The Adjacent

With just under one hundred pages left to go in Christopher Priest's new novel, readers come upon a chapter titled "Closure." I assumed this was Priest having a bit of fun, since closure is not a familiar trait of his fiction. The only other Priest novel I have read is The Islanders. It takes place in a realm known as the Dream Archipelago, is organized as a gazetteer, and leaves the reader pleasantly at sea with regards to most of the dozen or so narrative balls Priest keeps in the air. By comparison, The Adjacent might seem almost straightforward. The story is spread across about 150 years and at least two contingent universes. A handful of characters seem to be variations on themselves, whether they are living during World War I, World War II, or in the near future Islamic Republic of Great Britain -- a future marked by catastrophic climate change and continual terrorist attacks. There is also a detour to the Dream Archipelago of Priest's previous novel.

This is a love story, but the romance is disturbed by the Perturbative Adjacent Field theory, a leap in quantum physics whose great promise has been weaponized within a year of its announcement. Priest works in elements of stage magic, the Nazi invasion of Poland, some pretty good sex scenes, and a nightmarish vision of bureaucracy in a time that Britain has come to realize it is fighting a war it cannot win. And even among all the loose ends he reaches an emotionally satisfying final scene.