“An adult is in charge,” I thought while reading ‘The Separation’ by Christopher Priest.

On the news of his recent death, I moved a few of his novels towards the top of my unread pile, and ‘The Separation’ was the first that I hit. On starting, I wondered why I had not read it earlier given that I have always been interested in the Second World War, and started reading more widely about it in 1995. Perhaps it was the blurb announcing in the first sentence that the novel involved twin brothers and sometimes I react against writers banging on about the same thing (but then of course read certain writers obsessively in search of some particular ‘same thing’) – imagine if the blurb had been truly honest and referred to identical twins. That is not a good reason – a quote I read from JG Ballard the other day said “…as a writer all I do is to follow my own obsessions, whatever they may be – car crashes or the media landscape or Ronald Reagan … “.

Perhaps it is because Priest makes demands of one – not a lot, but still a demand. As I read, I forced myself to slow down. This is not about the quick fix of a lot of sf, to be gulped down before searching for the next thing. There was one scene of rich description that I found myself racing through, my eyes charging to get to whatever was going to advance the action, such as there was, and I internally yelled Stop! And I was rewarded with the best scene of Blitzed London that for all my reading, fictional and non-, that I have come across, with well chosen incidental descriptions of destroyed streets and trudging through the outflow from broken water pipes. As far as I could be, I was there.

The description in this novel is vivid and the detail is terrific. Not detail in any pedantic, bogging-down or Wikipedia-hoovering sense, but that real world building that is one of the joys of great science fiction. It makes no difference that the building here is of a world that actually existed. Simple things that would be glossed-over in the hands of a lesser writer, such as an observer at an airfield noting the aircraft waiting on a red-green signal before they advanced; the canvas slung seats in a particular aeroplane; the detail of delayed and broken journeys using war time public transport; and all of the detail of flying a bomber over occupied Europe. It could all be wrong of course – I doubt it, but it could be – but that doesn’t matter as much because it is convincing.

I say a world that actually existed, but that is one of the questions of the novel, as we open in world where Britain and Germany settled peace terms in 1941. We later journey with a character who learns that clarity and vividness are no guarantee of reality. After the initial otherwordly (literally) hiccough, we are firmly set for a while in the world we know, starting with the 1936 Berlin Olympics, an important anchoring for a novel of such ambiguity and uncertainty. Also important is the plausibility of every part, set up in plain sight so we see how it is made, reminding us that our world did not have to be the way that it is. I remind my children that to them, Germany is a country, whereas I grew up knowing two Germanies, and of course before 1871 a reference to German was to a people or a culture, not a state. For us the past of 5 minutes ago is long-settled history.

Priest was totally in control in this book. For a novel of competing realities and shifting truths and completely about uncertainty and ambiguity, I never felt that the writer slipped about. Today if something like the multiverse was used in a story, certainly in a film, there would be a great deal of gee-whizzery and references to alternative lines. Here, despite the title of ‘The Separation’, there is merging and overflow and brief intersection. There is a lovely Fortean no such building at this address early on. Towards the end, he even dares (and succeeds, in my opinion) with a version of “And then he woke up.” which consistent with the rest of the book, resolves little. And most importantly, none of it is a gimmick, or if it is, it is very far from only being a gimmick. This is a novel of character(s) and lived experience, so often missing in SF. Through all the playing with identity and the versions of the twin brothers and their several separate fates, we see the experience of humanity in WW2: victim & aggressor, pacifist & warrior, those at the front & the home-front experience. We see the ongoing anxiety, the boredom, the waste of time as people are stuck and years pass by in what is among other things, an excellent novel of the Second World War. Priest was his own writer of course, so I mean no disrespect when I say I found enjoyments in this book that reminded me of enjoyments I have gained from the best of say Philip Dick, Brian Aldiss, Len Deighton and Anthony Burgess.

This book was written over 20 years ago, and won the Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards for Best Novel, so it obviously needs no plugging from me. So why am I writing this when I don’t write reviews? Christopher Priest died earlier this year as I said above, so this is my inept attempt at a nod in his direction. Also, because the novel worked in ways that good novels do – it forced me to stop and pay attention; it was solid but not stolid; it was firm and controlled and precise and anchored in dealing with dreams, ambiguity and shifting reality; and I am still thinking of it after finishing, and not just moving onto the next quick fix.