Other significant works in Priest's oeuvre include The Space Machine (1976), a passionate pastiche of the sf novels of H.G. Wells; An Infinite Summer (1979), a collection of stories set on the Dream Archipelago that later provided a setting for one strand of The Affirmation; and The Quiet Woman (1990) a satirical tale of the Thatcher years, in which a hard rain of radioactive debris falls on the UK.
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The Magic: The Story of a Film (150pp, 16.99 hb) is essentially a memoir of Christopher Priest's sometimes remote but always engaged involvement in the creation of the film version of his best known novel, The Prestige. Each chapter has a title that echoes the presentation of the film's illusions (the pledge, the turn, the prestige) in a series of developmental stages—The Thought, The Writing, The Adaptation etc.
It begins with frank and fascinating insight into the development of the central idea, from an initial half-hearted interest in a TV illusionist, through cross-cultural research to an interest in the obsessive compulsive behaviour that underpins the great acts of stage magic.
It is fascinating to learn, given his dogged pursuit of his literary obsessions—identity, deception, memory and the plasticity of reality—that the trigger for the story came from Priest's discovery of a psychological fixation that came to dominate an illusionists life. But it is even more fascinating to learn that it took another 15 years for Priest to commit to writing the novel, and that an idea that began with an image on TV begat a book built around a simple image of a magician writing his memoirs.
Unlike his competing illusionists, Priest is more than happy to reveal how the trick is done. He reveals his methods of composition—he writes second drafts, eschewing IT-based shortcuts—and talks about his despair as the story began to seem lightweight. He's even happy to acknowledge the financial imperative that prevented him from abandoning the novel altogether. If Priest's honesty is one of the elements making The Magic a genuinely worthwhile read, the other is his integrity: he may write for a living, but his work is based on a quest for seriousness—in the sense of relevance to his readers and their world.
And that quest informed his reaction to the process through which the Nolan brothers created the film version of The Prestige. Priest's reaction to the filmmakers’ efforts is rigorous but generous: in the chapter titled The Adaptation, he highlights key differences between novel and film—praising the film's deft opening sequence and its juggling of seven levels of plotting. The Nolans’ adaptation, he feels, was brilliant because they went for a ‘purely filmic’ approach rather than merely filming a novel.
For a brief book The Magic is comparatively expensive, but it's essential reading for committed admirers of Priest's work, anyone needing an insight into the way the creative imagination works or anyone interested in the fragile ecology of the relationship between book and film.
Real-Time World (170pp, 16.99 hb) is a new edition of Priest's first story collection, originally published in 1974 and containing his first published story ‘The Run’ (which appeared in Impulse in 1966). In Priest's 2008 introduction he acknowledges his influences, highlights ways in which early stories prefigure later ones and confesses his feeling that this first collection came too soon in his career to yield the strongest possible collection of stories, but Priest is his own most rigorous critic.
The clarity and precision of the prose in his later novels and stories is reflected in all ten of the pieces here; all of them offer something in the way of provocation and engagement and four of them are vivid and unsettling enough to burn their way into your memory forever.
'The Head and the Hand', concerning a man who has made a fortune by literally taking himself apart in public was first published in 1972, but provides a perfect, if elliptical, comment on the voracious consumption of reality TV in 2008.
'Real Time World', which concerns an experiment in filtering news and information about ‘big picture’ events in the world, adumbrates his developing obsession with the psychological impact of environmental stressors.
'A Woman Naked’ is a powerful tale concerning individual survival in an authoritarian and hypocritical society and the complex relationship between observer and observed: its central motif (as indicated by the title) could, if handled by a less precise and insightful writer, have been interpreted as ‘one-handed reading material’ in the traditional sense.
In his new introduction Priest suggests the story ‘Transplant', with its nested imaginary worlds, shares thematic concerns with later novels such as A Dream of Wessex and The Affirmation. It is a powerful, multi-faceted and impressively condensed tale, cramming reflections on several of Priest's obsessions (moral, metaphysical and perceptual) into 16 pages.
Ersatz Wines (170pp, 16.99 hb) gathers twelve stories never before collected in book form, nine of which are published for the first time anywhere. The collection is necessarily uneven—it consists of work produced when Priest was in his early twenties, most of it rejected or never submitted. They have not been rewritten in any way. Written between 1963 and 1968, their presentation in chronological order highlights the extent to which Priest's work developed over the five year period—the striving for effect of the earliest is replaced by a more assured voice and higher level of control in the later stories.
In his fascinating 34-page introduction (a touching, honest and insightful chronicle of Priest's early life and career) the author asserts that none of the stories is embarrassingly awful but they are best read as object lessons in creative writing. I can't argue with either of those sentiments: the Introduction, Afterword and detailed notes at the end of each piece (including feedback from the likes of Michael Moorcock) are at least as important and entertaining as the stories themselves—which is entirely appropriate to a collection designed to “encourage others, who might have now the same objective as [Priest] did then."
Ersatz Wines gives you what it says on the tin—and I'd have no hesitation recommending it to anyone with the ambition of writing fiction or criticism for paying markets.
