Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #129840 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.com Review
The Washington Post called this "a dizzying magic show of a novel, chock-a-block with all the props of Victorian sensation fiction: seances, multiple narrators, a family curse, doubles, a lost notebook, wraiths, and disembodied spirits; a haunted house, awesome mad-doctor machinery, a mausoleum, and ghoulish horrors; a misunderstood scientist, impossible disappearances; the sins of the fathers visited upon their descendants." Winner of the 1996 World Fantasy Award, The Prestige is even better than that, because unlike many Victorians, Priest writes crisp, unencumbered prose. And anyone who's ever thrilled to the arcing electricity in the "It's alive!" scene in Frankenstein will relish the "special effects" by none other than Nikola Tesla.

From Publishers Weekly
Priest, one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists (1983 list), has not been overproductive since he made a small reputation with The Affirmation and The Glamour, published here more than a dozen years ago. His new novel (the title of which refers to the residue left after a magician's successful trick) is enthrallingly odd. In a carefully calculated period style that is remarkably akin to that of the late Robertson Davies, Priest writes of a pair of rival magicians in turn-of-the-century London. Each has a winning trick the other craves, but so arcane is the nature of these tricks, so incredibly difficult are they to perform, that they take on a peculiar life of their own?in one case involving a mysterious apparent double identity, in the other a reliance on the ferocious powers unleashed in the early experimental years of electricity. The rivalry of the two men is such that in the end, though both are ashamed of the strength of their feelings of spite and envy, it consumes them both, and affects their respective families for generations. This is a complex tale that must have been extremely difficult to tell in exactly the right sequence, while still maintaining a series of shocks to the very end. Priest has brought it off with great imagination and skill. It's only fair to say, though, that the book's very considerable narrative grip is its principal virtue. The characters and incidents have a decidedly Gothic cast, and only the restraint that marks the story's telling keeps it on the rails.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Notions of doubleness pervade this tale of a feud between the families ot two Victorian-era magicians. Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier have spent their careers trying to sabotage one another. When Borden ups the ante by developing a seemingly impossible trick in which he is moved across the stage in a unimaginable short time, Angier responds by enlisting inventor Nikola Tesla to build a turn-of-the-century version of a Star Trek-like transporter. The magicians' story is framed by that of two descendants, affected by the feud in ways they are only beginning to fathom, who meet at the Angier family's desolate country estate. Mixing elements of the psychological novel with fantasy, this is an inventive, if somewhat far-fetched, British neo-Gothic. For most collections.?Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, Mass.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Unsettling mystery where science and sleight-of-hand overlap
Written on the cover of this book is the phrase "Winner of a World Fantasy Award" -- those are the words that first caught my attention. And in retrospect, I find The Prestige entirely deserving of that honor. Few and far between are the books that I pick up and can still remember several years later, but it's been three or more years since I read this one, and certain vibes and moments that I took from it are still with me. This is due, in part, to an average-to-good plotline, but in the end, to Priest's own sleight-of-hand as an author -- he shows an impressive range, a nice attention to detail, and a subdued sense of style which sets the perfect tone for this tale of rival vaudeville magicians in the late 19th century...

Set in 1878, and focused on two magicians who are rivals in both business and love, this story is delivered in a style that made it literally impossible to put down (I think I surreptitiously read it during school classes for about two days, non-stop, and might as well have been absent. I don't even know what I missed). Moving from one character's perspective to another, the story unfolds almost entirely through journal entries written by the two protagonists.

The intriguing conceit of the novel is that these journals are not discovered until almost a hundred years later, when the descendants of the two rivals meet and feel a mysterious connection to each other. As they slowly uncover the series of mysterious and unnatural events which befell their warring ancestors, the action moves fluidly from past to present to future and back, almost without warning. The drastically different narrative styles used in the two journals reveal that Mr. Priest must have an incredible amount of talent -- they might as well have been written by two different people, so unalike are their tone and perspective.

The details of the plot are far too complicated to summarize, but I would go out of my way to recommend this book to fiction lovers. While the story does not leave you with any significant knowledge or insight into the meaning of life, it is pleasure reading at its best, and there is a lot to be said for that.

