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Chris Marker, Christopher Priest, Guy Murchie, Jacques Tati, M. John Harrison, nina allan, Steven Spielberg
Two books, published on almost the same day, by two writers of roughly the same age who are both regarded as among the best and most important writers of the fantastic working in Britain over the last half century. Yet neither of these books could be called science fiction or fantasy, and both play (perhaps perverse) games with autobiography. I’ll come to M. John Harrison’s “anti-memoir” next, but for now I want to look at Christopher Priest’s latest novel, Airside.
The novel is structured like a mystery, a reading of the book that is encouraged by the blurb: “In 1949, Hollywood star Jeanette Marchand landed in London. No one ever saw her leave the airport. No one ever saw her again.” That, pretty efficiently, sums up the first chapter; but that is not what the book is about. As far as the mystery goes, the attentive reader will have the vital clue before they are half way through the book. But the strange disappearance of Jeanette Marchand, a Hollywood star whose fame is already in decline, is the catalyst for the novel, it is not the subject of the novel.
The subject of the novel is the unreal heterotopia that is an airport, a place that exists at a tangent to the world outside it, that is at the same moment both within and apart from the nation that enfolds it. A place where the traveller, often weary always disoriented, finds their sense of self disrupted as they await barely heard announcements and follow barely understood instructions on where they must and cannot go. It is the sort of artificially disturbed setting that lends itself to the unsettling ontologies of Priest’s best fiction. Within an airport one can get turned around so readily that it is easy to imagine oneself emerging into the Dream Archipelago or crossing into the parallel reality of The Separation. Here, however, one emerges blinking into the same reality, just not entirely sure how one got there. (And no, before anyone starts to speculate, Jeanette Marchand does not step from her Douglas DC4 into another reality. Well, not in that sense.)
And the central character (given the movie references throughout the novel, it would be tempting but inappropriate to call him the star of the show) is Justin Farmer, a film critic. Farmer is the most Priest-like character to have appeared in any of Priest’s novels. He was born only a year or two after Priest; he was raised in the same part of Cheshire where Priest grew up; and his family moved to London at the beginning of the 1960s just when Priest’s own family made the same move. There are differences, of course: Farmer went to university which Priest did not; and Farmer fell into writing for a living (in his case film reviews) far more easily than I think Priest did. But the psychological similarities are notable, and significant for the plot. Both are entranced by film (when, in 1964, Priest reviewed the magazines New Worlds and Science Fantasy, both under new editors, he coined the term “New Wave” by analogy to the French nouvelle vague films he loved). And both are fascinated by planes and flight and the associated apparatus of airports (Priest’s early reading of books like Song of the Sky by Guy Murchie fed into the frequency with which planes and airports feature in his work, for instance in The Separation, The Dream Archipelago, The Islanders, The Adjacent, An American Story and others).
Farmer’s interest in film was inspired by seeing Jeanette Marchand in some of her early films, and though he is naturally intrigued by her disappearance he is not obsessed by it. Often years seem to pass during which he barely thinks of her. But whenever an opportunity rises to investigate the case further, he is always ready, for instance when he gets to meet a German director who turns out to have been the mysterious other passenger in the first class compartment on Marchand’s last flight, though all the reports agree that he left the flight at Shannon.
Nevertheless, airports bulk large in his imagination. In a device that echoes a similar one used by Priest’s partner, Nina Allan, in her latest novel, Conquest (published only a couple of weeks before Airside), Priest intersperses his novel with a selection of Farmer’s reviews – Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Jacques Tati’s Playtime, Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal, among others – which tend to revolve around the alienating atmosphere of an airport. Late in the novel there is a moment in which Priest suddenly seems to remember that he is a science fiction writer, and writes passages in which airports become scenes of dislocation, a disturbance in the sense of self. The setting is Seoul, where signs in a language Farmer doesn’t know add to the sense of being lost. There is a haunting intrusion of the fantastic when Farmer, having wandered in increasing desperation along featureless corridors that seem to transport him effortlessly from landside to airside and back again, falls asleep in the corridor only to wake and find that his flight is landing at his destination. It is tempting to read this dislocation as entirely psychological, an effect of tiredness and desperation; but it is one with the increasingly disturbing presentation of airport terminals in Farmer’s reviews. Indeed at one point he seems to find himself on the open observation platform that featured in La Jetée.
It may be no more than a suggestion of the fantastic, but though it is very well done, reminiscent of the very best of his novels, I still found it perhaps the least satisfying part of the novel, mostly because I was enjoying the remorseless realism of the book to this point. It is essentially an historical novel (the most recent scenes barely bring us into this century), and Priest’s style, the simple declarative sentences that don’t strive for effect, make the past seem clear and present. (The only significant error I spotted was a reference to the Los Angeles Dodgers seven or eight years before the team actually moved from Brooklyn.) It is a startling change of pace for Priest, but it works extremely well. And the overwhelming effect of the novel is the uneasy sense that in an airport one is so attenuated that it is easy to simply disappear.