By Christopher Priest
Within the smoke-and-mirrors international of Victorian track halls, gifted younger degree magicians vie to be often called the easiest illusionist in London. each one of them plays a masterful and likely very unlikely phantasm, and every is decided to solve the key of his rival’s trick at any fee. yet what begins out as specialist jealousy quickly escalates right into a sour and lethal obsession whose poor outcomes will nonetheless be felt a century later by means of their descendants, who've their very own magnificent purposes for desirous to become aware of the reality.
One of Christopher Priest’s so much acclaimed works and winner of either the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the realm myth Award, The Prestige is an ingeniously developed leisure, a masterpiece of misdirection the place not anything is what it kind of feels. Readers who've noticeable the 2006 movie version directed by way of Christopher Nolan will locate that notwithstanding the publication stocks many similarities with the motion picture, it additionally comprises many surprises, in addition to a chilling finishing that the reader won't ever see coming.
“A taut, twisting, prize-winning tale of 2 magicians and their fin-de-siècle competition that taints successive generations in their respective households. Electrifying results and a deft dealing with of mysteries and their motives (some last tantalizingly incomplete) in an without notice compelling fusion of peculiar technology and legerdemain.” – Kirkus Reviews
“Enthrallingly atypical. a delicately calculated interval variety that's remarkably reminiscent of that of the past due Robertson Davies. Priest has introduced it off with nice mind's eye and skill.” – Publishers Weekly
“Lushly set within the velvet-cloaked, smoke-and-mirrors international magic in turn-of-the-century London, this remarkable novel interweaves the sour competition and weird secrets and techniques of 2 magicians. the tale is drastically complicated but like a stunning magic act itself: a sequence of completely done illusions that construct in suspense and hassle. the result's a shock that marvelously satisfies the myriad genres that Priest has effectively controlled to merge and remodel during this eerie fictional sleight of hand.” – Entertainment Weekly
“The Prestige is a brilliantly built leisure, with a plot as uncomplicated and complex as a nest of chinese language bins … a dizzying magic express of a unique, chock-a-block with all of the props of Victorian sensation fiction.” – Washington Post
“It’s a rare functionality, his most sensible publication in years, probably his most sensible ever. hugely recommended.” – The big apple evaluation of technology Fiction
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Extra resources for The Prestige
Example text
After dinner I ask’d Isaiah to favour the world with his lost works, he said none of equal value was lost. Ezekiel said the same of his. 33 I also asked Isaiah what made him go naked and barefoot three years? he answer’d, the same that made our friend Diogenes the Grecian. I then asked Ezekiel, why he eat dung, & lay so long on his right & left side? he answer’d, the desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite; this the North American tribes practise, & is he honest who resists his genius or conscience only for the sake of present ease or gratification?
Soon we saw the stable and the church, & I took him to the altar and open’d the Bible, and lo! it was a deep pit, into which I descended driving the Angel before me; soon we saw seven houses of brick; one we enter’d; in it were a number of monkeys, baboons, & all of that species, chain’d by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but witheld by the shortness of their chains; however I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect, first coupled with & then devour’d, by plucking off first one limb and then another till the body was left a helpless trunk; this after grinning & kissing it with seeming fondness they devour’d too; and here & there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off of his own tail; as the stench terribly annoy’d us both we went 39 into the mill, & I in my hand brought the skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotles Analytics.
35 [Plates 16–17] The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in truth, the causes of its life & the sources of all activity; but the chains are, the cunning of weak and tame minds, which have power to resist energy, according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning. Thus one portion of being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring: to the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so; he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.