The Glamour | ||||||||
Christopher Priest | ||||||||
Gollancz, 235 pages | ||||||||
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A review by Matthew Cheney
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:
The problem is, not all of these pieces make sense. Grey has memories and dreams, but they contradict some of what Susan
tells him. But he has artifacts that contradict his memories. And one of his doctors at the hospital, in an attempt to
relieve his amnesia, gave Grey the hypnotic suggestion to see a woman disappear. As for the invisible Niall, Susan's
parents have a picture of him, but not much memory. Susan proves to Grey that he is himself capable of being
invisible. But it may just be that he doesn't really exist. (Then who sent the postcard from St. Tropez, the one signed
by X? And who in their right mind would ever believe everything they see on the evening news?)
Priest's accomplishment is that he has written a truly engaging and suspenseful novel of ideas, the sort of book that can be
read profitably by anyone interested both in stories and in philosophies, but it doesn't require advanced study of either
philosophy or narratology to understand and to enjoy. It plays with many of the conventions of realistic fiction, undermining
each of them, but does so in a way that feels more substantial than if it were just an intellectual game -- it digs deep
toward emotionally affecting questions, the problems of human life: problems of memory and yearning, of love and loss,
of what it means to know other people and yourself, of what it is to be whole. The questions are, and have always been,
unanswerable in any general sense, but they can be answered within the contexts of specific lives and within realms of
imagination, though very often the answers lead only to more questions, sometimes the same questions that began the
search for answers in the first place.
Let's begin again: Once upon a time...
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. |
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