The Fascination
Airside by Christopher Priest
When Chris died, I was reading Airside. I put this piece on my website where my hosting provider promptly lost it. It was for the best, since in my grief—Chris taught me writing in a Clarion-style workshop doing my mid-teens where I met some of my oldest friends and established a relationship with Chris himself from Pewsey to Hastings to Bute, on and off until 2022—I said one or two silly things. As you do. Although this little essay mentions the novel’s end, I don’t think it “spoils” it. This from one who never reads a word of any review until he has already read the book recommended. I do recommend Airside. Go read it. Also the Ballard book he was working on at the time of his death, to which I am so looking forward.
Christopher Priest’s final novel is named for the airport zone beyond which exists only atmosphere and vapour.
Airside. Outside of our sovereign inside.
It is the story of once-famous Hollywood actress Jeanette Marchand, whose public beauty and domestic pain made it impossible for her to escape in her own country in the 1940s, but who may, at a British airport, vanish without a trace. Justin Farmer is a boy in Manchester when Marchand disappears, one whose obsessive and systematic nature latches onto both film and aircraft.
Paul Kincaid has pointed out that “Farmer is the most Priest-like character to have appeared in any of Priest’s novels”[i]. Of course—of course not.
Airside’s plot flirts in some of its turns with a story written by any other science fiction writer that might satisfy content generation, but Christopher Priest was plying his own way well beyond the manufactory for many decades. It is also well beyond the novels of men of his generation which have been called postmodern, among other things. It’s really good writing. There are cheeky moments where the reader believes Justin’s story might resolve conventionally. Priest’s prose stands back from its subject, paces regularly, leaving spaces, lulling the reader into average expectations while all the while the author has been moving partitions around and altering lighting and angles. Pages go by and before you know you’re somewhere the ordinary words make poetry. The most un-Priest-like accusation I could make.
The novel form in Priest’s hands is itself an excuse to write up to a sequence of words which would make no sense without the previous tens of thousands of words, but which glow away from the pages with a plain truth it has taken millions of others piled up beneath author and reader to scramble upon.
I’ve been reading them for about fifty years[ii]. Priest’s novels have always revolved around an image of the infinite, or perhaps heading toward the infinite like the city Earth in Inverted World. Since Indoctrinaire and Fugue for a Darkening Island, the planet has changed yet is the same, only thinner. There is even a book with “infinite” in the title. Priest’s work moved very quickly from what that might have been identified with SFF movements such as the New Wave and publications such as New Worlds, to novels outstanding for originality and seriousness. Even The Space Machine—HG Wells pastiche which as a teenager and something of a stylistic snob I regarded as Priest breaking out of Priest but which in retrospect was just the author breaking further into Priestliness—is much more than a romp, arguably the origin of a rigorous and yet still frolicsome Steampunk and making real postmodern comment on the genre with which Priest’s work always maintained an ambivalent relationship.
For all Priest’s personal affection for the science fiction fantasy communities, his relationship with a range of genres and cliques, his relationship with their conventions, is broader-based in its fantasy and at once more factual than genre science, leading him out of genre, including the “literary” one, and into a place with potential to continue to influence not merely his originating fields but, through The Prestige and The Space Machine, The Adjacent, and his various Dream Archipelago stories, a much broader realm.
Priest, I would maintain, was that denim-clad beast rising from genre wetland, “storyteller,” where the magic of a printed stretch of pages comes from the author’s conspiratorial “plotting” in the devious sense of the word as much from the ideas and literary forms and stylistic twerking. This is what has helped Priest’s reputation for metafictional trickery in a way matched only in the great practitioners of it.
It isn’t enough to cleverly comment on the art of fiction and its history and connections to other art forms, to play an old song; Priest’s work depends from his connections with other art in a way completely integrated with his characters and places. Priest was always as at work on the reader’s expectation of what was about to happen or should happen in a story as by what he found himself fascinated.
I can still see his eyes glittering with the joke, one often taken so seriously it took on greater proportions than the confines of a novel. Or a movie.
