realthog

When I started this thing I said I wasn't planning to write reviews of the books as I read them, yet that's exactly what I've ended up doing -- not formal reviews, to be sure, but review-like prose items, as they'd doubtless be labeled should you see them in a supermarket. In the case of book #7, though, I don't want even to do that. It's a book I want to let slosh around in my mind for a while. I finished it a couple of days ago, and still haven't properly absorbed it.

The book's the novel The Separation (2002), by Christopher Priest. It's set in the real World War II as well as an alternative version that ended (at least for Britain and Germany) in a truce signed by Churchill and Hess in 1941. That last sentence oversimplifies, making The Separation seem like a standard two-timelines or alternate-history novel. It isn't. Both the supposed main "stories" have trees of internal inconsistencies, as do the worldviews of the two central characters: identical twins Joe and Jack Sawyer, the former a pacifist and the latter an enthusiastically loyal pilot in RAF Bomber Command, the part of the British war effort that can most convincingly be accused of having committed war crimes. Thus we see not just two timelines but braided representatives of an infinite (one assumes) number.

Joe and Jack are not the only sets of twins involved. Churchill has a stand-in for public appearances; in one of the versions of history recounted here, it's a fake Hess who reaches Britain in that famously doomed mission to negotiate peace; there are even two versions of the Me-110 that Hess flew to Britain on that mission.

As always with Priest, the writing's masterful and the narrative totally engrossing -- I was awake with it 'til the small hours two nights in a row. (Unusually for Priest, though, every now and then -- perhaps half a dozen times all told -- there's a little blip in the writing, a trivial "wince moment". Odd.) He's obviously conducted colossal amounts of research: my skin crawled with the wartime ambience he manages to create, and the experiential vividness of the bomber raids. If he'd written a straightforward historical novel about WWII, I'm sure it'd have been in line for something like the Booker. (In fact, The Separation won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award. It might have won a few more sf awards had it not had such a troubled publishing history. I don't know the details of that troubled publishing history, just that the book had one.)

So much for the basics.

Where I'm stumbling is in connection with the book's meaning. I'm assuming that the two characters embodied in Jack and Joe represent, in addition to their narrative function, the philosophical dichotomy with which the events of WWII confront almost all of us, in which allegorical context the trees of internal inconsistencies I mentioned could represent the fact that neither of the relevant philosophical extremes -- pacifistic or martial -- can offer a complete "explanation" to cope with the vast human tragedy that this war, including the Holocaust, was. Or perhaps what the book's saying is that our histories are merely the best stories we can construct out of flows of events that often are inconsistent with each other, that are genuinely mutually contradictory and thus, according to the "common sense" we're addicted to as an explanation for our environment, are "impossible". Or . . .

I don't know, which is why I'm not attempting to review the The Separation, instead just burbling a few random thoughts. In a few months' time, I'll maybe read it again to see if I can clarify things for myself a bit; or perhaps by then I'll have "solved" the book (in which case I may reread it just for the pleasure). Anything by Priest is better than 99.5% of the rest of the stuff on offer, so obviously I'd recommend this book. It's caused me more thought than any other novel I've read for quite some while.