What do you think?
Rate this book
The Gradual
A new literary novel by the critically acclaimed author of The Prestige, Christopher Priest. A rich and involving tale of the creative mind, the rigours of living under war and the nature of time itself.
Alesandro grows up in Glaund, a fascist state constantly at war with a faceless opponent. His brother is sent off to war; his family is destroyed by grief. Occasionally he catches glimpses of islands in the far distance from the shore, and they feed into the music he composes—music for which he is feted. His search from his brother brings him into contact with the military leadership and suddenly he is a fugitive on the run—he seeks refuge on the islands and his endless travels take him through places and time, bringing him answers where he could not have foreseen them.
Alesandro grows up in Glaund, a fascist state constantly at war with a faceless opponent. His brother is sent off to war; his family is destroyed by grief. Occasionally he catches glimpses of islands in the far distance from the shore, and they feed into the music he composes—music for which he is feted. His search from his brother brings him into contact with the military leadership and suddenly he is a fugitive on the run—he seeks refuge on the islands and his endless travels take him through places and time, bringing him answers where he could not have foreseen them.
301 pages, Hardcover
First published September 15, 2016
About the author
Christopher Priest
119 books1,000 followersChristopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968.
He has published eleven novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction.
He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). In 2006, The Prestige was made into a major production by Newmarket Films. Directed by Christopher Nolan, The Prestige went straight to No.1 US box office. It received two Academy Award nominations. Other novels, including Fugue For a Darkening Island and The Glamour, are currently in preparation for filming.
He is Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. In 2007, an exhibition of installation art based on his novel The Affirmation was mounted in London.
As a journalist he has written features and reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Scotsman, and many different magazines.
He has published eleven novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction.
He has written drama for radio (BBC Radio 4) and television (Thames TV and HTV). In 2006, The Prestige was made into a major production by Newmarket Films. Directed by Christopher Nolan, The Prestige went straight to No.1 US box office. It received two Academy Award nominations. Other novels, including Fugue For a Darkening Island and The Glamour, are currently in preparation for filming.
He is Vice-President of the H. G. Wells Society. In 2007, an exhibition of installation art based on his novel The Affirmation was mounted in London.
As a journalist he has written features and reviews for The Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Scotsman, and many different magazines.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 122 reviews
May 23, 2020
Spiritual Relativity
The Gradual is an allegory, and a fairly complex one at that. As with any allegory, it remains impenetrably obscure without some hint as to the key for its interpretation. I think the key here is medieval monasticism, specifically Gregorian Chant as the undisclosed but barely hidden theme of the book.
The first clue is of course the title itself. It refers to a ‘time gradient’ which affects travellers as they move about in Priest’s decidedly dialectical world from evil and ugliness to peace and tranquil beauty. But a Gradual is also a liturgical book of the Catholic Mass. it typically contains only the musical parts of the ceremony and not those that are merely spoken. Most of the music is ancient and anonymous, passed down and progressively modified with no accreditation by generations of monks. The music is written in Gregorian notation which uses four lines and three spaces as the range of average, probably untrained, voices without instrumentation. The protagonist of The Gradual, Sussken, is a composer who travels from his homeland to the Dream Archipelago, first for business, then for refuge.
The set of four lines in Chant (rather than the five in modern music) is a musical stave upon which the square-shaped notes are placed. Seen from a distance, this is the impression one gets of the islands of the Dream Archipelago floating in the Midway Sea. According to Sussken, “Every island had a different note.” In fact his initial musical inspiration comes from the three islands he can see from his room on the mainland of Glaund - corresponding of course to the three spaces in Gregorian notation. For Sussken, “The islands formed a pattern, a format, a structure in the way I understood structure: movements or parts that while being single and separate made up a whole. Islands, I had thought, would be like a sonata... “
A stave, of course, is also a kind of staff or pole. In The Gradual, the stave is a small staff which is an essential tool for managing the time variability in the Dream Archipelago. Time is lost or gained, seemingly randomly, as one travels eastward into the ‘score’ of the islands. Sussken is mystified by the absence of a reliable time standard: “Every day my watch appeared to lose or gain time –one day it gained four hours, or lost eight. I was not sure which.” After his first trip, he experiences a sort of Einsteinian Relativity - his nine weeks away are almost two years elapsed at home.
The most distinctive feature of Gregorian chant is that it has no definite time signature, no fixed rhythm. So, for example, Chant can be slowed to a lyrical lilt or speeded up to a rapid clip depending on liturgical circumstances and the whims of the choir master. Perhaps the most striking modern version of this is Vaughn Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in which the time of the music seems constantly and unpredictably to expand and contract. Just as does time for Sussken in the Dream Archipelago.
At the port of entry on every island of the Archipelago (all inter-island transport is via ship), a group of young ‘adepts’ awaits and scrutinizes arriving passengers. These monk-like adepts, both men and women, claim to have exclusive knowledge of how to adjust inadvertent time distortions for those who suffer from them - much like the clerical claim to intermediate between God and human beings. The adepts generally do not intrude upon the privacy of travellers but once they have found a willing mark, they solicit for ‘donations’ at every opportunity. They carry small etching tools as a sort of mark of office, not unlike the habit and crucifix of a medieval monk.
Once approach to the adepts is made, out of a kind of spiritual turmoil brought about by the fluctuations in time, the process of adjustment is highly liturgical. It involves the constant presence of, and attention to, the stave, upon which the adepts make arcane notations. ‘Clients’ of the adepts, upon making a necessary donation, are required to follow precise directions without question in a quasi-mystical ritual which reverses any previous ‘tidal aberrations’ of time they have experienced. Whether superstition or artful science, the process does appear to yield results: clocks become synchronized.
Throughout this ritual ‘adjustment’ the client is required to carry all the baggage which has been taken on the journey into the Archipelago. Baggage is cumbersome and tiring to lug around, thus provoking consideration of what is really important and necessary to one’s existence. Clothes, books, and other personal possessions are progressively dumped as it becomes clear they are not worth the effort of possession. In monastic jargon, this is equivalent to a novitiate, a testing of the intention and suitability of the candidate for inclusion in the spiritual community, and as Sussken realises “a purging of the old.”
Glaund, Sussken’s continental homeland, is a cold, northern, industrialised state in a more or less permanent war with its closest neighbour. It is ruled by a military junta which conscripts a large portion of each generation to fight endless battles on an obscure continent - a sort of distant military chess board which spares the productive capacity and civilian population of the home countries. Think Vietnam, or Iraq, or Syria. This is more or less the modern secular world and its material obsessiveness.
The Dream Archipelago, on the other hand, is composed of thousands of independent island states which live in harmony with each other. They have adopted but adapted a definitely medieval form of polity: “... the ways of a benign government that had devised a modern way of operating the ancient feudal laws of the islands.” Sussken’s artistic creativity is seduced by this alternative reality: “It was in every sense a real world away, halfway around the globe, and past concerns seemed for the time being minor and irrelevant. The music I lived for was finding fruition. I wanted to stay in these islands forever.”
The islands are climatically temperate, tranquilly sociable, environmentally aware and try to maintain good but arm’s length relations with the warring continental states. “The Dream Archipelago was the largest geographical feature in the world, comprising literally millions of islands, but it was closed to warmongers.” It is not much of a stretch to consider each island as a large monastic establishment whose principle threat is the militaristic and economic ambitions of the secular world. The monastic theme is made almost explicit in referencing “the sense of enclosure created by the wealth of islands.” Henry VIII certainly noticed both the enclosure and the wealth of the medieval equivalents.
Aside from permitting both warring parties a bit of R&R in their paradisiacal enclaves, the islands have two primary defenses against the secular powers: the time variability, a spiritual condition really, which only the islanders know how to manage; and the fact that there are no maps or charts of the entire Archipelago which might allow an invasion. This theme of hidden or arcane knowledge lends a certain gnostic flavor to the islands which is not inconsistent with the earliest desert monasteries. But like those early monastic establishments, the islands also change, and not necessarily for the better. Even paradise has its dialectical flaws.
I could be wrong in any of the detail suggesting the connection between The Gradual and medieval monasticism; but I think the overall conclusion is sound. The book, for me, has echoes of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion among other allegorical fantasies. Certainly this is not the only possible key to Priest’s tale, but I hope it’s a productive one.
The Gradual is an allegory, and a fairly complex one at that. As with any allegory, it remains impenetrably obscure without some hint as to the key for its interpretation. I think the key here is medieval monasticism, specifically Gregorian Chant as the undisclosed but barely hidden theme of the book.
