his will turn into a review, but first we're going to have to do some rescue archaeology, because Christopher Priest's latest novel has already been dumped into the plague-wagon with yesterday's newspapers, and we're going to have to excavate if we wish to look at The Separation. This may seem odd, as this alternate history of World War II, which may be the most accessible tale Priest has ever written, was released less than two months ago in the U.K., in the middle of August. But August is a graveyard month to publish a book in the U.K. (there is no U.S. edition yet), and The Separation was released in a downmarket trade paperback format, with as much fanfare as an almshouse funeral, accompanied by a press release describing it as a hardback, but eschewing any reference to the nature of the text. Given that much of a push, almost any book will sink without leaving a ripple.
In 2002, the world of books has become, after all, deeply fragile. 1) Trade publishers wallow in their bloated overheads like dinosaurs in a swamp about to eutrophicate, shedding the midlist authors they are no longer agile enough to promote. 2) Bookshops refuse to stock product they can't fit into a pre-labeled shelf, which means a quick quietus to something like The Separation, which boasts a blurb full of sentences like "As their stories play out, possibilities, parallels and confusion surround them," without mentioning the fact that the two men with the distressingly intertwined stories are in fact identical twins, and that the worlds they inhabit are incompossible. 3) Review editors, who receive 10 times more books than they have room to review, seem at times mainly to be in the business of finding reasons not to review particular titles. In order to reduce the piles of Unborn, they are always tempted to bin paperback originals sight unseen, which might well have happened in the case of The Separation, even though it is a handsome volume (trade paperbacks often are; it means zilch).
And those review editors who actually examined the book could not have failed to whiff the dinosaur funk that soiled its release; and they do know what to do about books whose publishers have lost faith. Yesterday (Oct. 4, 2002) I had lunch with an editor for a highly respectable London newspaper; he does not edit the reviews page, but writes knowledgeable SF reviews for it. He has been following Priest's career for years with great interest. He had not only not read The Separation: He had not known of its existence.
U.K. and American readers of this column can almost certainly still get hold of the book from an online retailer. But be warned: At least one of these firms has been so confused by The Separation's publication spoor that it lists both hardback and paperback editions for sale. Be assured, though: There is no hardback. It does not exist. Buy the paperback.
The review begins here.
The world considered as a Moebius strip
There is of course something about alternate history that loves a war. Wars are full of describable events, many of which could have had different outcomes, if only ... ; it is a central premise of almost anyone's understanding of times of war that history could have been different, if only. This premise does not operate with the same ease—does not so conspicuously liberate the imaginations of writers—during times of peace, when reality seems too fractal to sort, the deeper down you dig the more roots you find. If times of war are like an oak you can split, peace is a banyan. So it is, perhaps, natural that Christopher Priest's first full-throated alternate history should be set at the heart of World War II.
There is something else about war, too. Reality does thin during times of war, certainly for those not for the moment directly involved in combat; events seem simultaneously fragile (because it is terrifyingly easy to envision something else happening), and imperative (because a battle lost or won might change the world). Reality during times of war, in other words, rather resembles reality as depicted in most alternate histories: There is an essential staginess about both, a sense that the world is a theater (like a battle zone), with actors, storylines, intermissions, catastrophes, bugle calls. At times of war, and in alternate histories, it is as though you can see through the world to the engine. It is this sense of seeing the world as though it were transparent—as though it were a lucid dream—that governs the mechanisms of The Separation, the process by which alternate histories calve off from one another, like identical twins undergoing the most profound experience of their lives: separation.
Far into the novel, Joe Sawyer, who is the more interesting of the identical twins, speculates on the nature of reality, which seems to him like a series of lucid dreams:
I was convinced that the injuries I had suffered during the Blitz [in his brother's reality, which is ours, those injuries have killed Joe] were driving me mad. The visions were crippling me mentally. I was no longer able to tell truth from fiction. That was the classic definition of insanity, wasn't it? ... Was everything I thought of as real in fact another more subtle and extended delusion, a lucid imagining of forking alternatives, while in reality, real reality, I lay in the back of the noisy Red Cross ambulance, still being driven slowly across benighted England?
