The Prestige by Christopher Priest
The performer is of course not a sorcerer at all, but an actor who plays the part of a sorcerer and who wishes the audience to believe, if only temporarily, that he is in contact with darker powers. The audience, meantime, knows that what they are seeing is not true sorcery, but they suppress the knowledge and acquiesce to the selfsame wish as the performer’s. The greater the performer’s skill at maintaining the illusion, the better at this deceptive sorcery he is judged to be.
— The Prestige, page 33
Reading The Prestige is like being in the audience of a magic show. You know that you are being fooled, you just don’t know how it’s being done. So you keep reading, trying not to fall for the misdirection, thinking you have it all figured out. And then you get to the end and realize you’ve been wrong the whole time, and now you have to reread the book just to admire the way the author wove his magic.
The Prestige is the story of two stage magicians in the Victorian era, two men whose rivalry over one particular illusion extends even beyond their lifetimes. The novel reads like a classic gothic-inspired tale from Wilkie Collins or Charlotte Brontë, with hints of Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson. Written as a collection of personal diaries and journals, The Prestige unfolds illusion by illusion until the climactic ending.
A perfect novel for the dark of winter, The Prestige had me hooked from the very beginning and didn’t let go until the final page. I highly recommend this winner of the 1996 World Fantasy Award.
From Amazon:
In the smoke-and-mirrors world of Victorian music halls, two talented young stage magicians vie to be known as the best illusionist in London. Each of them performs a masterful and seemingly impossible illusion, and each is determined to unravel the secret of his rival’s trick at any cost. But what starts out as professional jealousy soon escalates into a bitter and deadly obsession whose terrible consequences will still be felt a century later by their descendants, who have their own surprising reasons for wanting to discover the truth.
The Prestige by Christopher Priest
First edition London: Touchstone, Simon and Shuster, 1995
Kindle edition: Valancourt Books, 2015
Print length: 372 pages
