Just finished
The Islanders by Christopher Priest.
Odd meta-novel. Part gazette, part almanac, part semi-linked short story/essay collection that hangs together particularly well, although in a very peculiar way. Another one of those books I personally like that you'll either love or hate. Hard to classify as to subject or style. For lack of a better word, I'd call it "experimental."
On the surface it's a guidebook to the Dream Archipelago, a vast collection of islands located in the Midway Sea, on an unnamed earth-like world. This archipelago has some unusual features such as being generally impossible to map or catalog. It also displays temporal and spatial contractions and discontinuities in seemingly random fashion.
To the north is an unnamed super-continent which is home to approximately 60 nations, several of which are constantly in a state of war with each other. To the south is another mostly arctic super-continent named
Sudmaieure.
Sudmaieure is uninhabited. It's only use is to serve as a battleground for various warring northern nations who would prefer to conduct their hostilities with each other outside their geographic borders in order to avoid civilian casualties and damage to their infrastructure and cities. One feature of the Dream Archipelago is the constant coming and goings of warships and troop transports shuttling young military forces and frightening warmaking technologies to the hot wars being conducted in the southern continent. It is generally believed that the troops who are sent there seldom return - although even that, like everything else in this book, is not an established fact.
The Archipelago is officially neutral by covenant, and remains out of the northern conflicts. Although that doesn't stop various northern nations from occupying, annexing, or establishing bases at will wherever they feel the need - something the island nations protest vehemently but basically have no power to prevent - any more than they can the mysterious drone flights (ostensibly for mapping purposes) that are seen everywhere in the archipelago - although nobody really knows what they're up there for.
Inside this framework, anything and everything goes. Some sections read like a tour guide for a particular island. Several are disjointed pieces of larger tales that straddle various islands or characters the reader meets along the way. All in all, a crazy jigsaw puzzle of impressions, narrative, and character development.
I don't know whether this book is an allegory, simply brilliant, or just Christopher Priest using up his collection of snippets and story pieces which he never expanded into full novels. But whatever it is, I found it a really enjoyable albeit
different sort of book. And I was actually disappointed when I reached the end. First, because I really enjoyed the journey the book took me on. And second, because I still had so many intriguing questions left unanswered.
If you're the sort who demands closure and a general 'tidying up' by the end of a book you'll really be annoyed by this one.
Publisher's Weekly had this to say:
British novelist Priest (The Prestige) creates a mind-bending, head-scratching book (already much lauded in the U.K.) that pretends to be a gazetteer of the Dream Archipelago, uncountable islands spread around a world whose temporal and spatial anomalies make such a project futile. The dispassionate descriptions of separate islands include odd references out of which it's possible to begin assembling a cast of characters: maniac artists, social reformers, murderers, scientific researchers, and passionate lovers. Some of these categories overlap, and all the actors are maddeningly fragmented, apt to fade away or flash intensely to life. Interpolated bits of directly personal narratives sometimes clarify and sometimes muddy the story (or stories), while uncanny events struggle to escape the gazetteers' avowedly objective control and Priest's elegant, cool prose. The result is wonderfully fascinating, if occasionally frustrating, and entirely unforgettable.[
Not for everyone. But highly recommended.
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