This book, the first collection by
Christopher Priest in about twenty years, is superb intellectual architecture.
The six short stories and novellas gathered here are all triumphs of quiet,
steady craftsmanship, models of ingenious design and subtle implication, and as
a group they further enrich each other, interlocking cleverly, symmetrically,
sinisterly. They date from the period 1978-80, the time when Priest's departure
into the mainstream was becoming evident; and the tales themselves demonstrate
this shift very clearly, being slow, contemplative studies of minds and
cultures in crisis. This book could just as easily have been issued as
"upmarket" literary fiction, given its exceptional depth and richness. Priest's
so-called Dream Archipelago is just what its name implies, a region of the
wondering (and wandering) mind, a location allowing intricate explorations of
various, always abnormal, mental states. The islands occupy the equatorial
ocean of a world that is in some sense a reflection of our own, with familiar
political, cultural, and psychological realities. Modern realities are
certainly being brought brutally home to the islanders, as the rival powers of
the northern continent wage global war on each other, enforcing a bizarrely
restrictive "neutrality" on the archipelago while their forces ravage countries
still further south. Armies of occupation; battles fought on supposedly neutral
territory; horrifying medical experiments; "sense gases" that drastically
confuse perception: these traumatize indigenous cultures, and make even
cosmopolitan visitors uncertain of their existential ground. All settings and
events seem unreliable, subjective; and, indeed, one might readily see the
islands as fragments of the inner landscape of a single human brain, obeying
subconscious rather than naturalistic logic. So of what does this mental
topography consist? One of the virtues of these stories is their openness to
multiple interpretations, as cryptic clues are dropped and hidden designs are
intimated. The Dream Archipelago is virtuosity of narrative design at its most
cunning, its most urgent, and its most elegant.
