The Affirmation (SF) - Christopher Priest ****

Defining science fiction is tricky. The most obvious way this interesting novel is SF is the catchall ‘it’s by an SF author’, which is why I presume it made its way onto the SF Masterworks list. Generally acclaimed as one of the much-missed Christopher Priest’s best books, at its simplest The Affirmation can be seen as the musings of the mentally ill Peter Sinclair, whose attempt to construct a better life by writing himself a fictional autobiography gradually results in a loss of awareness of what is and isn’t real.

What makes it an exceptional novel is that its structure very cleverly takes the reader into the relationship between memory and reality, exploring what is real if memory can no longer be relied on. As such it is extremely clever and sophisticated. Where it falls down a little is in engagement with the reader.

If this book is an affirmation of anything, it’s that old storytelling distinction between showing and telling. The Affirmation is almost pure tell as Sinclair, both in his ‘real’ and ‘imagined’ life tells us what happened (or didn’t) and how he feels about it. It’s arguably essential for a novel that is entirely about how imagining and writing something down gives it a kind of reality. But it leaves the reader a touch detached at all times. One of the cover comments refers to a ‘dream-like’ quality - and it’s very difficult to get truly engaged with someone else’s dreams.

Having written the review and looking back at a couple of other reviews I’ve written of more recent Priest books (The Affirmation dates back to 1981), both for Airside and An American Story I remarked that they were only really science fiction because Priest was writing them. This may sound a negative, but actually it is for me a better approach than Iain Banks took in keeping his SF (Iain M.) and general fiction (Iain) novels entirely separate. By not making a clear distinction, Priest will hopefully have lead people who avoid SF to realise it’s far more than talking squids in space, and those who won’t read anything else to realise that literary fiction isn’t always dull and worthy.

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