Christopher Priest’s screed about the Clarke Awards reminded me that I’d been meaning for some time to read his most recent novel, The Islanders, about which I’d heard the sort of good things that made me think, yeah, baby, this sort of thing is my bag (for one thing, maps play a role).
The Islanders reads as a travel guide, with entries on various islands in the Dream Archipelago, the setting of two of Priest’s previous books (though he says you don’t have to have read them). The Archipelago is a massive collection of thousands of inhabited islands on another world, positioned between two great continents, one north and one south. The mainland nations of the north pass through the Archipelago to the southern continent, the battlefield of their constant wars. The Archipelago is neutral territory, mostly, its inhabitants preoccupied by artistic pursuits.
But it is by no means a straightforward location. The winds have a curious effect on the psyche. Some islands have profoundly lethal insects. But most of all, both time and space seem . . . fluid. Temporal distortions, as they are called, make satellite mapping and air travel complicated. Maps and navigation are quite unreliable: you can pass over the same terrain and arrive at a different location. The Archipelago as a whole remains unmapped.
A strict chronology may not work either: an incident from an earlier section is a century in the past in another. The fictional author who introduces the book is discovered to have died two thirds of the way through. Artists appear throughout the narrative, and I’m not sure their appearance in the timeline is consistent. I’m afraid to check. The narrative is, in other words, not trustworthy.
Several intertwining narratives nevertheless emerge over the entries, some of which are brief, others more involved, departing from the form of a travel guide to form a story about the island in question. It’s a style of fiction that has a great deal of appeal to me; also, there’s quite a bit about maps and geography. It contains, however, less whiz-bang strangeness than some readers may be comfortable with: Priest seems to work in the interstitial and slipstream end of the speculative fiction pool. But it turns out that I like the water there.
Last September The Islanders was reviewed in Strange Horizons and the Guardian (the latter review by Ursula Le Guin).