donn@utah-gr.UUCP (Donn Seeley) (01/14/85)
I recently read THE MAN WHOSE TEETH WERE ALL EXACTLY ALIKE by Philip K Dick, which is an excellent novel that has been disgracefully neglected. When I came upon Christopher Priest's THE AFFIRMATION (Arena, London, c1981, L2.50 -- this is a 1983 British trade paperback) I was struck by how inevitably Dickian the book seemed, especially in the light of TEETH. TEETH tries to be a 'mainstream' novel about the 'little universes' we all live in; its sf aftertaste made it unpublishable at the time it was written, in 1960, and Dick was driven to give up on mainstream writing (his next novel was THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE). There are certainly some superficial similarities between the novels. THE AFFIRMATION has been billed as 'mainstream' fiction (a bit of a joke -- the cover is very careful never to mention the words 'science fiction', although no experienced reader would fail to notice its sf nature), and it also has failed to find an American publisher; I understand the experience has left Priest somewhat bitter. The careful prose and the distinctly English sensibility of THE AFFIRMATION are quite different from Dick's work, however. Yet at a deep level there are consistencies: if I say that the psychology of THE AFFIRMATION is like TEETH and the philosophy is like UBIK, perhaps you'll get a feeling for what I mean. Peter Sinclair's breakup with his girlfriend has left him deeply disturbed with himself. His image of himself is losing definition, and as a defense he decides to write his autobiography, hoping to rationalize his life, to give it theme and structure. Soon he discovers that his own memory is insufficient to reproduce his life -- when he writes about it, he finds that the events seem to have happened to another person, the details threaten to trap him and prevent him from characterizing the grand metaphors in his existence. So he decides to fictionalize: he will create a new universe for his narrative, one that will have correspondences to his own but which he can shape at will: he will write himself into existence. After a while we detect that something is wrong, however, and an accumulation of little discrepancies lead us to wonder whether the narrator is entirely sane, and worse, who is imagining who... An added twist, for those who know Priest's work, is that the alternate world which Peter Sinclair 'creates' is the same as the Dream Archipelago in which a number of Priest's stories are set. Although Priest tells us (in the introduction to AN INFINITE SUMMER, a superb collection) that the Dream Archipelago stories are not 'linked', it's hard to avoid wondering about the connection between THE AFFIRMATION and the story 'The Negation', especially when the latter features an author who has written a novel titled THE AFFIRMATION. I liked THE AFFIRMATION, although I suspect that another reading will change some of my ideas about it... Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept donn@utah-cs.arpa 40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn