The prestige

Wednesday

J.S. Barnes

Christopher Priest was a grievously underrated novelist

There really ought to be a word to describe the dispiriting realization that a great writer has slipped through our fingers without the culture at large ever quite appreciating what’s been lost. The novelist Christopher Priest, who died earlier this year of cancer at the age of eighty, was one such figure. It would be glib to describe him as the nearly-man of English fiction, for this wasn’t quite the case — instead his career represented a sequence of missed opportunities for the world beyond his chosen genre to recognize his skill and quiet profundity. In some ways, the early part of his publication history closely resembles that of J.G. Ballard without the mid-career renaissance Ballard enjoyed.

Priest

Thursday

Christopher Priest

Too much sound and fury in Christopher Nolan’s movies

From our UK edition

In 2006 the director Christopher Nolan filmed an adaptation of one of my novels, written a decade and a half earlier. Other than providing the source book, I had no involvement with any part of the filming. Unlike some novelists who have a Hollywood film made, I was not at all disappointed with the result: it struck me as an intelligent, skilful and imaginative adaptation, both similar to but also subtly different from the novel. That it has since become something known as ‘Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige’ seems slightly odd from my point of view, but that’s the name of the game. Another decade and a half further along, The Prestige still looks pretty good to me. Some people describe it as his masterpiece, which is probably debatable but close to what I think.