Magical fun
This was a lot of fun but probably doesn't warrant repeated reading since it's pretty dependent on plot twists and shocks to hold your interest. With most Christopher Priest novels currently out of print (Dream of Wessex, etc) it's nice to see this one still out there and it's one of his better novels too, which is a nice bonus. Basically it concerns two magicians at the turn of the century who's paths cross and through a series of unpleasant events become bitter rivals, screwing up each other's tricks and driving each other to more and more complicated illusions in a magical game of oneupmanship. This tale is told through two journals as read by their descendants, first one magician, than the other. This style works pretty well, there are some quirks and it probably won't fool anyone who is a Victorian scholar but it looks good enough to me and it's not enough to make me hate the books. What he does an excellent job of is getting us into the world of magicians, without turning the book into a tedious expose of how they do their tricks ('cause it's all about the illusion), you get a glimpse into a sort of exclusive club that's all about convincing you that you're seeing what you shouldn't be seeing. The method of using both journals is a trick that required quite a bit of skill to pull off properly, since the order of the journals make a bit of difference in order to remain surprising and it's interesting to see two different versions of events, especially when one explains the other in greater detail (the only problem with that is that by the time you get to the concurrent event in the second journal, you might have forgotten what happened the first time around). Some people might take some issue with the fact that it gets seriously weird toward the end, and being that the book mostly sticks to "real" stuff the way it starts to go toward fantasy might turn off some people . . . you'll have to read and decide that for yourself, unfortunately. Also, I wasn't exactly sure what the point of the bookending modern day descendants was, they barely appear and Priest doesn't make too much of an effort to give them any sort of personality, which leaves the ending a little flatter than maybe it should be. Still, this is a fine novel showing a lot of imagination and skill, and those looking for fantasy without elves and swords should take a sharp detour here. Even with its flaws, it's highly readable and very recommended.

Save Your Time and See the Film
As someone with an interest in the adaptation of books and stories into films, I often read a book and then watch the movie or movies to see how various screenwriters have reshaped the material. In this instance, seeing the movie pushed me to finally read the book that had been sitting on my shelf for two years. One always hates to be a heretic, but this is one of the very rare cases where the movie improves on the original.

The premise of this World Fantasy Award-winning novel is certainly an intriguing one: two English magicians of the Victorian era, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier, engage in a lifelong rivalry to outperform each other, a rivalry which at times leads to life-threatening sabotage. Their story is told partially from the modern perspective of their great-grandchildren, but mainly through their own diary entries. The narrative framework is the first area in which the film is a vast improvement. The modern storyline serves almost no purpose and the filmmakers wisely jettisoned it. Similarly, the diary entries are entirely unconvincing as Victorian documents, and play a much-subdued role in the film.

However, the main problem of the book is that the feud is never given much of a basis -- in other word, there are no stakes. The one fairly egregious act early on is done by Borden to Angier, but when Angier eventually turns the other cheek, Borden keeps at it. Indeed, the feud seems to periodically die off, only to inexplicably flare up again over the course of twenty years! The filmmakers recognized this problem and came up with a much more convincing back story to explain the start of the feud, and then very carefully calibrated its escalation over time.

Another problem the book has is that for the reader to really buy into the notion that these two magicians are obsessed with each other, the protagonists must be equals. However we learn much more about Angier than Borden, and indeed, while Angier is a bit of a schmuck, he comes off far more sympathetic than Borden. Again, the film does a much better job of making the two men equals in stature, and very different in nature. It also does a good job of streamlining their family lives, which are rather convoluted in the book.

There are plenty of other more mundane instances where the film comes out looking better. For example, in the book Angier consults with the real-life inventor Nicola iTesla. Tesla builds him an apparatus which can replicate matter, lectures Angier about how he should not use it to counterfeit currency, and then proceeds to abandon his lab due to bankruptcy! The film takes the much more interesting and plausible approach that Tesla disappears because Thomas Edison's goons have finally tracked him down and torch his lab. And ultimately, Priest commits the sin of making the story's two big twists all too obvious to the reader, thus removing any sense of wonder or suspense. Meanwhile, the film does a great job of holding off on revealing the twists until the last possible moment, and actually adds one or two.

Ultimately, it's hard to recommend the original book version of this tale -- with its clunky framework, poor pacing, uneven characterization, vague motivations, and tipping of its hand -- when the film version exists. Instead of spending six hours reading this, watch the movie and use the other four hours on another book.