The first clue is of course the title itself. It refers to a ‘time gradient’ which affects travellers as they move about in Priest’s decidedly dialectical world from evil and ugliness to peace and tranquil beauty. But a Gradual is also a liturgical book of the Catholic Mass. it typically contains only the musical parts of the ceremony and not those that are merely spoken. Most of the music is ancient and anonymous, passed down and progressively modified with no accreditation by generations of monks. The music is written in Gregorian notation which uses four lines and three spaces as the range of average, probably untrained, voices without instrumentation. The protagonist of The Gradual, Sussken, is a composer who travels from his homeland to the Dream Archipelago, first for business, then for refuge.
The set of four lines in Chant (rather than the five in modern music) is a musical stave upon which the square-shaped notes are placed. Seen from a distance, this is the impression one gets of the islands of the Dream Archipelago floating in the Midway Sea. According to Sussken, “Every island had a different note.” In fact his initial musical inspiration comes from the three islands he can see from his room on the mainland of Glaund - corresponding of course to the three spaces in Gregorian notation. For Sussken, “The islands formed a pattern, a format, a structure in the way I understood structure: movements or parts that while being single and separate made up a whole. Islands, I had thought, would be like a sonata... “
A stave, of course, is also a kind of staff or pole. In The Gradual, the stave is a small staff which is an essential tool for managing the time variability in the Dream Archipelago. Time is lost or gained, seemingly randomly, as one travels eastward into the ‘score’ of the islands. Sussken is mystified by the absence of a reliable time standard: “Every day my watch appeared to lose or gain time –one day it gained four hours, or lost eight. I was not sure which.” After his first trip, he experiences a sort of Einsteinian Relativity - his nine weeks away are almost two years elapsed at home.
The most distinctive feature of Gregorian chant is that it has no definite time signature, no fixed rhythm. So, for example, Chant can be slowed to a lyrical lilt or speeded up to a rapid clip depending on liturgical circumstances and the whims of the choir master. Perhaps the most striking modern version of this is Vaughn Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in which the time of the music seems constantly and unpredictably to expand and contract. Just as does time for Sussken in the Dream Archipelago.
At the port of entry on every island of the Archipelago (all inter-island transport is via ship), a group of young ‘adepts’ awaits and scrutinizes arriving passengers. These monk-like adepts, both men and women, claim to have exclusive knowledge of how to adjust inadvertent time distortions for those who suffer from them - much like the clerical claim to intermediate between God and human beings. The adepts generally do not intrude upon the privacy of travellers but once they have found a willing mark, they solicit for ‘donations’ at every opportunity. They carry small etching tools as a sort of mark of office, not unlike the habit and crucifix of a medieval monk.
Once approach to the adepts is made, out of a kind of spiritual turmoil brought about by the fluctuations in time, the process of adjustment is highly liturgical. It involves the constant presence of, and attention to, the stave, upon which the adepts make arcane notations. ‘Clients’ of the adepts, upon making a necessary donation, are required to follow precise directions without question in a quasi-mystical ritual which reverses any previous ‘tidal aberrations’ of time they have experienced. Whether superstition or artful science, the process does appear to yield results: clocks become synchronized.
Throughout this ritual ‘adjustment’ the client is required to carry all the baggage which has been taken on the journey into the Archipelago. Baggage is cumbersome and tiring to lug around, thus provoking consideration of what is really important and necessary to one’s existence. Clothes, books, and other personal possessions are progressively dumped as it becomes clear they are not worth the effort of possession. In monastic jargon, this is equivalent to a novitiate, a testing of the intention and suitability of the candidate for inclusion in the spiritual community, and as Sussken realises “a purging of the old.”
Glaund, Sussken’s continental homeland, is a cold, northern, industrialised state in a more or less permanent war with its closest neighbour. It is ruled by a military junta which conscripts a large portion of each generation to fight endless battles on an obscure continent - a sort of distant military chess board which spares the productive capacity and civilian population of the home countries. Think Vietnam, or Iraq, or Syria. This is more or less the modern secular world and its material obsessiveness.
The Dream Archipelago, on the other hand, is composed of thousands of independent island states which live in harmony with each other. They have adopted but adapted a definitely medieval form of polity: “... the ways of a benign government that had devised a modern way of operating the ancient feudal laws of the islands.” Sussken’s artistic creativity is seduced by this alternative reality: “It was in every sense a real world away, halfway around the globe, and past concerns seemed for the time being minor and irrelevant. The music I lived for was finding fruition. I wanted to stay in these islands forever.”
The islands are climatically temperate, tranquilly sociable, environmentally aware and try to maintain good but arm’s length relations with the warring continental states. “The Dream Archipelago was the largest geographical feature in the world, comprising literally millions of islands, but it was closed to warmongers.” It is not much of a stretch to consider each island as a large monastic establishment whose principle threat is the militaristic and economic ambitions of the secular world. The monastic theme is made almost explicit in referencing “the sense of enclosure created by the wealth of islands.” Henry VIII certainly noticed both the enclosure and the wealth of the medieval equivalents.
Aside from permitting both warring parties a bit of R&R in their paradisiacal enclaves, the islands have two primary defenses against the secular powers: the time variability, a spiritual condition really, which only the islanders know how to manage; and the fact that there are no maps or charts of the entire Archipelago which might allow an invasion. This theme of hidden or arcane knowledge lends a certain gnostic flavor to the islands which is not inconsistent with the earliest desert monasteries. But like those early monastic establishments, the islands also change, and not necessarily for the better. Even paradise has its dialectical flaws.
I could be wrong in any of the detail suggesting the connection between The Gradual and medieval monasticism; but I think the overall conclusion is sound. The book, for me, has echoes of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion among other allegorical fantasies. Certainly this is not the only possible key to Priest’s tale, but I hope it’s a productive one.
October 5, 2018
A mind expander and a mind blower. After reading and reviewing Inverted World, The Affirmation, The Prestige, The Islanders, The Space Machine, The Glamour, I was wondering if Christopher Priest would continue to amaze and confound. He did! Matter of fact, The Gradual might count as one of the most memorable, magical and beautiful novels I’ve encountered. Here are a number of highlights:
Island World: We are on a planet very much like Earth with our familiar modern technology, things like automobiles, computers, email and cell phones but with one colossal difference in geography: rather than continents, there are thousands and thousands of islands, some as large as Madagascar but most small, even tiny, spread across the oceans.
Alesandro Sussken, music man: Our first person narrator begins his story when a boy on a northern island, the Republic of Glaund. The most important part of Sandro’s life is music – he is a gifted classical composer and highly accomplished musician, playing both piano and violin. Sandro’s reflections and inspirations on everything musical adds great charm and lyricism. “The Archipelago was in my dreams, and every morning I would rise from my bed and go straight to the piano, trying to capture, define, describe, use the fleeting impressions, the unreliable memories of the music of my dreams."
Alesandro Sussken, adventurer: We follow Sandro over the course of years, exploring the islands south of Glaund, first as part of a tour group of musicians and then on his own. And his story covers the long arch of his life: we join Sandro at various points up until he is a man in his mid-fifties. One vital reason propelling his journey: discovering the fate of his long lost brother Jacj who was drafted into the army to fight in the endless, nonstop war with Faiandland, an island to the south.
Music of the Islands: Both on his home island of Glaund and on the islands to the south, music of every variety is played - classical, jazz, rock - which leads to a number of Sandro’s musing on the ways in which a creative artist's memory and inspiration are affected and shaped by a specific location. One musician Sandro attempts to seek out: a leader of a rock group, And Ante, who stole Sandro’s musical melodies and ideas for his own rock music.
Nightmares: Island paradises complete with balmy winds, pristine beaches, gentle valleys and unspoiled mountains form most but not all of this world. At one point Sandro is brought before a woman his despises, the Generalissima who has headed up a brutal, murderous junta on his home island. At another time, on his afternoon stroll on an island, he enters an empty town and witnesses a young man, probably a deserter from his unit (there are many military deserters on the islands), nearly beaten to death by soldiers and then dragged off. Like our own world, life on the islands is a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly.
Shock of the Weird – Similar to the other Christopher Priest novels I’ve read, The Gradual contains an abrupt, uncanny break from the “normal” laws of nature - at first eerie and then alarming shifts, all revolving around the clock. Sandro finds himself out of sync, either lagging behind or mysteriously moved into the future. Our first real foreshadowing of time playing games happens at one of the symphony’s rehearsals when there’s a problem with uneven tempi - the percussionists claim the orchestra was constantly slipping behind them.
Clarity: The British author’s virtuosity as a storyteller shines through in the way he presents bizarre time shifts without confusing his readers. We might think scrambling past, present and future would be baffling but it is not. Even someone like myself new to science fiction and novels of time travel, Sandro’s story is as clear as one of the island's fresh mountain streams.
