Story Within a Story Within. . .
THOMAS, BRIAN
Story Within a Story Within. The Affirmation By Christopher Priest Scribner's. 213 pp. $10.95. Reviewed by Brian Thomas In this tale told by a madman, one hears echoes of At Swim-Two-Birds,...
...She finds a shocking number of empty whiskey bottles...
...Disturbing to Peter as well is the f act that a side-effect of athanasia is amnesia...
...Another influence might be Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, whose demented narrator completely loses sight of the poem he is supposedly explicating...
...He thinks: "If the deeper truth could only be told by falsehood-in other words, through a metaphor-then to achieve total truth I must create total falsehood...
...Characters from the Dream Archipelago haunt his London apartment...
...His account of moving from stasis to confident activity appears convincing, confirming our prejudices about the redeeming power of art...
...To the therapists in the Dream Archipelago clinic, of course, the manuscript is unintelligible...
...The moral seems to be that someone in delicate mental health should leave writing alone...
...In fact, with an irony entirely unnoticed by its protagonist, Peter Sinclair, Christopher Priest's latest work corroborates the suspicion held by many authors that literary production is often idle, worthless and conducive to the worst sort of dreaminess...
...The Peter travelling through the Dream Archipelago has apparently written a fictionalized autobiography, too, and with a start we realize it mirrors the real world...
...they are a distilled version of the Greece where Peter met Gracia: Everything is hot, dirty, bustling, and full of a vigor that briefly jars him out of his self-absorption...
...Yet he has been proving through his fizzled autobiography that you can-Although his creations are uninhabitable to anyone else...
...Priest's surprises are carefully prepared and deserve not to be divulged...
...When an old friend of his father's offers him a chance to house-sit at a country cottage in exchange for fixing up the place, he seizes the opportunity, longing to escape the clutter of London and sort through his mental confusion...
...The Archipelago Peter has won a lottery that gives him the chance to take advantage of this...
...Peter assures us that "Felicity saw only narrow or actual truth...
...Thus each Peter is the central character in the other's book...
...An important element of this suspense is "athanasia," a medical process that prolongs life indefinitely...
...In sober, earnest sentences, he informs us that he has lost his job, been evicted from his apartment, and his father has died of cerebral aneurysm...
...But when his sister, Felicity, arrives at the cottage she explodes the upbeat story of disciplined self-improvement Peter has been spinning for us...
...She was unperceptive to higher truth, to imaginative coherence, and she would certainly fail to understand the kinds of truth I told in my manuscript...
...He forces himself to rise early and work several hours at whipping the cottage into shape before spending the rest of the day at the typewriter...
...The islands in the Dream Archipelago, perhaps because they exist only in Peter's mind, are more vividly fleshed out than his previous straightforward account of London...
...Peter, as heemerges from his amnesia, refers to himself as a solipsist, never realizing that he is now almost the reverse: Like a living illustration of the sort of implausibility a linguistic philosopher might invent to make an abstruse point, every self confronting Peter is real-except his own...
...After fondly dwelling on his initial halting efforts, then despairing over how flat and dull the drafts seem, he waxes proud over his improving style...
...Priest, happily, is much more skillful...
...The various possibilities life has to offer are represented by a huge chain of islands called the Dream Archipelago...
...Interspersed throughout this fantasy are scenes from what we presume to be Peter's real life...
...So he creates an imaginary world, where the jetsam of his existence can be transmuted into art...
...The solitude soon bores and demoralizes him, though, and he decides to start working on his autobiography...
...One advantage to using a narrator as unreliable as Peter Sinclair lies in the ease of avoiding nitwitted criticism...
...His objections to undergoing athanasia vanish however, when the clinic's examination reveals that a cerebral aneurysm threatens to kill him at any minute...
...Peter imagines his worlds feebly and along the way falls victim to their traps...
...At one point Seri protests to Peter that you can't live in a fiction...
...Reviewed by Brian Thomas In this tale told by a madman, one hears echoes of At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien's hilarious meditation on the testy marriage of life and art that has characters in a bizarre novel take revenge on their insane creator...
...Through her recriminations we further discover that Gracia swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills soon after their last row and nearly died...
...London" is Jethra, "Gracia" is Seri, and so on...
...Out of a new-found greed for survival, he overcomes his hesitations...
...Here Priest's experience as a seasoned writer of science fiction stands him in good stead...
...My manuscript had to become a metaphor for myself...
...But it won't spoil anything to say that the ending is deliberately ambiguous-leaving open whether Peter is finally completely swallowed up by his fictions or liberrated from them...
...The Affirmation also shares the dyspeptic view of composition evident in its less exalted cousin, Stephen King's The Shining...
...what's been happening to you...
...But even though he invented the character of Seri, for example, she and Gracia turn out to be two quite different women, both of them mysterious to the obtuse narrator...
...But he demands that the questionnaire be waived, and that his fictionalized autobiography be used as the mnemonic aid...
...Either he must leave instantly-the clinic abhors adverse publicity-or be rushed through the process...
...The clinic does have an elaborate questionnaire that is used to help amnesiac immortals recover their obliterated pasts, but Peter scoffs at the notion that a bare compilation of basic data could restore anyone's memory in all its richness...
...Worst of all to him, he has had a bitter fight with his lover, a woman oddly named Gracia...
...At first Peter is just down on his luck...
...These recount his attempted reunion with Gracia, and provide additional glimpses of just how daft he is...
...London is dubbed "Jethra," Gracia is transformed into "Seri...
...Surprisingly enough, when we finally get a look at snatches of Peter's fictional reconstruction, he does seem to have fabricated a compelling imaginary world...
...He hesitates to go through with the process, though, for he vaguely suspects death is necessary to give life meaning...
...Your clothes are filthy, the house is a tip, you look as if you haven't eaten a proper meal in weeks...
...Trying to rebuild Peter's memory, they find his garbled scribblings of London and Gracia utterly opaque...
...Peter's musings on the nature of death and memory may sound hackneyed to a peevish audience, but if a captious reader objects to them as lackluster Proustifications, Priest can justifiably shrug, "Why blame me for what this self-deceiving lunatic says...
...I will not detail The Affirmation's more striking turns of plot...
...Priest handles the blurring of their worlds inventively, and the hoary device builds up considerable suspense...
...All this unlocks his memory and enables him to produce pages at a spanking clip, Peter tells us as he congratulates himself on his progress...
...Ultimately, however, Peter decides that imposing a mere factual order on his life's incoherence betrays its reality...
...While writing his autobiography, he has found that memory is one of his greatest joys...
...Since his condition is so precarious, to save time the clinic reluctantly agrees...
Vol. 64 • June 1981 • No. 11
