27 Jun 2013 11:12:42
It opens with a freelance photographer called Tibor Tarent, travelling back home from Turkey after his doctor wife Melanie has been killed by insurgents near the emergency clinic where she was working. The (we assume) near-future world through which he travels – generally in a giant armoured personnel carrier called a Mebsher – is not as we recognise it. Climate change has rendered vast areas of the world uninhabitable and England – which is now part of the Islamic Republic of Great Britain (IRGB) – is battered by tropical hurricanes and subject to attack by an unspecified group of terrorists in possession of a doomsday weapon.
Abruptly Tarent's story breaks off, and we're in the first world war. A stage magician called Tommy Trent is travelling to the western front after being asked to devise a means of making allied aircraft invisible to the enemy. He falls in with HG Wells, who is setting out to supervise an idea to help carry supplies across the battlefield. Neither of them, when they meet each other again on the return journey, appears to have got anywhere at all.
Subsequent sections continue with Tarent's story; introduce a present-day scenario where we meet Tarent as a younger man; travel to the second world war to encounter a young flight engineer servicing Lancaster bombers; and take us into the Dream Archipelago, a fantasy landscape that has appeared in Priest's previous work. All these stories, one way or another, circle around the idea of "adjacency".
An attack by the so-called adjacency weapon (which leaves a scorched black equilateral triangle of annihilation) is what appears to have killed Melanie in Anatolia. In the IRGB, it has wiped Notting Hill off the map, which is one way of reacting to Richard Curtis's film. The thing about adjacency is – we're told – that it began its life as a defensive weapon: "An incoming missile, to use the famous example described by Professor Rietveld, need not be intercepted or diverted or destroyed – it could be moved to an adjacent quantum dimension." One way or another, that has changed – which is jolly bad luck for Mrs Tarent, not to mention the citizens of W11.
It's also, to take the hint, bad luck for reality. With adjacency poking holes in space-time, everything gets muddled. Buildings, people and vast areas of land are now prone to exist in something like quantum superposition: now you see them, now you don't. The stories are threaded with rhymes and echoes. An accident with a plane foreshadows an accident with a rope trick. Avatars of the main characters appear in different timelines with slightly different names, and perform versions of the same action. (One apparent benevolent effect of the Perturbative Adjacent Field, incidentally, is that hot but uptight-seeming women turn out to rut like polecats.)
It becomes clear, or clearish, though, that even within what appears to be the same continuity there are gaps and contradictions. Those bodies being carried into the tower after the attack: are they, as the medical fuss around them suggests, survivors; or are they, as we're later told, corpses? Have we seen one scene, or two? In the opening section Tarent (or the version of him we encounter there) says he has no memory of ever having met Rietveld, the inventor of adjacency; later, he recalls the meeting in detail. In another continuity, two slightly divergent versions of the same set-piece encounter are retailed.
The intellectual engines of Priest's banjaxing story are the many-worlds hypothesis and the idea of eternal recurrence. Through its emotional centre runs a sentimental love story with a whiff of Cocteau's L'éternel retour. But the big reveal is that there isn't a big reveal: symmetries are skewed. Nothing exactly adds up. You can be blasted into la-la-land with an adjacency weapon and fly out in a world war two Spitfire. You can travel in time as well as in space. You can encounter – as Tarent seems to – both a living version of yourself and a dead one. Weird stuff, essentially, happens – as, in an infinite multitude of interpenetrating universes, you might expect it to.
I don't know that all this completely comes off. The IRGB – which is never historicised, simply presented as a given, and has no obvious thematic significance – feels a little like it belongs in a satirical novel by Richard Littlejohn, and Priest's prose and characterisation are pretty humdrum. The section dealing with the near-romance between the young aircraft engineer and the beautiful civilian pilot is especially clunky.
But there's no question that you turn from one page to the next with absorption and enjoyment – and that if The Adjacent leaves you unsatisfied, that's not a matter of indifference. It's better to set too many hares running, in other words, than to set too few.