Waking Dream, Nighttime Dream: Is some or all of what Sandro reports happening in everyday waking time or in dreamtime? If you are familiar with the film Body Double you have a sense as to what I’m referring. Then again, since when reading a novel we always create a moving picture in our mind of characters and setting, events and conversations, in the end, does it truly matter?
"You have to embrace the gradual, Sandro." . . . "It comes to you, but you have to surrender to it. It is not an option for you. Or for me.. It is not a creative force as we think, but a reflection of our own imaginings."
September 17, 2016
For once a highly expected novel which delivered.
First person narration from musician Sandro Sussken, native of the Glaund Republic, a military dictatorship on the Northern mainland in a permanent war with the Faianland Alliance, war that after a while moves into ritualized combat on the uninhabited Antarctic continent; but the world of the novel is the Dream Archipelago one (of The Affirmation, The Dream Archipelago collection, The Islanders and Adjacent - first and last here having dual action on Earth and there), where the huge, mysterious Archipelago, neutral, strange and protean occupies most of the world, while Glaund and Faiandland are side stories, so everything in the book ultimately relates to the Archipelago and its strangeness, while the action also mostly takes place there - some of the islands appear in the previous works which are useful to have at hand, especially The Dream Archipelago and The Islanders, though the story makes sense by itself -, some being new
Travelogue, meditation on life, fate and art, The Gradual unfolds slowly but builds tension from the first page, with the first paragraph, one for my collection of memorable openings (did a post on such on FBC a long time ago)
"I grew up in a world of music, in a time of war. The latter interfered with the former. After I became an adult, a composer, many pieces of my music were stolen, copied or rehashed by a plagiarist. I lost my brother, my wife and my parents, I became a criminal and a fugitive, I traveled among islands, I discovered the gradual. Everything affected everything else, but music was the balm, the constant.
When I went in pursuit of my tormentor, I became an inadvertent traveler in time.
Time is a gradual process – like ageing, you do not notice it happening."
Obsessed by the nearby three islands of the coast of Glaund, islands that are mysterious and forbidden, Sandro grows up with music as his main focus in life through which the constant horrors of war are kept at bay - later when the situation normalizes and the war moves far away as noted, he manages to befriend an Archipelago musician and use his growing reputation to finally travel there, only for strangeness to engulf him; and then the book really starts and it keeps moving till the ambiguous but superb ending.
Wonderful, beautifully written and impossible to put down once started, The Gradual delivered big time on my huge expectations and I highly recommend it, while noting that The Dream Archipelago and The Islanders make excellent companion pieces though are independent of the book
First person narration from musician Sandro Sussken, native of the Glaund Republic, a military dictatorship on the Northern mainland in a permanent war with the Faianland Alliance, war that after a while moves into ritualized combat on the uninhabited Antarctic continent; but the world of the novel is the Dream Archipelago one (of The Affirmation, The Dream Archipelago collection, The Islanders and Adjacent - first and last here having dual action on Earth and there), where the huge, mysterious Archipelago, neutral, strange and protean occupies most of the world, while Glaund and Faiandland are side stories, so everything in the book ultimately relates to the Archipelago and its strangeness, while the action also mostly takes place there - some of the islands appear in the previous works which are useful to have at hand, especially The Dream Archipelago and The Islanders, though the story makes sense by itself -, some being new
Travelogue, meditation on life, fate and art, The Gradual unfolds slowly but builds tension from the first page, with the first paragraph, one for my collection of memorable openings (did a post on such on FBC a long time ago)
"I grew up in a world of music, in a time of war. The latter interfered with the former. After I became an adult, a composer, many pieces of my music were stolen, copied or rehashed by a plagiarist. I lost my brother, my wife and my parents, I became a criminal and a fugitive, I traveled among islands, I discovered the gradual. Everything affected everything else, but music was the balm, the constant.
When I went in pursuit of my tormentor, I became an inadvertent traveler in time.
Time is a gradual process – like ageing, you do not notice it happening."
Obsessed by the nearby three islands of the coast of Glaund, islands that are mysterious and forbidden, Sandro grows up with music as his main focus in life through which the constant horrors of war are kept at bay - later when the situation normalizes and the war moves far away as noted, he manages to befriend an Archipelago musician and use his growing reputation to finally travel there, only for strangeness to engulf him; and then the book really starts and it keeps moving till the ambiguous but superb ending.
Wonderful, beautifully written and impossible to put down once started, The Gradual delivered big time on my huge expectations and I highly recommend it, while noting that The Dream Archipelago and The Islanders make excellent companion pieces though are independent of the book
October 26, 2016
Superb. Recreates the haunting feeling of strangeness seeming totally normal for the protagonists living in the world Christopher Priest creates effortlessly. Inverted World (70s) is still one of my all time favourites and here again there is the same delicate, subtle, pervasive otherness that seems so normal. So many authors embark on world-building with a heavy hand. They either over-explain or leave the reader totally lost. Here it is perfectly achieved, so skillfully that it seems as if this world is real and we are travelling in it ourselves. It harks back to the atmosphere of the great writers of the 60s and 70s - Sturgeon, Aldiss, Knight, Pohl, Priest and of course others of the generation that conceived "Strange Visions".
I am so tired of cloned post apocalyptic dystopias and asteroid belt/deep space/almost-but-not-quite-earthlike-but-unimaginative-planet lone-hero(ine)-against-authority adventures. This is a breath of fresh air. And so beautifully written.
There are so many themes. Contrast between a grey totalitarian mainland society and an island society with shifting rules. The main protagonist who is isolated within himself, selfish, yet desperate to express what he hears. Exploration of time, loss, searching, finding. Passive acceptance versus action. Possiblities. Always, always there are possibilities.
I am so tired of cloned post apocalyptic dystopias and asteroid belt/deep space/almost-but-not-quite-earthlike-but-unimaginative-planet lone-hero(ine)-against-authority adventures. This is a breath of fresh air. And so beautifully written.
There are so many themes. Contrast between a grey totalitarian mainland society and an island society with shifting rules. The main protagonist who is isolated within himself, selfish, yet desperate to express what he hears. Exploration of time, loss, searching, finding. Passive acceptance versus action. Possiblities. Always, always there are possibilities.
July 15, 2018
I pondered over this book for 5 months (this is how the slippery descent into being a Reader starts, where books plague your mind months after you read them...) and I still am not confident that I know what the heck was going on in the book to write a coherent review. Part of it was because the political aspect of the story bored me and I skimmed through a lot of it.
I'm shelving this to re-read. This was amazing yet I can't quite put it into words. And I thought the Adjacent was hard.
I'm shelving this to re-read. This was amazing yet I can't quite put it into words. And I thought the Adjacent was hard.
October 10, 2016
Books do not get more beautiful than this one. Everything about it is at superlative: the theme centered around fate and the meaning of art, the rich and tormented characters (even the secondary ones), the beautiful structure that takes the central character into one journey and the readers into another one (and without being too complex), the plot that makes you want to turn just one more page, the wonderful prose and style that are at the same time extremely clear and superbly rich.
And what a great opening chapter:
"I grew up in a world of music, in a time of war. The latter interfered with the former. After I became an adult, a composer, many pieces of my music were stolen, copied or rehashed by a plagiarist. I lost my brother, my wife and my parents, I became a criminal and a fugitive, I travelled among islands, I discovered the gradual. Everything affected everything else, but music was the balm, the constant.
When I went in pursuit of my tormentor, I became an inadvertent traveller in time.
Time is a gradual process – like ageing, you do not notice it happening"
And what a great opening chapter:
"I grew up in a world of music, in a time of war. The latter interfered with the former. After I became an adult, a composer, many pieces of my music were stolen, copied or rehashed by a plagiarist. I lost my brother, my wife and my parents, I became a criminal and a fugitive, I travelled among islands, I discovered the gradual. Everything affected everything else, but music was the balm, the constant.
When I went in pursuit of my tormentor, I became an inadvertent traveller in time.
Time is a gradual process – like ageing, you do not notice it happening"
March 22, 2018
The Gradual is aptly named.
Christopher Priest's 2016 novel takes its sweet time, gliding only gradually into focus, quietly insinuating itself into your synapses. There's nothing very odd about it, to start with. Alesandro Sussken begins his narration with a summary of commonplaces, common nouns that could describe many places, many lives:
Sussken's first departure from the Republic of Glaund feels like an escape—his homeland is in the grip of a military junta (eternally at war with Faiandland) that's all too similar to our own world's various totalitarian regimes. The war has already consumed his brother Jacq, and Glaund's restrictions on travel, communication and even awareness of the rest of the world mean that although Alesandro can name and even occasionally see a few of the islands in the Dream Archipelago from an upstairs window of his parents' home (on clear days, at least), he has to make up everything else about them.