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Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale
Russell T. Davies & Benjamin Cook
The Torchwood Archives
Gary Russell
Doctor Who: Shining Darkness
Mark Michalowski
Doctor Who: The Doctor Trap
Simon Messingham
Doctor Who: Ghosts of India
Mark Morris
Torchwood: Pack Animals
Peter Anghelides
Torchwood: Skypoint
Phil Ford
Torchwood: Almost Perfect
James Goss
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Doctor Who has been in existence now for longer than most people can remember and it is currently bigger than it has ever been. Its commercial appeal and critical respect may have ebbed and flowed with the passing decades, but throughout its lifetime secondary sources have remained popular with a loyal public. Today, besides the two spin-off television series, there are a great number of other choices available for the adventurer, and Paul F. Cockburn keeps track of some of the latest in print.
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It's difficult to imagine any other British television series that has been quite so thoroughly researched and documented as Doctor Who. From the publication of The Making of Doctor Who in 1972 to the most recent episode of BBC Three's Doctor Who Confidential, an ever more knowledgeable and demanding audience has sought out every detail of the show's production. Magazine and book publishers have been able to satisfy this craving thanks to both the scale of the prospective readership and the fact that some fans are willing to spend years tracking down all those lost memos and department reports from the obsidian depths of the BBC's administrative archives.
Of course, relatively little ‘behind the scenes’ coverage is written by those directly involved in the show's production; and when it has, enough time has usually passed to smooth at least some of the sharpe
r memories. Not so Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale. By collecting together a year's worth of emailed correspondence between Russell T. Davies (head writer and executive producer) and journalist Benjamin Cooke (who has been ‘embedded’ into the production for several years and is therefore as close as you can get to Doctor Who without being on the BBC's payroll) this book is probably the nearest we'll get to a day-by-day diary of ‘How it happened, as it happened'.
Cooke's initial interest was in exploring ‘the nuts and bolts’ of writing a Doctor Who script, and the book is infused with Davies's view on the subject: from practical suggestions on how to emphasise the pace of a scene in the way you format the stage directions, to the honing of dialogue. Plus, of course, that vitally important lesson that every writer ultimately has to find their own way of writing.
Which is just as well. Unlike his contemporary Paul Abbott, who writes a first draft and then focuses on what the story is about—deciding what works and what doesn't before starting a second draft—Davies's approach is more intuitive. “I don't often do treatments or breakdowns,” he warns Cooke at the start. “There's little physical evidence of the script process to show you. No notes. Nothing. I think, and think and think ... and by the time I come to write, a lot has been decided.” That approach certainly seems to fit with Davies's public persona, of the big man who exudes self-confidence from every pore.
The surprise of this book is the picture of Davies as a man so paralysed by the fear of not writing anything good that he will procrastinate for weeks about even starting a script. “That's where this job is knackering and debilitating,” he writes. “Everything—and I mean every story written anywhere—is underscored by the constant murmur of: this is rubbish, I am rubbish, and this is due in on Tuesday!” Which may well explain why most of Davies's longest emails are written in the darkest hours just before dawn.
The irony is that once he starts writing, all his anticipated problems magically sort themselves out; yet he's unable to learn from this. “I can only conclude that I've lumbered myself with a painful system that works,” he explains during one particular long dark email of the soul. “Is it like a superstition that I have to panic in order to write well? It drives me mad.” No wonder his Doctor Who successor Steven Moffat said: “If you still want to be a writer after reading this, then you probably will be."
On occasions during The Writer's Tale, Davies has cause to mention the supposedly ‘more grown up’ Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood. Regardless of its intended audience, BBC Books seem to believe this show's audience isn't yet ready for anything approaching the sophistication and detail of The Writer's Tale. In contrast, The Torchwood Archives—written by BBC Wales script editor Gary Russell—is an overview of the fictional events shown over the first two series, presented in the style of a suppressed ‘exposé'. While well done in terms of design and production, you can't quite help wonder what the point of it all is—assuming you can suspend your disbelief at the thought of Captain Jack Harkness spending his evenings writing up weekly reports of Rift activity.
These days, BBC Books are an imprint of Ebury Publishing, itself a division of the Random House Group. Current sales figures alone suggest that the editorial teams controlling their Doctor Who and Torchwood novels are well versed in the art of such applied fiction, although the real challenge with at least the latter series must surely be trying to match the tone of a show that veers between wannabe bloody urban thriller and Scooby Doo minus the jokes and the disgruntled janitor. No wonder, with the novel Skypoint, they even opt for a writer who's scripted a few episodes of the TV show, although by keeping most of the action in a luxury block of flats Phil Ford does little that couldn't have been easily reproduced on screen.
The Doctor Who novels, in contrast, do at least feature interplanetary chases and recreations of 1947 India that would be difficult to fit into the budget of a televised 45 minute episode, playing to the financial advantage of the written word. Beyond that, though, all six books pretty well represent the three defining characteristics of the modern spin-off novel. Firstly, there's the vital necessity of the authors to successfully replicate, on paper, characters usually brought to life on television by actors. Secondly, there's the lightness of touch that comes from being able to assume that most readers will bring to the books a wealth of knowledge about these particular fictional worlds. And thirdly? At least when it comes to the main characters, there's the requirement that they remain essentially the same at the end as they were at the start—but as that could also be said for most of the TV episodes, is that really a complaint? Readers come to these books expecting ‘more of the same, but different', which is why their writers must remember that, playing with somebody else's toys, it's only polite to make sure they return them in the same state they found them.
Latest Doctor Who novels also received: Beautiful Chaos by Gary Russell, The Story of Martha by Dan Abnett and The Eyeless by Lance Parkin. All BBC Books, 6.99 hb, published 26 December.
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LASER FODDER—Tony Lee's DVD Reviews
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Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #220 Page 16
