Second paragraph of third chapter:

Justin’s family background was conventional. He had one sister, four years older than him. Her name was Amanda. Her friends called her Mandy, but Justin and his parents invariably called her Amanda. His father’s name was Mortimer, and his mother was Nicole. Their names for each other were Mort and Nicky.

A weird little jewel at the end of Christopher Priest’s writing career, this book’s protagonist, a film student who grows up to be a film critic, becomes obsessed with the disappearance of a Hollywood film star at Heathrow Airport in 1948. There’s a lot of exploration of film history and of airports and the human process of flight, and although I worked out what had happened to the actress some time before the characters did, there was more than enough momentum to keep me going. Like most of Priest’s books, this one will set your mind racing rather than your pulse. A decent note to end on. You can get it here.

Bechdel fail, I think. Most of the book is tight-third to the male protagonist. There are a couple of scenes where his girlfriend is talking to an older actress, but he is present and in the conversation too.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Chad was standing on an unbroken spur of the former sea road, staring out at the remains of the town’s old seaside pier when he felt the phone vibrating in his pocket. The rusty upright piles of the pier managed to hold on somehow, still visible and prodding up at low tide, although low tide had itself become something of a rarity. The sunshine on the white foam of the breakers was dazzling. Greg’s name was on his screen. He turned his back on the sea.

An intricate story, involving (as usual from Priest) twins and (unusually for him) climate change, with three timelines (late 19th century, early 20th, mid-21st) whose interlinkages gradually come into view, meshing to form a complete story. Not my all-time favourite book by this writer but I still liked it a lot. You can get it here.

Second paragraph of third section:

Working methodically, by midday I had filled two haversacks with canned food and had stolen for future barter three road maps from abandoned cars. I did not see the other man, Rafiq, again during the morning.

This was one of Christopher Priest’s first books, published over half a century ago in 1972, depicting a near-future Britain with a populist right-wing government, over-run with refugees from African conflicts, and the consequent disintegration of the social order. It’s told through the viewpoint of Alan Whitman (“White man”?) who is frankly unpleasant; he cheats on his wife and on his travelling companions, not for the sake of any grand strategy but because he’s just that kind of guy.

Since the book was published, the topic of migration and refugee flows has become considerably more toxic than it was then. Priest is clear that the two things he had in mind while writing were the early days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which saw the biggest forced population movement in Western Europe since the second world war, and the expulsion of Asians from Uganda, many of whom came (and as it turned out integrated well) to the UK. Those were different times, and for us it’s impossible to read the book now outside the context of the 2015 migration crisis and the poisonous and dishonest rhetoric of recent years.

It’s not what Priest was getting at; he was looking at the disintegration of his own society under the shock of the future, a sort of It Can’t Happen Here, and mapping the disintegration of his protagonist’s household and family onto this social crisis. His target is not the refugees but the corrupt right-wing government that presides over the chaos. The narrative itself is disjointed, three different timelines (as a fugue has three different themes) jumping between several different phases of the crisis as things get worse.

I read this as a teenager and wondered how it would hold up. It’s all grimly credible from a 1971 viewpoint, but of course the world has moved on, and Priest revised the novel in 2011 to smoothe some of the parts that had aged less well. This is not one of his better known books – tenth on LibraryThing, fourteenth on Goodreads – but it was an interesting return. You can get it here.

This was my top unread book acquired in 2016 (kindly given to me by the author, who signed it for me). Next on that pile is At the Edge of the World, by Lord Dunsany.