This obligate fantasy does at least prompt Sussken's first popular musical composition, Dianme, which in turn leads to his being invited onto a tour of the Archipelago (the first thawing, perhaps, of Glaund's icy political climate)... and from there The Gradual gradually becomes more and more unmoored from the glum and humdrum Glaund, more and more enamored with the exotic and brightly-colored variety of the islands. You'll wonder along with Sandro at first why the ships passing between ports of the Archipelago always have two clocks side by side, showing Mutlaq Vaqt ('absolute time') and Kema Vaqt ('ship time')... but eventually this too becomes known.
Reading The Gradual is a process of revelation... one that leaves the reader feeling very strange, in the best possible way.
Christopher Priest's 2016 novel takes its sweet time, gliding only gradually into focus, quietly insinuating itself into your synapses. There's nothing very odd about it, to start with. Alesandro Sussken begins his narration with a summary of commonplaces, common nouns that could describe many places, many lives:
I grew up in a world of music, in a time of war. The latter interfered with the former. After I became an adult, a composer, many pieces of my music were stolen, copied or rehashed by a plagiarist. I lost my brother, my wife and my parents, I became a criminal and a fugitive, I travelled among islands, I discovered the gradual. Everything affected everything else, but music was the balm, the constant.From that quiet beginning, though, The Gradual takes us far away from Sussken's dour and gray homeland of Glaund (which is where, exactly? Nowhere on this Earth), on a journey—several journeys, really—through the Dream Archipelago that Priest described so well in The Islanders (a fictional gazetteer, which I read back in 2015).
—p.7
Sussken's first departure from the Republic of Glaund feels like an escape—his homeland is in the grip of a military junta (eternally at war with Faiandland) that's all too similar to our own world's various totalitarian regimes. The war has already consumed his brother Jacq, and Glaund's restrictions on travel, communication and even awareness of the rest of the world mean that although Alesandro can name and even occasionally see a few of the islands in the Dream Archipelago from an upstairs window of his parents' home (on clear days, at least), he has to make up everything else about them.
This obligate fantasy does at least prompt Sussken's first popular musical composition, Dianme, which in turn leads to his being invited onto a tour of the Archipelago (the first thawing, perhaps, of Glaund's icy political climate)... and from there The Gradual gradually becomes more and more unmoored from the glum and humdrum Glaund, more and more enamored with the exotic and brightly-colored variety of the islands. You'll wonder along with Sandro at first why the ships passing between ports of the Archipelago always have two clocks side by side, showing Mutlaq Vaqt ('absolute time') and Kema Vaqt ('ship time')... but eventually this too becomes known.
Reading The Gradual is a process of revelation... one that leaves the reader feeling very strange, in the best possible way.
February 6, 2017
I don't believe I have ever been so disappointed in a book.
When I came across Christopher Priest's new novel, THE GRADUAL, I thought two things: 1) "OMG, this guy wrote THE PRESTIGE, one of my favorite novels of all time!" and 2) "OMG, a book about a music composer who discovers time travel while traversing mysterious islands?!? THAT SOUNDS AMAZING."
What I found upon reading THE GRADUAL, however, was a novel broken in every way.
The story itself was rambling, disjointed, at times laughable and at times frustrating (and the rest of the time, just plain boring). The worldbuilding could have been brilliant, but instead Priest chose to write a sci-fi in which nothing makes sense, nothing is explained, and yet the main character never questions nonsensical plot devices that are wrecking his entire life. Furthermore, the ending made absolutely no sense and was not satisfying to the reader at all. I'm aware that Priest is a writer of ambiguous endings, but there is a difference between ambiguous and poor storytelling. THE GRADUAL is the latter.
The writing ... the writing, the writing, the writing. Priest is clearly an adept writer of fiction, and yet he made two decisions that render this book, in my opinion, almost unreadable. FIRST: he writes almost the entire novel with narration, telling the reader the story instead of showing the reader the story. Never have I ever come across such a clear example of why it is so important in fiction that the writer shows and does not tell. The reader simply does not care about these things the character is experiencing. This is the worst offender in the crimes of lazy writing! (Besides, when he wasn't narrating or telling, Priest simply wrote stilted, awkward dialogue.) SECOND: where was this guy's editor?!? I'm almost of the opinion that his editor was aware that Priest is a celebrated figure in science fiction and was therefore too afraid to touch the manuscript. Not only are the character, plot, story, and writing choices suspect at best, but it reads as if the author is writing in a foreign language. But I KNOW Priest is a good writer ... so why so many painfully awkward phrases, such a confusing lack of commas and poor use of en-dashes ... for crying out loud, there's even a grammatical error in the official SYNOPSIS of the novel that clouds the meaning of the entire through line of the book!
Ugh. I think, because I loved THE PRESTIGE so much, I may give his earlier novels another chance, despite this piece of garbage—the award-winning ones, at least.
This book seems to have quite a lot of glowing reviews, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why. THE GRADUAL is horrid in just about every single aspect. I would not recommend this to my worst enemies.
When I came across Christopher Priest's new novel, THE GRADUAL, I thought two things: 1) "OMG, this guy wrote THE PRESTIGE, one of my favorite novels of all time!" and 2) "OMG, a book about a music composer who discovers time travel while traversing mysterious islands?!? THAT SOUNDS AMAZING."
What I found upon reading THE GRADUAL, however, was a novel broken in every way.
The story itself was rambling, disjointed, at times laughable and at times frustrating (and the rest of the time, just plain boring). The worldbuilding could have been brilliant, but instead Priest chose to write a sci-fi in which nothing makes sense, nothing is explained, and yet the main character never questions nonsensical plot devices that are wrecking his entire life. Furthermore, the ending made absolutely no sense and was not satisfying to the reader at all. I'm aware that Priest is a writer of ambiguous endings, but there is a difference between ambiguous and poor storytelling. THE GRADUAL is the latter.
The writing ... the writing, the writing, the writing. Priest is clearly an adept writer of fiction, and yet he made two decisions that render this book, in my opinion, almost unreadable. FIRST: he writes almost the entire novel with narration, telling the reader the story instead of showing the reader the story. Never have I ever come across such a clear example of why it is so important in fiction that the writer shows and does not tell. The reader simply does not care about these things the character is experiencing. This is the worst offender in the crimes of lazy writing! (Besides, when he wasn't narrating or telling, Priest simply wrote stilted, awkward dialogue.) SECOND: where was this guy's editor?!? I'm almost of the opinion that his editor was aware that Priest is a celebrated figure in science fiction and was therefore too afraid to touch the manuscript. Not only are the character, plot, story, and writing choices suspect at best, but it reads as if the author is writing in a foreign language. But I KNOW Priest is a good writer ... so why so many painfully awkward phrases, such a confusing lack of commas and poor use of en-dashes ... for crying out loud, there's even a grammatical error in the official SYNOPSIS of the novel that clouds the meaning of the entire through line of the book!
Ugh. I think, because I loved THE PRESTIGE so much, I may give his earlier novels another chance, despite this piece of garbage—the award-winning ones, at least.
This book seems to have quite a lot of glowing reviews, and for the life of me I cannot figure out why. THE GRADUAL is horrid in just about every single aspect. I would not recommend this to my worst enemies.
May 9, 2018
just couldn't get into this book, the idea was good but sadly the book didn't carry it off though.
February 9, 2017
The Gradual is a further addition to Christopher Priest's suite of stories and books set in the Dream Archipelago. Prior to reading this novel my only experience of the archipelago was a brief encounter in The Adjacent (a brilliant book that deserved wider attention). Unless I'm horribly mistaken, The Gradual is the first novel since The Affirmation that's a full length narrative rather than a series of short stories, vignettes and snippets about each of the islands. Also unlike The Affirmation (which I haven't read but really should get around to) this is the first book to feature a singular point of view from someone who isn't, also, from our world. More importantly you can read this book without knowledge of the previous volumes.
The first half of The Gradual is as absorbing and as hard to put down as anything I've read this last twelve months. Sandro Sussken is a renowned musician / composer in his homeland of the Glaund Republic. That's no mean feat given that Glaund is a fascist state in a permanent war against the Faianland Alliance, and Sandro's brother, also a talented musician, is drafted into the war effort. Sandro's lucky avoidance of the draft means he can develop his musical and compositional skills and over a couple of decades his work grows in popularity both at home and through the islands that make-up the archipelago.
From a young age the archipelago has been a source of fascination for Sandro. So when given the opportunity to tour the islands as a key part of a orchestra he is excited by what he might encounter. What he's not expecting, after a two month journey, is to come home and discover that impossibly nearly two years have gone by. Unbeknownst to Sandro he has been exposed to the Gradual, a mysterious temporal phenomena unique to the islands that if not properly navigated can result in the loss of time.
