Christopher Priest, now 73, has been quietly turning out oddly mesmerising fiction for nearly half a century but, like the protagonists of his 2005 novel The Glamour, somehow has the knack of never quite being noticed.
It is true that he has devoted admirers; he has won awards; he was on Granta’s original list of best young novelists — scraping in on age, not quality — and Christopher Nolan filmed, cleverly, his even cleverer novel The Prestige (1995), which was about Victorian illusionists and duplicity.
But though that book won both the ‘literary’ James Tait Black and the ‘genre’ World Fantasy Award, his work is not nearly as widely known or praised as it ought to be, certainly when compared with that of Amis, Barnes, Ishiguro, McEwan, Rushdie and others from 1983. The devout in Priest’s
congregation seem overwhelmingly to be science fiction and fantasy readers.
Not for the first time, their judgment is the more acute.
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