Not just geekery, those Priest interests in flight, photography, and stage magic, all partake of the miraculous. In Airside, Justin Farmer keeps a card catalogue of every film he has seen and runs into trouble when he attempts to catalogue his first relationship. It is not mentioned whether Justin continues this practise in his romantic life. Certainly he destroys this early assembly with the determination, “Never again. Never.” And yet his follow-through on Jeanette Marchand’s disappearance is quietly persistent and arguably all-absorbing in the finish.
In scenes echoing the films his character reviews throughout the book, Justin Farmer enters the world of Jeanette Marchand, lands on whose far side lie uncertainty and alarm, whose border anxiety is managed by unseen and incomprehensible forces ministering according to scripts the passengers cannot share.
Part of the enigma, brand names are points of reference when the globalised and novelty-based architecture dissolves a sense of sovereignty to place or one’s body. Such logos and shapes are superficial but familiar, at least on the face. Christopher Priest has always seen through his own industry’s branding and travelators and boarding pass Cerberuses.
His work has taken appealing ideas—invisible man, alternate WWII, professional magician secret, bizarre topology—and led them to never-predictable conclusions. Airside is no exception. The glamorous combines with its opposite, locating the birth of the “classic” magazine science fiction and its fandom in a nervous Edwardian reaction to the corners of the planet shrinking, and as the mystery origin story for this global rather systematised production mythology we now cannot avoid. One more incarnation of “end of history” fight and flight at the same time.
Priest wrote at book-length caustic on the deceptive moneymaking patter of fandom. Yet to the end of his life he remained a cheerful participant in fandom’s amateur public expression. Ready with a laugh.
The shiny belly of the aircraft, or its shadow, or its descent into fire, stands in for the looming of real nature always ready to break with a climate-led, water-dependent shit-crash into our sterile profit-maximised and yet puffed-up baggage roundabout of entertainment, our peach veneer of luxury without real legroom: the moment of maximum vertigo for me in this novel concerns the boarding gate tunnel repetition of posters of tourists enjoying themselves in manufactured paradises.
And relief from that, however illusory this also might be, takes us back into coherent story, where we expect and want a “solution”, however qualified and ironic.
Justin reflected that being conducted through a terminal in this semi-official way temporarily removed the feeling of dysfunction. The one mixed blessing allowed to passengers waiting in a terminal, the false and restricted freedom to walk or wander around, was replaced by a sense of purpose, motion, transportation. No options existed. Was this a key to understanding? The solution to the enigma? The elevator halted. The journey resumed. The walls were the same, so were the advertisements.
A mystery is perhaps solved and Justin and his partner Matty, a writer with professional interests lending her an x-ray view into his obsessions, if not a collaborative fascination over them, must satisfy themselves with Jeanette Marchand’s new location, somewhere beyond their current movable partitions.
Such an ending could have been perfunctory.
It could have been Concrete Island and not a novel in which this appears:
She disbelieved in coincidence. The circle of connections, double-headed arrows like arms pointing towards each other, a symbol of a loose friendly hug, the names made into a never-ending link. For Justin that day in the old cemetery was the first tentative confession of Matty’s love scribbled on the title page of an old book, or the approach of love, or its likelihood. Or its truth. That warm summer’s day on the bench beneath the canopy of trees—that was when he had Matty had begun their lives together.
We read shortly afterwards about “a mature and stable love,” as against Justin’s fannish obsession with Marchand. Priest’s planet is fractured but not entirely a crystal world.
The reason Christopher Priest has left writing and film artistry a better place than he found them is that in a career across six decades he maintained a story-based relationship with his reader, an unwavering gaze upon his own and others’ human natures, and work always firmly Christopher Priest no matter the influence.
Playfully, Priest’s characters have departed without confirmed arrival, into the clouds as, unlike their pages’ author, human being Christopher Mackenzie Priest has done as well.
Christopher Priest
14 July 1943-2 February 2024
[i] https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/tag/christopher-priest/
[ii] I have not read Paul Kincaid’s book on Priest, which is very un-Voermans of me, but I suppose now I can.