I said I found the first half absorbing. Sandro's development into a musician, the loss of his brother to an unending war, the joy of touring through the islands, the mystery of lost time and his decision to flee Glaund after being asked nicely (threatened) by the military junta to compose a symphony under a set of restrictive rules. The second half of the novel is more a travelogue, as Sandro explores the archipelago and gains some understanding of the Gradual. If I was less engaged it's because unlike Sandro I wasn't as fascinated by the character of each island. What mitigates this somewhat is the introduction of the adepts, a strange, cult-like group of people who offer assistance to those traveling between the islands. The adepts innately understand the twisted currents of time that surround the archipelago and have a means of neutralising the lost time Sandro experienced when he first toured the islands. They're a weird bunch and while Sandro often finds their methods frustrating he is also drawn to them. We never get a scientific explanation of the Gradual or the technology, in
particular a wooden stave that needs to always be held by a traveller and marked and scratched in increasingly complex ways. It does mean though that the ending - which I won't spoil - is both bewildering and satisfying. It makes sense at a character and thematic level, but I'm not sure it's even remotely logically coherent.
It's hard to read a novel like The Gradual - so fascinated with art, the passage of time, mortality - and not feel compelled to psycho-analyse the author. One effect of the Gradual is that Sandro feels and looks younger. Is this Priest's meditation on his own age as he moves into his mid-70s, a desire to also turn back the clock? Or is it the idea that great art is its own form of immortality? The one wonderful and exciting thing about a novel by Chris Priest is that the themes and messages are not always immediately evident, they need to be teased out. And this is no different with The Gradual.
The first half of The Gradual is as absorbing and as hard to put down as anything I've read this last twelve months. Sandro Sussken is a renowned musician / composer in his homeland of the Glaund Republic. That's no mean feat given that Glaund is a fascist state in a permanent war against the Faianland Alliance, and Sandro's brother, also a talented musician, is drafted into the war effort. Sandro's lucky avoidance of the draft means he can develop his musical and compositional skills and over a couple of decades his work grows in popularity both at home and through the islands that make-up the archipelago.
From a young age the archipelago has been a source of fascination for Sandro. So when given the opportunity to tour the islands as a key part of a orchestra he is excited by what he might encounter. What he's not expecting, after a two month journey, is to come home and discover that impossibly nearly two years have gone by. Unbeknownst to Sandro he has been exposed to the Gradual, a mysterious temporal phenomena unique to the islands that if not properly navigated can result in the loss of time.
I said I found the first half absorbing. Sandro's development into a musician, the loss of his brother to an unending war, the joy of touring through the islands, the mystery of lost time and his decision to flee Glaund after being asked nicely (threatened) by the military junta to compose a symphony under a set of restrictive rules. The second half of the novel is more a travelogue, as Sandro explores the archipelago and gains some understanding of the Gradual. If I was less engaged it's because unlike Sandro I wasn't as fascinated by the character of each island. What mitigates this somewhat is the introduction of the adepts, a strange, cult-like group of people who offer assistance to those traveling between the islands. The adepts innately understand the twisted currents of time that surround the archipelago and have a means of neutralising the lost time Sandro experienced when he first toured the islands. They're a weird bunch and while Sandro often finds their methods frustrating he is also drawn to them. We never get a scientific explanation of the Gradual or the technology, in
particular a wooden stave that needs to always be held by a traveller and marked and scratched in increasingly complex ways. It does mean though that the ending - which I won't spoil - is both bewildering and satisfying. It makes sense at a character and thematic level, but I'm not sure it's even remotely logically coherent.
It's hard to read a novel like The Gradual - so fascinated with art, the passage of time, mortality - and not feel compelled to psycho-analyse the author. One effect of the Gradual is that Sandro feels and looks younger. Is this Priest's meditation on his own age as he moves into his mid-70s, a desire to also turn back the clock? Or is it the idea that great art is its own form of immortality? The one wonderful and exciting thing about a novel by Chris Priest is that the themes and messages are not always immediately evident, they need to be teased out. And this is no different with The Gradual.
March 30, 2018
“I grew up in a world of music, in a time of war.” - This is the one of the most beautiful first sentences I came across in a while. And the book follows from it. The story is about a composer. It is set out in an imaginary land moving between the mainland infested by a military junta and an Archipelago of exotic islands with free people and colourful life where time bands backwards and forwards while you travel. But I would not call it “fantasy” or “magic realism”. It is more like a dreamy mediation about the nature of time and the sources of creativity…
Music is the most important thing in the main character’s life. It is more important that any relationship, politics or physical comfort. The author considers this enigma whether the music comes to him of whether he is actively creating it. Creation or discovery? There is an answer of a sort in this case which poses another series of questions of course.
It is very atmospheric, slow burning novel. It reminded me the writing of Alexander Grin, the Russian writer of the beginning of 20th century. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...) Unfortunately, he is not well known abroad and the translations of his work are rare. His life was in stark contrast to his writing: in real world he was going through the prisons, revolutions and depravations, alcoholism and illness; while his writing is all set in an imaginary country, close to a sea, populated by people with sun dried faces - sailors, vagabonds and aristocrats and beautiful women- grappling with their humanity… Andey Tarkovsky called him a poet with "an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality... a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life.”
Coincidently, The Gradual was compared by an FT columnist to Tarkovsky’s movie “Stalker”. “Stalker” is darker. But this atmosphere of searching for something which is illusory is certainly there, as well as the references to an oppressive state.
Rather than the book, The Gradual felt like a journey slowly carrying me along.
The quotes:
“ I also discovered that the fragment of the past does not fill the present, nor provide future.’
from the Gradual
'Sooner or later, closer to the old age or during our prime, The Unfulfilled calls us and we look back trying to understand where the call has flown from. Waking from our world, treasuring each day, we look closer into our life, trying to use all our will to see whether The Unfulfilled is starting to come true. Is its image clearer? Is it now enough just stretching the hand to grasp and hold its weakly visible features? … Meanwhile, the time is passing by and we are sailing past the high, misty banks of the Unfulfilled, returning to talks about our daily business.'
from “The girl running on the waves” by Alexander Grin
Music is the most important thing in the main character’s life. It is more important that any relationship, politics or physical comfort. The author considers this enigma whether the music comes to him of whether he is actively creating it. Creation or discovery? There is an answer of a sort in this case which poses another series of questions of course.
It is very atmospheric, slow burning novel. It reminded me the writing of Alexander Grin, the Russian writer of the beginning of 20th century. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexand...) Unfortunately, he is not well known abroad and the translations of his work are rare. His life was in stark contrast to his writing: in real world he was going through the prisons, revolutions and depravations, alcoholism and illness; while his writing is all set in an imaginary country, close to a sea, populated by people with sun dried faces - sailors, vagabonds and aristocrats and beautiful women- grappling with their humanity… Andey Tarkovsky called him a poet with "an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality... a philosophy to guide a man throughout his life.”
Coincidently, The Gradual was compared by an FT columnist to Tarkovsky’s movie “Stalker”. “Stalker” is darker. But this atmosphere of searching for something which is illusory is certainly there, as well as the references to an oppressive state.
Rather than the book, The Gradual felt like a journey slowly carrying me along.
The quotes:
“ I also discovered that the fragment of the past does not fill the present, nor provide future.’
from the Gradual
'Sooner or later, closer to the old age or during our prime, The Unfulfilled calls us and we look back trying to understand where the call has flown from. Waking from our world, treasuring each day, we look closer into our life, trying to use all our will to see whether The Unfulfilled is starting to come true. Is its image clearer? Is it now enough just stretching the hand to grasp and hold its weakly visible features? … Meanwhile, the time is passing by and we are sailing past the high, misty banks of the Unfulfilled, returning to talks about our daily business.'
from “The girl running on the waves” by Alexander Grin
September 4, 2017
Christopher Priest may not be a prolific writer, but he was writing when I first got interested in science fiction, and he's still producing remarkable novels - most recently The Gradual. It's a remarkable book - mysterious, intriguing and with a main character who really takes the reader along on his sometimes dream-like experience.
In one respect, this is not what I expected from reading Christopher Priest many years ago, as then he was a science fiction author, and this is fantasy. (Unless you take the old definition that 'science fiction is what science fiction authors write.') I need to note a few specifics to explain why, but I'll try not to make them spoilers.
What makes it fantasy? Firstly it's set on a world that clearly isn't Earth, yet absolutely everything about the culture and environment (other than the fantasy elements we'll come to) is exactly like Earth, from the alcoholic drinks to the musical instruments and gramophone records. That's a relatively minor aspect. But then we've got a world where traveling from island to island causes shifts in time - you could just about set up an SF explanation for this, but it is not attempted. And most of all, these time shifts are countered by what can only be described as magic.
