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Once upon a time, the British writer Gabriel Josipovici wrote a book called The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction wherein, toward the very very end, he defined what he called the "anti-novel," saying that it is anti "Not because it sets itself up in direct opposition to the novel, but because it enlists the help of the novel to lull the reader into a false sense of security and then, by pointing to its own premises, pitches him into reality."

Once upon a time, the British writer Christopher Priest wrote an anti-novel called The Glamour wherein, toward the very very end, the narrator says, "We all make fictions. Not one of us is what we seem. ... The urge to rewrite ourselves as real-seeming fictions is present in us all. In the glamour of our wishes we hope that our real selves will not be visible."

The moral of the story, then, is the story itself. What Josipovici misses, and what Christopher Priest gets, is the fun -- the sheer joy of being part of a trick, of letting the magician-writer warp reality into a funhouse mirror of itself. All fiction does this to some extent, but certain types of novels -- I hesitate to call them "anti-novels", because they seem instead to be über-novels, novels that revel in their own novelty -- crank up the engines of fabulation and drive at unsafe speeds past grand pretensions of metaphysical hoo-ha toward a finish line that is simultaneously the beginning, end, and middle of the freeway of desire.

In other words, I liked this book. ("Like" is such a hollow, awful word, one suitable only to be used in sentences that also include "anti-novel", which the previous does not, though it could in your imagination if you remember it just wrong.) Let's begin again:

Once upon a time, Christopher Priest wrote a novel called The Glamour. It was published in 1984. This is not a review of that novel, because I have neither seen nor read that novel. This is a review of a novel called The Glamour published in 2005 that contains, it is rumored, revisions from a novel called The Glamour published in 1984, though I cannot tell you the extent of these revisions, or even if they are the same revisions rumored to be included in an edition of a novel called The Glamour published in 1996. (I remember asking someone about this, I do, but I don't remember them answering.)

The 2005 novel I read is one that reviewers would be justified in hauling out various reviewerly clichés to describe: achingly beautiful, haunting, a masterpiece, sensitive and luminescent, it limns the liminal....

None of this is very helpful, is it? Let's begin again:

Christopher Priest's The Glamour tells the story of Richard Grey, a television cameraman for news programs, who wakes up to find himself in a hospital after having been injured by a car bomb explosion. He does not remember anything about the previous few weeks of his life before the explosion, and is surprised when a visitor tells him she is his girlfriend, Susan. With hopes that she can restore his memories for him, though, Grey lets her into (or back into) his life, and soon discovers that she has (or thinks she has) the ability to be invisible -- to be, as she calls it, glamourous:

...she explained that it was an old Scottish word, brought into general English before its meaning became corrupted. In the original sense a "glammer" was a spell, an enchantment. A young man in love would approach the wisest old woman of his village and pay her for a charm of invisibility to be placed on his beloved, so that she should no longer be coveted by the other young men. Once she had been glammered, or made glamourous, she was safe from prying eyes.

Matthew Cheney teaches at the New Hampton School and has published in English Journal, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, and Locus, among other places. He writes regularly about science fiction on his weblog, The Mumpsimus.