairn’ does, some lotus-eating experience will have changed you forever. Significantly, as islands always reflect the identity of Priest’s characters, those who seek out the islands do so to escape a troubled life, and bring their trouble with them amplified by the magic of the islands. Graian Sheeld, for instance, is fleeing ‘the mounting confusion and emotional fall-out’ (DA, p88) caused by his infidelities. It is fitting, therefore, that what he finds in the islands is a sexually predatory woman who becomes implicit in his gruesome death. While Yvann Ordier, in ‘The Watched’, leaves behind his involvement with the microscopic spying devices known as scintillas, only to find himself emotionally trapped by his own voyeurism which leads eventually to him taking the place of the one he was watching.

The narrator of ‘The Miraculous Cairn’ is typical, seeing the Dream Archipelago at once as a place of escape and of retribution. A sexually nervous middle-aged teacher – we discover only at the mid-point of the story that she is female and a lesbian – revisits the island of Seevl where, as a teenager, she had her first sexual encounter. As a child, even though she knew the island, she half-shared the popular impression that:

Seevl was populated by bogeymen and creeping horrors, while the actual landscape was thought to be a nightmare terrain of crevasses and volcanic pools, sulphurous mists, steaming craters and shifting rocks (DA, p117).

Curiously, the nightmare is not far from what she actually discovers there. Led on by a carefree older girl, her first sexual encounter is unconsummated, but marked by an extraordinary incident in which her arm is caught in the jaws of a monstrous beast she never sees, and when she escapes its bite she finds it has left no mark on her flesh. Now, years later, she discovers that the ruined tower in which this strangely formative experience occurred does not actually exist. The island, like that childhood nightmare, is a place of psycho-sexual terror where fears of one’s sexuality are externalised and turned into creatures of irrational punishment. And in that, as invariably occurs within Priest’s fiction, lies the key to her identity, or lack of it.

Everything I am, that I have been as an adult, began here at the seminary. I gained my identity here. If I hadn’t come back I would still feel that I had that identity, but now it’s gone. I am not sure of anything. (DA, p184)

The result is the existential doubt that marks so many of Priest’s characters, and which we will encounter most notably in Peter Sinclair. And as with Sinclair, that doubt is identified with the islands.

Sinclair starts out with certainties, the clearest way of recognising that his identity is made up of uncertainties:

This much I know for sure:

   My name is Peter Sinclair, I am English and I am, or I was, twenty-nine years old. Already there is an uncertainty, and my sureness recedes. Age is a variable; I am no longer twenty-nine. (A, p1)

It is a litany that calls to mind Whitman’s statement of identity at the beginning of Fugue, and in exactly the same way it prefigures doubts, hesitations and a profound remaking of who Peter Sinclair is. (The other Peter Sinclair, writing a parallel narrative in the Dream Archipelago, will later have the same hesitation at Lotterie-Collago when he claims to be 29 though the records state he is 31.) At this point Peter’s life is breaking apart. How much is his fault we are never entirely sure, but we know he loses his job, his girlfriend and his father in short order. When a friend of his father offers him a cottage in the country he deliberately cuts himself off from what remains of his life: ‘I wanted to be unencumbered after my move’ (A, p8). This is a deliberate isolation from reality: ‘in London I had been extensively aware of the world … [N]ow I was cut off from all that’ (A, p11). This is exactly the loss of news experienced by the scientists in ‘Real-Time World’, but in this more sophisticated working out of the Tolneuve Theory there is no guarantee that Sinclair will follow the same bell curve. His loss of identity quickly becomes apparent: ‘One day I looked in the bloom-spotted mirror in the kitchen and saw the familiar face staring back at me, but I could not identify it with anything I knew of myself’ (A, p13). The mirror which reaffirmed the real identity of the inhabitants of Wessex clearly does not work here.

To reclaim his identity, therefore, Peter Sinclair starts to write his autobiography. When Julia is brought back into a recursive present in A Dream of Wessex, the event which destroys the mind of her fellow participants, she is able to retain her grip on reality and hence defy Paul by clinging onto the reality of her memories of Wessex and of David. Similarly, Sinclair now decides ‘I could only regain my sense of identity through my memories’ (A, p14). Looking upon his autobiography he declares: ‘I had imagined myself into existence’ (A, p15) and later, as his manuscript changes through the invention of the Dream Archipelago and ‘to achieve total truth I must create total falsehood’ (A, p23): ‘I had found myself, explained myself, and in a very personal sense of the word I had defined myself’ (A, p25). These islands ‘represented a form of wish, or of escape’ (A, p24), but they are also the metaphor that he lives. This is surely what Helward Mann is doing in Inverted World and David and Julia in Wessex, living a metaphor; and the metaphor is an island separated from mundane reality. But the island of release, of identity, of escape, also implies a mainland, and the mainland is the place of confusion and anarchy, but also the place of connection and reality. In Inverted World and Wessex and The Extremes, even back in Indoctrinaire and ‘Real-Time World’, the protagonists turn their backs on reality and find escape in the dream island. But they do so at a cost, which may be isolation or madness or even non-existence (Wessex, The Extremes) which is what madness and isolation amount to. In The Affirmation we discover the madness and isolation early in the way Sinclair splits his reality even while still wholly in this world.

Charged by the owners of the cottage to redecorate it, Sinclair realises that ‘[t]o visualize the rooms newly painted, made clean and tidy, was in a sense half the work already done’ (A, p12), and from that moment we are unsure if what we are told is real or only what he imagines. Then his sister, Felicity, visits, and having exclaimed about the filthiness of this supposedly pristine cottage, begins to wash up.

‘Is there no hot water?’