If we get over the book sneaking in here under false pretences, though, it is marvellous. It's not a book to read if you like everything set out just so from the beginning. Like the great Gene Wolfe, Priest enjoys leaving us confused about what's going on, only gradually revealing what's happening near the end. (Frustratingly so, to an extent, as the main character really doesn't try very hard to get an explanation, other than from people whose job it is not to give it.)
The best parts are those involving the nastiness of living in a dictatorship and anything connected to music. Throughout the book, music is a powerful theme - Priest really puts us in the head of a true musician and it's a wonderful experience.
Just occasionally there seem to be logical gaps. For example, the main character is advised that just moving around on a particular island will cause him big problems - yet everyone else, who should have the same problems, seems to do so just fine. And some of the supporting characters, particularly the female ones, could do with a bit of rounding out. But this doesn't stop this being a remarkable piece of writing.
In the past, I've found that it has been hard work to read some of Priest's novels (Inverted World springs to mind) - and the outcome sometimes didn't reward the effort. The Gradual reads like a dream (both metaphorically and literally in places) - it's excellent just as a highly approachable novel, but is also inspiring. Probably the best book by Priest I've ever read.
In one respect, this is not what I expected from reading Christopher Priest many years ago, as then he was a science fiction author, and this is fantasy. (Unless you take the old definition that 'science fiction is what science fiction authors write.') I need to note a few specifics to explain why, but I'll try not to make them spoilers.
What makes it fantasy? Firstly it's set on a world that clearly isn't Earth, yet absolutely everything about the culture and environment (other than the fantasy elements we'll come to) is exactly like Earth, from the alcoholic drinks to the musical instruments and gramophone records. That's a relatively minor aspect. But then we've got a world where traveling from island to island causes shifts in time - you could just about set up an SF explanation for this, but it is not attempted. And most of all, these time shifts are countered by what can only be described as magic.
If we get over the book sneaking in here under false pretences, though, it is marvellous. It's not a book to read if you like everything set out just so from the beginning. Like the great Gene Wolfe, Priest enjoys leaving us confused about what's going on, only gradually revealing what's happening near the end. (Frustratingly so, to an extent, as the main character really doesn't try very hard to get an explanation, other than from people whose job it is not to give it.)
The best parts are those involving the nastiness of living in a dictatorship and anything connected to music. Throughout the book, music is a powerful theme - Priest really puts us in the head of a true musician and it's a wonderful experience.
Just occasionally there seem to be logical gaps. For example, the main character is advised that just moving around on a particular island will cause him big problems - yet everyone else, who should have the same problems, seems to do so just fine. And some of the supporting characters, particularly the female ones, could do with a bit of rounding out. But this doesn't stop this being a remarkable piece of writing.
In the past, I've found that it has been hard work to read some of Priest's novels (Inverted World springs to mind) - and the outcome sometimes didn't reward the effort. The Gradual reads like a dream (both metaphorically and literally in places) - it's excellent just as a highly approachable novel, but is also inspiring. Probably the best book by Priest I've ever read.
September 9, 2017
Though this may seem a cruel way to begin a review for a book I did not think was by any means terrible, upon finishing The Gradual I was struck with an overwhelming question of "What was the point?"
The book is billed as a Sci-Fi, however the time travel aspect of the story is dealt with in such a matter-of-fact and almost bureaucratic way that it ends up feeling more like window dressing than anything else. Indeed, I knew nothing about the book when I began reading it, and when I was around a third of the way through I decided to check out some reviews. I was surprised to even see it referred to as a "sci-fi", and remembered thinking "man, things better kick off soon".
They never really do, though. While there are brief moments of introspection and briefer still moments of drama, I am quite hard-pressed to outright say what The Gradual is "about", both on a literal and subtextual level. Our main character leaves home, wanders into a strange situation, returns and then... Decides to leave home again. Along the way, he has some strange interactions with time, and maybe two semi-stressful encounters. Much of the book simply involves Sandro travelling and describing his journey - this wouldn't in and of itself be a bad thing, however the prose is somewhat flat and not overly engaging on its own.
"Flat" is a good word to use in general when talking about "The Gradual". The main character speaks so blandly and passionlessly that in the early chapters of the book I actually thought he was being characterised as having some kind of learning disability. Most of the characters in the brief moments they actually speak reiterate this strange dialect, however, and it feels clear that human interaction was not really on Priest's mind when he wrote the novel.
Yet, despite the negativity, I cannot really say I was bored reading The Gradual. There were plenty of moments I would realise the current chapter would be yet more travelling and speed-read it, but something did keep me going all the same. Priest dangles several enticing plot-threads before the reader at the start of the book (Sandro's brother going MIA in the army, a mysterious young musician plagiarising Sandro's work), and the promise of resolution and hope that they would be tied together somehow was enticing.
The world itself, while not overly unique, is also interesting enough. The moments in which the time-travel curtain is parted are quite enjoyable, and I was honestly eager to understand exactly what was going on. It's a neat, matter-of-fact take on the subject and while I wish something a bit more was done with it it was fun to see a world where time-travel is an accepted and even annoying part of everyday life.
Towards the end of the book, something more about the nature of the world is revealed when Sandro visits a particular island. At this point, the book suddenly introduces a strange metaphor for creativity and the artistic process. I admit my own bias here - I find endless metaphors for the artistic process quite boring, and in The Gradual it felt especially egregious as the book had been so flatly written and devoid of real point beforehand.
My cover of the book proudly wore on it a quote from The Guardian calling it "haunting". I don't know what exactly the reviewer was haunted by - maybe the ghosts of missed opportunities? The Gradual really does have an enticing premise - it even has, I think, what sounds like a great plot on paper, but in the end it's hard to feel like the words did anything other than roll off me like water.
The Gradual is by no means a bad book. It has a few interesting ideas, it's written competently and it has a world that's entertaining enough to spend time in. However, it does so little with what it has it's hard to see anyone becoming truly engrossed in it. Ironically enough, the one thing I can say the novel truly succeeds at doing is being a time-killer.
The book is billed as a Sci-Fi, however the time travel aspect of the story is dealt with in such a matter-of-fact and almost bureaucratic way that it ends up feeling more like window dressing than anything else. Indeed, I knew nothing about the book when I began reading it, and when I was around a third of the way through I decided to check out some reviews. I was surprised to even see it referred to as a "sci-fi", and remembered thinking "man, things better kick off soon".
They never really do, though. While there are brief moments of introspection and briefer still moments of drama, I am quite hard-pressed to outright say what The Gradual is "about", both on a literal and subtextual level. Our main character leaves home, wanders into a strange situation, returns and then... Decides to leave home again. Along the way, he has some strange interactions with time, and maybe two semi-stressful encounters. Much of the book simply involves Sandro travelling and describing his journey - this wouldn't in and of itself be a bad thing, however the prose is somewhat flat and not overly engaging on its own.
"Flat" is a good word to use in general when talking about "The Gradual". The main character speaks so blandly and passionlessly that in the early chapters of the book I actually thought he was being characterised as having some kind of learning disability. Most of the characters in the brief moments they actually speak reiterate this strange dialect, however, and it feels clear that human interaction was not really on Priest's mind when he wrote the novel.
Yet, despite the negativity, I cannot really say I was bored reading The Gradual. There were plenty of moments I would realise the current chapter would be yet more travelling and speed-read it, but something did keep me going all the same. Priest dangles several enticing plot-threads before the reader at the start of the book (Sandro's brother going MIA in the army, a mysterious young musician plagiarising Sandro's work), and the promise of resolution and hope that they would be tied together somehow was enticing.
The world itself, while not overly unique, is also interesting enough. The moments in which the time-travel curtain is parted are quite enjoyable, and I was honestly eager to understand exactly what was going on. It's a neat, matter-of-fact take on the subject and while I wish something a bit more was done with it it was fun to see a world where time-travel is an accepted and even annoying part of everyday life.
Towards the end of the book, something more about the nature of the world is revealed when Sandro visits a particular island. At this point, the book suddenly introduces a strange metaphor for creativity and the artistic process. I admit my own bias here - I find endless metaphors for the artistic process quite boring, and in The Gradual it felt especially egregious as the book had been so flatly written and devoid of real point beforehand.
My cover of the book proudly wore on it a quote from The Guardian calling it "haunting". I don't know what exactly the reviewer was haunted by - maybe the ghosts of missed opportunities? The Gradual really does have an enticing premise - it even has, I think, what sounds like a great plot on paper, but in the end it's hard to feel like the words did anything other than roll off me like water.
The Gradual is by no means a bad book. It has a few interesting ideas, it's written competently and it has a world that's entertaining enough to spend time in. However, it does so little with what it has it's hard to see anyone becoming truly engrossed in it. Ironically enough, the one thing I can say the novel truly succeeds at doing is being a time-killer.
