Book review: The Affirmation, Christopher Priest (1981)

This complex masterpiece has more layers than a filo pastry and in style and substance resembles the brilliant movie ‘Donnie Darko’ from 2001. The movie was a sleeper, ignored critically and failing at the box office until its cult status led to delayed acclaim. Priest’s brilliant novel certainly deserves to be better-known and has probably been hampered in its ascendance to notoriety by the fact that its value is discounted because it is a genre work, a work of science fiction. The other work that this novel resembles are the novels of Haruki Murakami, the Japanese novelist who also writes speculative fiction. There is something about Priest’s hero Peter Sinclair that feels similar to Murakami’s oddball outsiders, who live on the fringes of normal society in Japan’s sprawling megalopolis of Tokyo.

In Priest’s novel, a young man named Peter Sinclair is faced one day with what he thinks is a suicide attempt by his girlfriend Gracia. The event comes on the back of a series of other shocks, including the death of his father, his being made redundant at his workplace (he works as a chemist), and his being evicted from his apartment. One day during this period he meets with an old family friend named Edwin Miller, who agrees to let Peter live in a dilapidated house he owns near the Welsh border in the shire of Hereford. Peter moves his few belongings to the house promising to repair it so that Edwin and his wife can move in at some unspecified point in the future. Once ensconced, Peter starts to write a kind of biography.

He is unhappy with it, however, and makes a second draft, changing the referents and the style, and then a third. This time, he creates a narrative that is completely divorced from lived reality. It is about a world where there is a northern continent named Faiandland with to the south a large sea dotted with innumerable islands. In this place he meets a young woman named Seri and things happen to him that had no connection, except for their larger truth, with reality.

Felicity, Peter’s sister, arrives unannounced one day to find that instead of looking after the house, he has been living in squalor and drinking heavily. Bottles have been left all over the place and the kitchen stinks with unwashed plates. She cooks a meal for the two of them, phones the house’s owner, and drives Peter back to her own house in Sheffield where he lives for some time with her family. While there, the family goes on a trip to a place in the Pennine Hills and there Peter meets, in the carpark, Gracia. The two of them go off to a café and he decides to go back to live with her in a rent-controlled flat she had found in London.

The other strand of the book, the story of Peter Sinclair in Jethra (the name of the city he had written about in his manuscript), takes over at this point. In this world, Peter has won a lottery to be given the ability, using a special medical procedure, to live forever. To claim the prize, Peter must travel to the islands where the Lotterie’s clinic is located. Once in the islands he meets a young woman named Seri who works for the Lotterie in one of their offices. She becomes his lover and tells him that she wants to go off travelling in the islands and leave her job. It turns out that her mother had died an untimely death and her father had ineffectually bought tickets to the lottery, hoping that the treatment it gave access to would lead to his wife’s life being saved.

When Peter and Seri arrive on Collago, where the clinic is located, they meet another employee named Lareen who guides him toward the treatment that will lead to Peter being wiped clean, including his memory. She gives him a set of papers with questions on them that he is asked to answer so that he can be given back his memories after the procedure is completed by the clinic’s doctors. Instead, he convinces her to accept in their place the manuscript he has written about his past. This document however contains details of his upbringing in England, and had been one of the earlier drafts of the work he had spent time on in the house near the Welsh border.

Once the procedure is completed, Lareen and Seri help the childlike and convalescent Peter to regain his memories, relying on the cues they find in the manuscript, but they find they often have to correct it in order to make sense of it. The fiction it contains turns out to be completely unsuitable for the purpose it is being used for. Nevertheless, they press on.

Back in London, the clearly deranged Peter follows a figure he identifies as Seri through the streets and the train system of the city, ending up in the countryside on its outskirts. As he follows the fleet young woman through a sodden field he stumbles and lags behind, then finds himself on a beach on an island. He scoops out a bowl in the sand and goes to sleep. In the morning, he wakes up to find Seri swimming naked in the water. The two make love and then find their way to a town, where they buy food to eat.

You switch between the two modes of the book like this after roughly every three chapters, the two interconnected stories overlapping, forming strange consonances that are thrown up centering around the figures of Seri and Gracia. Seri is a less complicated, more normal person than the occasionally-depressed Gracia. Especially echoing with redolent meaning are the words used in the conversations that Peter has with the two women. What might seem to be a normal sort of relationship-led conversation turns out in the light of the twin narratives to have powerful secondary meanings. On one occasion, Peter turns up at Gracia’s flat. She finds he has been sleeping rough, and she cooks him a meal while he has a bath. Such mundane events take on ringing significance in this story, where the borders between what is real and what it imagined blur and fade to nothing in an instant.

There is something profound and disturbing about the ideas that this very English book provokes, but also something deeply human and wistful. Ideas about loss, memory, identity, and love roil around in a sea of larger cognates linked to history and to ethnography as Peter tries to make sense of his own mind in a world where he seems always to be an outsider. If ever there was a novel that tried to explain what it is like to live with a mental illness that involves delusions, this is it. It is fairly common knowledge today that mental illness is often accompanied by homelessness, especially with rough sleeping, so this novel feels ahead-of-its-time.

At the furthest extent of the available metatextual considerations you might choose, if you wished, to ask questions about the nature of art and about the imagination of the artist and the way fiction feeds off lived experience, but such a reach to distant districts of knowledge is not necessary if you want to get value from this strange book. It has worlds within it, and they are simply unforgettable.