‘Yes … it’s hot.’ I could see the steam cascading around her arms. (A, p30)

But this doubling of reality is not a problem for Sinclair, it was ‘Felicity’s failure, not mine. She was perceiving it wrongly’ (A, p33).

Throughout it all – the breakdown in the cottage, the enforced stay with Felicity, renewed contact with his suicidal girlfriend, Gracia – Sinclair clings to his manuscript which tells of Peter Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago. Meanwhile Peter Sinclair sets sail among the islands of the Dream Archipelago carrying a manuscript he wrote two years before during a long summer in the country while he had been unemployed. This manuscript, we will eventually discover, tells of a Peter Sinclair who lives in the imaginary city of London. Only the fact that The Affirmation opens in London gives Peter Sinclair the Londoner any precedence over the Jethran Peter Sinclair: each invents the other, and either or neither could be real. The Jethran Sinclair is travelling to claim a prize he won in a lottery, athanasia treatment, which will give him prolonged life. Just as there has been a consistent temporal element in the island settings Priest has created from Indoctrinaire to the Dream Archipelago stories, this treatment too is a way of isolating Sinclair in time: ‘My friends, my family, would move on into biological future, while I would be fixed, or petrified’ (A, p83). The symbolism of this is emphasised when Sinclair and Seri visit a village where objects are left in running water to become petrified, an event echoed in this world when Sinclair goes with Felicity’s family to visit Castleton in the Peak District where there is a ‘pool which could turn things to stone’ (A, p88). As a result of one visit Sinclair and Seri become lovers, as a result of the other Sinclair and Gracia are reunited.

When Sinclair leaves Sheffield to move back to London and Gracia:

I was moving from one island to another. Beside me was Seri, behind me were Kalia and Yallow. Through them I could discover myself in the glowing landscape of the mind. I felt that at last I saw a way to free myself from the confinements of the page. There were now two realities, and each explained the other. (A, p100)

This is as potent a statement as can be found of the role islands play in Priest’s fiction. Islands are the ‘glowing landscape of the mind’, the second of two realities that Priest’s protagonists inhabit. But because the two realities, islands and the mainland, as it were, each explain the other, they cannot be independent; there must be movement each way. (It is noticeable how often there is an interdiction on travel between the worlds, from the supposed temporal dislocation of ‘Real-Time World’ to the restrictions on movement in Fugue and the Dream Archipelago stories.) Each reality is necessary: in the island of the imagination is to be found individual identity; in the mainland of the outside world is social, political and cultural connection. Alone, the island is a place of madness; alone, the mainland is a place of anarchy and turmoil. Too often, however, Priest’s protagonists choose one world over the next. Sinclair, in this brief moment of self-knowledge, might recognise that ‘through them I could discover myself’, but he makes no discoveries ‘through them’. He might wish to free himself ‘from the confinements of the page’, but that is something he will prove unable to do. Indeed, as The Affirmation ends with the same broken sentence that Sinclair’s manuscript has twice reached, there is a recursion that turns us back, glancingly at an odd angle, into the novel. Neither Sinclair nor the reader can, in the end, escape the page; quite the opposite, when Sinclair is asked to write his life story as part of the athanasia treatment it is ‘so that afterwards I could be made into the words I had written’ (A, p117). Reality is trapped within the novel as it is also in The Prestige and The Separation. Though as Seri tells Sinclair towards the end of the novel, ‘There’s no such thing as truth. You are living by your manuscript, and everything in it is false’ (A, p208).

What happens throughout the second half of The Affirmation is a progressive breaking down of the walls that separate the two worlds of the imagination. Mostly this revolves round the character of Seri/Gracia, with each Peter Sinclair finding it increasingly difficult to know which was which. ‘I knew that Seri must be more than a fictional analogue of Gracia. She was too real, too complete, too motivated by her own personality,’ (A, p143) as Sinclair acknowledges. After which, Seri and Gracia change places during lovemaking, a scene uncomfortably reminiscent of the invisible rape in The Glamour. Later, as each Sinclair moves restlessly between London and Jethra without really connecting with either, Seri becomes specifically linked to the islands: ‘To her, each island represented a different facet of her personality, each one vested in her a sense of identity. She was incomplete without islands, she was spread across the sea’ (A, p183). Seri has become the Dream Archipelago. Sinclair had hoped to find his own identity within the islands, but finds only the identity of his girlfriend, or the avatar of his girlfriend; and in the end he is unable to commit himself to her. His final abandonment of Gracia/Seri, which leaves the novel uncompleted, is also his abandonment of the islands and hence of his own identity. He had been promised: ‘For you, the islands will be a redemption’ (A, p150), but there can be no redemption now. He has turned back into the words on the page, into an imagination that does not connect with reality. That is to abandon the world.

Others will follow this trajectory to more or less the same effect, Niall in The Glamour, Angier in The Prestige, Teresa in The Extremes. They follow routes that involve duplicates of themselves, as Peter Sinclair’s duplication is echoed by Borden in The Prestige and by J.L. Sawyer in The Separation. It is a route that takes them away from the world, into islands of invisibility or virtual reality or alternate worlds. Again and again Priest follows his protagonists on their journeys into the islands, whether it be the Planalto or Earth City, Wessex or the Dream Archipelago. Sometimes they might find their identity there, as David and Julia did in A Dream of Wessex; sometimes they might lose it, as Peter Sinclair does. Conflating Seri with the islands of the Dream Archipelago, Sinclair recognises at one point: ‘She offered only escape … but escape from, not to, so there was nothing to replace what I left behind’ (A, p186). Though the focus may be on the escape, Christopher Priest’s island stories are always really about what is left behind.