July 22, 2017
I've been wanting to read another novel by Christopher Priest ever since The Inverted World, and decided to pick this up after the excellent film version of The Prestige. But despite all the interesting ideas, this novel is missing everything a novel about human beings should have. I'm not sure if his other writing is so powerfully dull but now I'm sort of afraid to try finding out.
December 22, 2019
Christopher Priest’s 2016 The Gradual is the latest in his novels of the Dream Archipelago. They are set on a world very much like our own, but with a globe encircling archipelago of islands that defy human explanation. It is science fiction of the sort that involves humanity’s relationship to unexplained phenomenon, rather than with science, that would be more properly known as speculative fiction or literary SF. Playing with the perception of time is something SF writers like to do, such as in Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World (1965), Greg Egan’s The Clockwork Rocket (2011), and even H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). The Gradual is a Kafkaesque stand-alone, and you need not have read any prior works.
On the plot level, it is the first-person story of Alesandro Sussken, a musician and composer, growing up in a fascist state at war since his birth. His older brother is sent off to fight in a faceless and secretive war set far offstage, leaving his family in a state of perpetual grief. Sandro’s musical inspiration is the occasional glimpse of islands offshore, representing where Jacj has been taken by the junta. But it is more than that calling to him, as he learns during a tour with disastrous personal consequences.
Priest is a British writer, and some of his vocabulary may be unfamiliar to speakers of American English, such as myself. Particularly, in the UK a “stave” is the set of parallel lines and spaces on which musical notes are recorded – whereas Americans say “staff” for the same thing. The physical staves are a very close metaphor that I did not understand until very near the end. Another term to ponder is of course the title. The term “Gradual” is a proper noun describing a musical component of Christian liturgy, and the allusion may be meaningful to some readers. But I feel that as an uncapitalized noun when spoken by the characters, it is simply a contraction for “the gradual slippage of time.�� In other words, the strange overall system of time gradients experienced when travelling between the islands.
The writing is rich with allusions and metaphors. Priest tells us that unlike literal time, the experience of time is like musical composition of counterpoint and randomness – difficult for the performers to play and probably baffling for an audience to hear. No meaning without the human spirit can break the code. In perceiving time, we are misled by undetectable detriment. Time is a gradual process – like ageing, you do not notice it happening.
I am highly recommending this book, and have come to realize I have not read enough Christopher Priest.
On the plot level, it is the first-person story of Alesandro Sussken, a musician and composer, growing up in a fascist state at war since his birth. His older brother is sent off to fight in a faceless and secretive war set far offstage, leaving his family in a state of perpetual grief. Sandro’s musical inspiration is the occasional glimpse of islands offshore, representing where Jacj has been taken by the junta. But it is more than that calling to him, as he learns during a tour with disastrous personal consequences.
Priest is a British writer, and some of his vocabulary may be unfamiliar to speakers of American English, such as myself. Particularly, in the UK a “stave” is the set of parallel lines and spaces on which musical notes are recorded – whereas Americans say “staff” for the same thing. The physical staves are a very close metaphor that I did not understand until very near the end. Another term to ponder is of course the title. The term “Gradual” is a proper noun describing a musical component of Christian liturgy, and the allusion may be meaningful to some readers. But I feel that as an uncapitalized noun when spoken by the characters, it is simply a contraction for “the gradual slippage of time.�� In other words, the strange overall system of time gradients experienced when travelling between the islands.
The writing is rich with allusions and metaphors. Priest tells us that unlike literal time, the experience of time is like musical composition of counterpoint and randomness – difficult for the performers to play and probably baffling for an audience to hear. No meaning without the human spirit can break the code. In perceiving time, we are misled by undetectable detriment. Time is a gradual process – like ageing, you do not notice it happening.
I am highly recommending this book, and have come to realize I have not read enough Christopher Priest.
February 14, 2018
This is only the second book I've ever read by Christopher Priest and it won't be my last.
This is a rather strange and surreal book at times; actually not at times but rather almost every page. Sometimes this strangeness and level of surreal doesn't work well when it's taken too far and I thought this was close to that point but didn't reach it, thankfully. I liked the book overall as it had a interesting albeit strange and sometimes hard to follow ideas and plot. The writing itself, the prose, was very strong and proves that Priest has a certain way with words that he makes his own.
This is a rather strange and surreal book at times; actually not at times but rather almost every page. Sometimes this strangeness and level of surreal doesn't work well when it's taken too far and I thought this was close to that point but didn't reach it, thankfully. I liked the book overall as it had a interesting albeit strange and sometimes hard to follow ideas and plot. The writing itself, the prose, was very strong and proves that Priest has a certain way with words that he makes his own.
October 4, 2016
Originally published on my Rant and Rave About Books blog: https://rantandraveaboutbooks.com/201...
I received a lovely hardback copy of The Gradual from Titan Books in exchange for an honest opinion. First, I want to mention the cover of this book because I was so excited to read it as soon as I opened the box. The Gradual is about time and travel but unlike anything I’ve ever read before that handles time travel. I couldn’t help myself when I started taking pics of this book. When I pulled the links from Amazon UK, I noticed that it’s sadly not the same cover as the US cover. I’m thrilled to have this cover on my shelves, so I would recommend buying the US copy if you plan want something fun to add to your bookshelf.
Now, let’s talk about the book…
The story is narrated from the first person point of view of Alesandro, a composer who becomes known for his work inspired by the Dream Archipelago, islands that cannot be found on a map. They are left unexplained for most of the book because the main character has no prior knowledge of the islands other than they exist, and with his country constantly at war, there is no information about them available to the public, something I always saw as a tactic the government was using to keep the people from knowing too much. The islands from the start gave me the sense they were more of an idea that something is out there, even if we are unable to understand what it means.
We start with Alesandro’s early years, moving at a slow pace with mostly narrative and very little dialogue for at least the first thirty pages. Priest’s writing is different from what I’m used to. Alesandro is telling us about his early years at more of a distance than what I’m accustomed to reading from first person POV. I never felt as though I was part of the story, unable to fully immerse myself in Alesandro’s life because of all the “telling” of past events. I like to experience the action along with the main character, and unfortunately, I couldn’t connect with any of the characters because of how the story is told.
The writing is good, unique in its own way, but I will caution that it is dense at times, with large chunks of narrative that are too much information overload without fully understanding the world that is introduced. If you like music, a fair amount of the book talks about Alesandro’s works. And while interesting, I still couldn’t get into this part of the story.
You learn about Alesandro’s brother and that he was drafted to the war and never heard from again. His parents are a wreck because of his disappearance, unable to find out if he was killed in battle. Alesandro was obviously upset about his brother, but the love and passion he had for composing music served as a distraction that didn’t allow me to feel whatever pain he was feeling over the potential loss of his brother. Until I finally got into the meat of the story, I wasn’t sure if Alesandro was going to wake up from a dream, almost as if the Dream Archipelago was a more of adult version of Neverland. I wasn’t opposed to that idea by any means, and as the synopsis implies, Alesandro finds himself seeking refuge on the islands. This is when things get very interesting.
From the start, I always thought it was odd how Alesandro would catch glimpses of the islands from his house, and then they were gone. Or at least that was the impression I was given at times. That was the main reason I wasn’t sure how much of the islands was in his mind or reality and if they were just a myth that some people believed.
The way Priest blends time and travel is so different from other science fiction novels that address the same topic. I don’t want to say too much about how it works, but I will say that it’s worth the wait. Despite the slow start, I enjoyed the ending of the novel. Everything the author introduces is perfectly tied up by the end, including his brother’s disappearance, the mystery surrounding the islands, and the country’s constant state of war.
While I’m not raving about this novel and I wouldn’t recommend it for the causal science fiction reader, it’s still an enjoyable read for lovers of science fiction. Recommended.
I received a lovely hardback copy of The Gradual from Titan Books in exchange for an honest opinion. First, I want to mention the cover of this book because I was so excited to read it as soon as I opened the box. The Gradual is about time and travel but unlike anything I’ve ever read before that handles time travel. I couldn’t help myself when I started taking pics of this book. When I pulled the links from Amazon UK, I noticed that it’s sadly not the same cover as the US cover. I’m thrilled to have this cover on my shelves, so I would recommend buying the US copy if you plan want something fun to add to your bookshelf.
Now, let’s talk about the book…
The story is narrated from the first person point of view of Alesandro, a composer who becomes known for his work inspired by the Dream Archipelago, islands that cannot be found on a map. They are left unexplained for most of the book because the main character has no prior knowledge of the islands other than they exist, and with his country constantly at war, there is no information about them available to the public, something I always saw as a tactic the government was using to keep the people from knowing too much. The islands from the start gave me the sense they were more of an idea that something is out there, even if we are unable to understand what it means.
