The Prestige

Christopher Priest's The Prestige is a mysterious thriller set in the late 19th century England, at a time when the popularity of magicians was on the rise. The heart of the story is the rivalry between two magicians, a rivalry that lasts their whole lives and expands to affect their professional careers. The form of the book is that of memoirs written by the two magicians and their descendants in the present day.

In the opening, a young man named Nicholas Borden tells about how he has always felt he had a twin brother out there somewhere. He could sense his brother even though he had always known that he was a single child and all evidence of his birth showed that he had no siblings. When he is sent on assignment as a journalist, he meets a woman named Kate Angier who tells him that she has information about his past. He learns that his great grandfather was Alfred Borden and her great grandfather was Rupert Angier, and that the two men had had a great rivalry over a hundred years earlier.

The story follows in Alfred Borden's memoir. Borden is the son of a cabinet maker and learns the family trade, which helps him make devices for his magical acts. He is an acute student of the art of magic. He assumes the stage name Le Professeur de Magie. Borden discovers that there are unsavory magicians who are holding seances and using magic tricks to fool bereaved families. He sneaks into one such seance and disrupts it, exposing the medium as a fraud. The medium is Rupert Angier, and this starts the bitter feud that will entangle their careers. With the clever use of the form, we do not discover until we read Angier's account why the episode had enraged him so much.

Borden's big trick for his finale is The Transported Man. It is an act where he closes himself into a large cabinet and then immediately steps out of one across the stage. When Angier sees it, he cannot figure it out, and this drives him to distraction. Angier is a premier showman, but he cannot always figure out how magic tricks work, depending on the help of others. The conflict between the two men drives the story, particularly Angier's obsession with Borden's secret.

Angier's memoir follows Borden's, and we learn the other side of the picture. Angier's family is wealthy, though his older brother stands to inherit the estate. He tells of his attempts to disrupt Borden's shows due to his anger, but also his fascination with Borden's tricks. The obsession leads to an affair and the breakup of his marriage. When his mistress tires of him, she tells him she will leave him but give him one last gift, the secret of Borden's trick. When she hands him the note, it has one word on it: Tesla. Thus Angier goes to America to entreat Nikola Tesla to help him create a great trick to match Borden's.

The theme of twins is a critical part of the novel. In addition to Nicholas, there is the question of Alfred Borden's secret. Is Borden's magic trick so all encompassing that he has changed his whole life to make it succeed? And when Angier receives his magic device, there comes the haunting effects of doubling that he must deal with. (I have seen the movie and it is great; though the book is a little different it is also great.) The mystery deepens and gets darker throughout the memoirs. It is truly haunting when you realize what Angier means by the prestige materials. The final section, narrated by Nicholas as he descends to the Angier crypt, is chilling even as it ties his life to that of his ancestor. The mystery of the magicians' secrets makes for an exciting story. A-

Kraken

China Mieville's books feature the city as a force with a life and intelligence of its own. In The City and the City, the city is split in two and the citizens live their lives in careful apprehension of each other. In Un Lun Dun, the city is a whimsical and dangerous inverted version of London. In Perdido Street Station, the city is a mystical and dark London analogue with assorted dangerous creatures. Mieville is a master of urban fantasy.

In Kraken the city is London. This version of London is full of magical creatures and wizards lurking behind the scenes. There are Londonmancers, mages who work magic with the essence of London. They can turn the stuff of London into other useful items, and are attached to the city. There is Wati, a spirit that can inhabit inanimate humanoid forms, and who is a union boss of the city's familiars. And there are many various cults, including the Kraken cult.

Billy Harrow is a curator and master preserver at a natural history museum called the Darwin Centre. His specialty is preserving remains, and his biggest accomplishment is preserving a giant squid in a large glass tank. But things go wrong when the squid disappears one day, apparently vanishing from its storage room. The police are clueless, except for a special team that investigates odd and occult crimes. After a dead body is found at the museum and two dark strangers appear in Billy's flat, Billy ends up joining forces with Dane. Dane is one of the museum's guards and a devotee of the Kraken cult.

The situation gets weirder and darker. The kraken church leaders insist that Billy is important to their religion and must have some hidden knowledge, but he insists he doesn't know what they're talking about. Meanwhile Collingswood, one of the police detectives, is trying to track down Billy and keep him out of trouble. It turns out there are no serious suspects for the theft of the kraken. However everyone thinks that it has to do with an impending apocalypse, and not just your garden variety apocalypse that cults claim every week but a real and final one.

Dane helps Billy escape from the Kraken church, becoming a bit of an outlaw along the way. They try to track down clues to who might have stolen the kraken and why Billy is important. On the way they get help from Wati, who is a friend of Dane's. They find themselves in the middle of a battle between Grisamentum, an underworld boss believed to be dead, and the Tattoo, an animate ink drawing cursed to live on a victim's back.

