Christopher Priest's The Prestige is a superbly constructed fantasy about the lengths magicians will go for their craft. The heart of the book contains the diaries of two competing 19th-century magicians, whose rivalry begins in a woeful misunderstanding and ends in horror. They compete for fame, women, and--most importantly--a trick called the Transported Man. The trick is simple to describe, and impossible to explain: The magician steps onto a platform. Another platform stands across the stage, or across the audience, dozens of feet away. The magician throws his hat, or a ball, or a rod toward the other platform. He whisks a blanket over himself and vanishes. At that very instant, he materializes on the other platform and catches the thrown object, to thunderous applause.

The two diaries in The Prestige recount how first one, then the other magician devises (or attempts to devise) a means of performing this miraculous trick. More than anything else, Priest's novel captures the intensity with which these magicians devote their lives to their chosen venture, and the craftmanship they bring to bear. Priest has obviously researched the history of magic for this book; at one point, one of the magicians articulates a taxonomy of tricks that is both illuminating and obvious, and Priest begins the novel with the astonishing story of a magician who shaped his entire life around even his minor illusions.

The Prestige's addictive readability derives from some intentional gaps hinted at and then enticingly danced around by Priest--the explanation behind the Transported Man, some curious discrepancies in the increasingly unreliable diaries, the dark motivations behind monstrous events. When I first read The Prestige in high school, it confused me mightily. This time around, bolstered by a vague memory of the book's sneaky revelations, I found the story much clearer, but just as fascinating. For readers who are confused, know two things: the narrative is much more straightforward than it at first seems, and yes, that is a hint of the supernatural. Anything beyond that, I leave for you to discover.

I'm not sure how I feel about the framing story surrounding the two diaries. On the one hand it does a lovely job of drawing you into the story; on the other hand, it ends the novel on a note that is disquieting but, I think, perhaps over the top. There are also a surprising number of unexplained gaps in the framing story, despite its apparent simplicity--far more than in the more complex chief narrative(s). Aside from this weakness, however, The Prestige is a fun and compulsively readable novel.

Copyright © 2005 Steven Wu