Gollancz, 2020, 318p.

This is the latest of the author’s forays into the world of the Dream Archipelago which he first brought to our attention in 1981 in The Affirmation. Like our own world, it has changed somewhat in the years since that first appearance. Its invention does though give the author an opportunity to comment on our world while still providing an element of skew. His imagined world is familiar but always perceptibly different from our own.

This slipperiness is not confined to the Dream Archipelago. In most of Priest’s works things tend to be numinous. Appearances can be deceptive, or alter; but in the Dream Archipelago that is literally so. In some locations more than others something called mutability affects the topography but in a way such that afterwards it is just accepted and no-one comments on the change. It is almost as if that change has never been. Later Fremde tells us, “Money and high finance were a system of belief.” And adds that the onset of mutability was a belief system similar to high finance. The events were real, but afterwards only the results counted, so that no one believed the process had really happened; they became abstract.

In many ways reading a Priest novel is exactly like that. Something has happened. You are no longer where you were when you started yet the mechanism of getting there remains obscure. It is a neat trick to pull off but Priest’s glides between realities can be all but seamless.

In The Evidence viewpoint character Todd Fremde lives with his partner Jo Delson on the Salay Islands, a group containing five main landmasses, Salay Ewell, Sekonda, Tielet, Raba and Hames, each of which are always referred to in speech as “the island” followed by its ordinal number. For example “Salay Tielet, the third.” Fremde is a writer of crime fiction who has been invited to the northern University of Dearth to give a lecture on “The Role of the Modern Crime Novel in a Crime-Free Society” (which Dearth claims to be,) necessitating an air journey and a long rail trip. His welcome is odd, the instructions for his hotel key cards even more so. One is relatively normal, the other a mutability safeguard. Moreover, everything in his room is to be switched off whenever he leaves. This minor aspect of the novel is an illustration of mutability but is an adjunct to the main narrative. Here it is almost as if Priest is demonstrating his ability to conjure up such concepts, not quite backgrounding for the sake of it, but showing us his world-building. In this regard the society of the Dream Archipelago is structured along feudal lines (but not absolutely rigidly so: for instance here there is no restriction on travel.) Its inhabitants are characterised as Serf, Citizen Serf, Villein, Squire, Vassal, Corvée Provider, Cartage Provider, Demesne Landed, Knight, Manorial Landed, Baron, Seignior. Most of the time this makes no impact on the story.

In Dearth, Fremde is waylaid by one Frejah Harsent, with a tale of a murder – or two – in Salay. Despite himself Fremde is drawn into the who, how, what and why of those crimes. However, a fair part of the text constitutes a disquisition on the purposes and practice of the crime novel and the lot of the novelist. With particular reference to the peculiarities of the Dream Archipelago, Priest, through Fremde, treats us to thoughts such as “All writers are serfs,” and “Writers never fit into a social system,” but “No one tells me when to work, how to work, what I should write in my books, where I might travel.” At one point we even have Harsent give to him “the suggestion novelists never have an answer for, and try to avoid at all costs,” an idea for a story. He tells her, “Story is seen as unique to each novel,” and “people want stories to work properly … to give a kind of satisfaction,” not to be messy or unresolved as in real life. It is perhaps here that we are being prepared for a diversion from that template as, later, Priest appears to toy with the idea of the narrator becoming the victim only to draw back.

Priest’s work can be full of echoes. The Prestige focused on a rivalry between stage magicians. In The Evidence part of Fremde’s investigation involves the demise of another such entertainer and we are shown the mechanics of how one of his illusions worked.

In Priest’s worlds nothing is simple yet while having a certain kind of flatness and a distancing detachment his prose is clear. What it describes is not. What we see is not necessarily what we get.

Fremde’s cat is called Barmi. We make of that what we will.

Pedant’s corner:- “Time interval later” (or equivalent) count:- ten or so. The USian usages, ‘trunk’ for ‘boot,’ parking lot, etc suggest that this was typeset for the US Market and not translated for publication in the UK. Otherwise; “He would then have laid low” (lain low.)