The story starts off a bit slow and confusing, but picks up steam and gets very interesting about a third of the way through. Billy starts off as a timid character, mostly a two-dimensional character who is just part of the plot. However by the middle of the story he starts to grasp what is going on around him. With the help of Londonmancers, he sends a message through the city to his friend's girlfriend Marge, who receives the message as a blinking light. From here Billy makes sense of the city and puts it to his own use, making decisions and coming to his own conclusions. With the help of Dane and their otherworldly allies, they try to find the Kraken and avert the apocalypse. The magical characters are all fascinating. The cooperation and fights are compelling. Even with the slow start, the book is a fun read. B+

Un Lun Dun

China Mieville's Un Lun Dun is a light fantasy novel in stark contrast to his fabulous but dark Perdido Street Station. Two young girls find a way into an alternate version of London called UnLondon, where one, Zanna, is declared to be the chosen one who will save the city from the Smog. Zanna and her friend Deeba encounter all sorts of fabulous people and things, such as a boy who is half-ghost and a bus conductor who also conducts electricity. The story has a lot to owe to J. K. Rowling, but in many ways it is more inventive. One way it is different is that Deeba turns out to be a strong and determined central character.

Zanna and Deeba find their way to a bridge that can touch any street in the city and meet the Propheseers, people who are trying to figure out how to beat the Smog by interpreting the Book. However it soon becomes apparent that the Book doesn't know what it's talking about when Zanna becomes incapacitated. A man named Brokkenbroll who calls himself the Unbrellissimo because he controls unbrellas (umbrellas that have become broken, gone to UnLondon and turned somewhat sentient) promises to save Zanna and UnLondon by making a wary truce with the Smog. However after Deeba gets Zanna home and makes sure she is OK, Deeba realizes that Zanna doesn't remember anything and starts to worry about what's really going on in UnLondon.

Deeba uses clues from a page of the Book that it told her to rip out to climb the bookcases at a library, and ends up back in UnLondon. There she finds that the Smog has been taking over the city and realizes that Brokkenbroll is in league with the Smog, who is impersonating a scientist by filling a bag of skin with smoke. Deeba faces a steep battle proving to the Propheseers and others that they are being betrayed, and finding a way to complete the prophecy in the Book despite not being the Chosen One.

The world created by Mieville is very enchanting. Just about everything is sentient to some degree. He plays with the conventions of the formula, having the Chosen One get switched around, and when Deeba decides to skip most of the prophecy and go to the final goal. I enjoyed following Deeba, a creative and resourceful heroine. The book is light fun and an easy read. It's not as gripping and though-provoking as the last book I read by him, but it was still enjoyable. B

Drood

Drood is an historical novel by Dan Simmons that builds on the last few years of the life of Charles Dickens and a terrible accident he survived in 1865 in a train wreck. Dickens part of The Mystery of Edwin Drood before he died, and Simmons draws from the same elements of opium, dark underworlds and mesmerism.

The narrator is Wilkie Collins, a writer and sometimes collaborator with Dickens who is a little younger than the esteemed author. Collins is clearly in awe of Dickens and yet full of jealousy. He also suffers from gout and is a liberal user of laudanum (liquid opium) to help his pain. After the train accident, Dickens tells Collins about his encounter at the scene with a mysterious man named Drood. The two of them enlist the help of private detectives to lead them to the underworld beneath London's catacombs. There they find a hidden Chinese opium den that Collins begins to frequent. And Dickens is taken away by two mysterious men to visit Drood alone.

Collins plays cat and mouse with Dickens for a long time on the subject of Drood. He is hesitant to bring it up directly for fear that Dickens will dismiss the subject as mere fantasy, the ramblings of writers inventing creative plots. Collins has his own demons to deal with, including a mysterious green woman who terrorizes him. He also has a double, "the other Wilkie", who appears to him at times. In a central scene in the middle of the book, Drood kidnaps Collins, plants a scarab in his brain, and orders him to write Drood's biography. The other Wilkie begins to write down Collins's text, and Collins discovers that what he's writing is not his own invention but fabulous tales of the Egyptian occult. The interaction of Collins with his double is one of the more fascinating parts of the narrative, giving it a good Gothic ghost story feel. It also strengthens the theory that Collins's narrative is all a part of his delusion.

Collins is a terrible misanthrope, not only visiting a mistress but also kicking out his kept woman after he comes to believe she's interested in another man. He ignores her letters of the abuse she suffers until the final passages of the book. He comes to believe that Dickens has murdered a young man named Dickinson in order to free himself of Drood's scarab, but then he sees Dickinson as part of Drood's cabal. As his mind starts to deteriorate, he takes more and more laudanum, and the value of his take on events becomes more and more questionable.

Simmons does a good job weaving a tale of the occult and mesmerism and making it ambiguous. The story could be an eerie ghost story or a tale of a man's descent into addition and insanity. Collins's jealousy becomes the background for mysterious happenings, all centered around Dickens.

I thought that much of the novel was a little slow and felt like a travelogue. The description of Collins watching one of Dickens's public readings and discovering Drood standing in his place is fascinating, but we don't really need more extensive descriptions of the readings. Simmons goes into much detail about Collins's daily life and how he tracks Dickens, but eventually it gets to be a bit tedious. The best parts are Collins's interactions with Drood or the private detectives. I think the passage where Collins and Dickens discuss the plot of The Mystery of Edwin Drood and argue over the best ending is one of the best parts of the novel. Despite the slow parts, the story is both exciting and at times unnerving. B+