Priest plays Moebius-strip games with the forking paths (the reference to Borges is clearly intended) between our World War II and Joe's, in which Britain and Germany end hostilities on May 10, 1941; and we are clearly intended to wonder if Joe is in fact conveying to us a series of lucid dreams about an alternate world that will end abruptly—like the lucid dream of the hanged soldier in Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1891)—with his death. But it would fatally reduce the cognitive strengths and the affective potency of The Separation to think of it as presenting Joe Sawyer's reality as a lucid dream.
It is far more interesting conclusion—one amply allowed for by Priest's Moebius-like plot turns—to think of The Separation as an exact reversal of Bierce's "Occurrence," one in which the lucid dream is the reality, though it is a reality profoundly difficult for Joe Sawyer to gain. It is as though he himself, through his painful transaction of lucid dream after lucid dream, is earning the new alternate world for all of us. Less sentimentally, it does seem the case that he is earning it for the book.
War is hell—and sometimes pure joy
As in any alternate history, the story is not simple; and as The Separation presents the "simultaneous" survival of two realities—Jack Sawyer's, which is ours; and Joe Sawyer's, in which Britain and Germany, by agreeing to a standoff, create a world order dominated by Europe for the next half century, while America huddles into herself, wounded and introspective, after a disastrous 1940s invasion of Asia—it is, in the end, a particularly complicated story.
The premise, however, is simple. On May 10, 1941, Rudolf Hess' proposal for a negotiated peace is accepted by Winston Churchill, and the war ends. Nor is it difficult to understand a telegraph version of the role of the two Sawyer brothers. In our world, pacifist Red Cross work Joe Sawyer dies of his wounds after London is bombed in 1940, and bomber pilot Jack Sawyer, after surviving a plane crash in the North Sea, is seconded to the team surrounding Churchill; because he speaks German, he is directed to assess the state of mind of Rudolf Hess. His conclusion is that the man purporting to be Hess is in fact a ringer. War continues. In the alternate world, Jack Sawyer dies (it may be) in the plane crash, while Joe Sawyer survives, becoming involved in the elaborate peace negotiations instigated by Hess, who has flown to England with official German support. At one point Joe eloquently pleads the cause of peace with an understandably truculent Churchill. Peace is declared.
Which, of course, is much too simple. The Separation is over 450 pages long, and each page is packed. The only real problem is with a frame story featuring historian Stuart Gratton in the alternate-history version of 1999—I leave to someone wiser than I how to unpack the peculiarly irritating enigma Gratton presents, for he does not seem to know he is the son of one or another of the Sawyer brothers, but is at the same time researching their (or his) role in creating the peace of 1941—for this frame story peters out. It is, perhaps, a Moebius strip too far.
The rest of the novel is almost pure joy. Almost all of it is comprised of recovered documents of one sort or another, all of them rendered by Priest with unobtrusive but magisterial authority. The first half of the book is taken up with Jack Sawyer's memoirs, which lead us to our own here and now. The second half is taken up mostly—though there are many inserted documents and transcripts—by Joe Sawyer's increasingly bewildered journal, as he transacts lucid dream after lucid dream, earning (as it may be) the new world. One thing is certain: The alternate world does not become reality in The Separation at the simple juncture of some jonbar point (the point here being Joe's survival; the 1941 peace comes later). The separation of the two potential worlds, like the final separation of the already estranged twins, is not a Jonbar click, but a slow climb into lucid reality, which is a dream Joe dreams, or it is not, or it is both.
World War II has become stories within stories. It is become much too complex a part of the Matter of the West for reportage or history to begin to handle. It has become a truth of fiction. There are now four great novels of World War II in the literature of the fantastic: one is a prophecy, Swastika Night (1937) by Katharine Burdekin writing as Murray Constantine; and three are alternate histories: Sarban's The Sound of his Horn (1952), Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (1962) and Christopher Priest's The Separation (2002). Let us hope that not only in some other world will The Separation be found.