We start with Alesandro’s early years, moving at a slow pace with mostly narrative and very little dialogue for at least the first thirty pages. Priest’s writing is different from what I’m used to. Alesandro is telling us about his early years at more of a distance than what I’m accustomed to reading from first person POV. I never felt as though I was part of the story, unable to fully immerse myself in Alesandro’s life because of all the “telling” of past events. I like to experience the action along with the main character, and unfortunately, I couldn’t connect with any of the characters because of how the story is told.
The writing is good, unique in its own way, but I will caution that it is dense at times, with large chunks of narrative that are too much information overload without fully understanding the world that is introduced. If you like music, a fair amount of the book talks about Alesandro’s works. And while interesting, I still couldn’t get into this part of the story.
You learn about Alesandro’s brother and that he was drafted to the war and never heard from again. His parents are a wreck because of his disappearance, unable to find out if he was killed in battle. Alesandro was obviously upset about his brother, but the love and passion he had for composing music served as a distraction that didn’t allow me to feel whatever pain he was feeling over the potential loss of his brother. Until I finally got into the meat of the story, I wasn’t sure if Alesandro was going to wake up from a dream, almost as if the Dream Archipelago was a more of adult version of Neverland. I wasn’t opposed to that idea by any means, and as the synopsis implies, Alesandro finds himself seeking refuge on the islands. This is when things get very interesting.
From the start, I always thought it was odd how Alesandro would catch glimpses of the islands from his house, and then they were gone. Or at least that was the impression I was given at times. That was the main reason I wasn’t sure how much of the islands was in his mind or reality and if they were just a myth that some people believed.
The way Priest blends time and travel is so different from other science fiction novels that address the same topic. I don’t want to say too much about how it works, but I will say that it’s worth the wait. Despite the slow start, I enjoyed the ending of the novel. Everything the author introduces is perfectly tied up by the end, including his brother’s disappearance, the mystery surrounding the islands, and the country’s constant state of war.
While I’m not raving about this novel and I wouldn’t recommend it for the causal science fiction reader, it’s still an enjoyable read for lovers of science fiction. Recommended.
October 21, 2016
I'm grateful to the publisher for an e-copy of this book via NetGalley.
This was the first of Christopher Priest's books that I'd read. While I gather from other reviews that it's particularly accessible for him and so probably a good place to begin, I am still dismayed that I've missed out on such a good writer for so long. I'll put that right soon.
The Gradual is the latest of a collection - not really a series - of stories (some short, some longer) that includes the motif of the 'Dream Archipelago', a mysterious and, it seems, ultimately unknowable group of islands that feature in different ways. I don't know whether they are intended to be a self-consistent feature, or more of an idea, a mythology. In this book, at any rate, they form a band of islands which encircles the whole world. They are unmappable, idiosyncratic, home to a myriad dialects and seem to stretch from the equator to colder, more Northerly climes. For our hero, Alesandro Sussken, from the moment he glimpses the nearest islands as a child, they represent an alluring Other, a place to escape.(and he needs to escape). Even the names seem to hold promise: Dianme, Manlayl, Derril, Callock, Gannten, Unner, Leyah, Cheoner.
Sussken is a composer, living in the drab, grey country of Glaund, a state ruled by a junta and perpetually at war with its neighbour, Faiandland. We are told that there is little freedom in Gland. one must renew identity documents every three months and report to the police if away from home more than three nights. Everyone is required to carry a certain amount of cash. The entire country is under curfew on certain days, and everyone must be assigned to a church whether religious or not. (Priest is studiedly vague about the religion of this church or churches).
Military service is compulsory. At the start of the book, Sussken's beloved older brother is called up by the army and much of the subsequent story is a quest to come to terms with this, or to find him again. The grim background of Glaund is vividly conveyed, but that said, Sussken seems to flourish, building his musical reputation and subject to no censure even when he dares name a musical piece after one of the forbidden islands (they're not supposed to be referred to at all).
Indeed he is even, eventually, permitted to join a cultural trip to the Archipelago when relations thaw somewhat. The book is necessarily much concerned with travel, both the practicalities - tickets, luggage, accommodation, Customs procedures - and the psychological effects of exposure to different cultures and places - so Sussken's life isn't as cloistered as you might fear or even expect, given the realities of life in Glaund.
It is though exclusively travel by ferry or cruise ship - there is no sign of air travel, an interesting omission in a world that seems technologically to be equivalent to ours (there are cars, Internet, CD players, plastic). From the geography, vague as it is, this obviously is not 'our 'world, not even an alternate timeline version, but on the other hand it is a recognisably modern society of 'our' kind and indeed at one level the story only works because much of what is alluded exists in our world. For example, at one point it's mentioned that social networking was introduced to Glaund then rapidly banned again, an allusion that only really makes sense in a world where social networking is a reality.
It's in other words a shifty, impressionistic, world, furnished with props from ours: items and cultural things that could only originate in certain social situations that exist here and now being, used to make points or flesh out Priest's invented reality (jazz is another example - such a context specific form of music that it rather surprises the reader when it's mentioned, but it functions perfectly to represent the sort of music that Sussman doesn't like: his forte is austere ultra modernist stuff). Priest hasn't then felt the need to create a whole self-sufficient world like Tolkien, or like most fantasy writers. That shows I think a very confident, very mature writer who trusts his own ability to keep the reader's focus where he wants it without the need for a scaffolding. A confidence that is completely justified - the scenes and events in the book have much greater resonance than would if supported by a wholly invented structure.
Things in this story are shifty in other ways too. As I said, early in the book, Sandro's beloved brother Jacj is taken by the army. We then hear no more of him, with Sussken's career developing, including through his extraordinary trip to the Archipelago - which changes everything - till suddenly it's ten or more years later. For a moment I thought poor Jacj had simply been forgotten, but no: something odd is going on here and it's the attempt to resolve the mystery that eventually - one might almost say belatedly - brings Sussken into conflict with the authorities and takes him back to the Archipelago.
His life after this is far from plain sailing (sorry, I couldn't resists the pun). Travel between the islands has its own strange features. In a section of the book which has the island hopping overtones of a Conrad or Somerset Maugham and allusions to a pattern of islands which are implicit in the whole setup, there are more peculiar features, indeed dangers, to travel in the archipelago. Sandro doesn't understand them at first and he suffers the consequences. Much of this part of the book is about how he comes to an understanding of what's going on. (It's frustrating writing about this aspect because there are a couple of shocks in the story and it would be a shame to blunt them by giving away precisely what's going on).
One oddity worth a mention is the bureaucracy involved in island travel. Despite them being neutral in the war and subject to little central authority, the amount of paperwork and sheer checking involved in making even short island journeys is daunting and the details sometimes mysterious - there are episodes, presumably involving searches and questionings, that are never described in detail except by how angry they make Sussken. Indeed, at one stage he seems to find it easier to slip away from - and later return to - his martial-ruled homeland than travel between two of the apparently peaceful and paradisiacal islands. This is one feature we never quite get to the bottom of - a reminder perhaps that Priest's Dream Archipelago has a deeper and wider existence than in this book.
I'm in danger of rambling on now. This book is simply so good and there is so much that one might say about it that it's hard to know where to stop. It's extremely readable and immersive from the first page. Its world is well portrayed and convincing. The language can be playful, fun (at one point we visit Ilkla, a "place of high windswept moors... where almost the entire population seemed to speak a heavily glottal patois." Remind you of anywhere?) There is also a whole musical dimension I haven't even touched on, being totally unmusical myself, with Sussken's musical tastes and development and even the milieu in which he works convincing described, including how he is influenced by the Archipelago. Indeed the book has a deep musical sensibility throughout linking people, events and places.
Above all, the book has heart. While Sussken comes over, at first, as a bit of a cold fish - fussing over his luggage, passively going along with the petty restrictions of Glaund, fumbling himself into a marriage against all expectations - he is really a deeply human character, a man who loses such a lot in a pitiless and inexplicable world that one can't help but warm to him.
And, in keeping with that, he does thaw.
I'd recommend this book highly both as a remarkable story and a demonstration of modern fantasy at its very best, showing what can be done and how to do it.
Simply brilliant.
This was the first of Christopher Priest's books that I'd read. While I gather from other reviews that it's particularly accessible for him and so probably a good place to begin, I am still dismayed that I've missed out on such a good writer for so long. I'll put that right soon.
The Gradual is the latest of a collection - not really a series - of stories (some short, some longer) that includes the motif of the 'Dream Archipelago', a mysterious and, it seems, ultimately unknowable group of islands that feature in different ways. I don't know whether they are intended to be a self-consistent feature, or more of an idea, a mythology. In this book, at any rate, they form a band of islands which encircles the whole world. They are unmappable, idiosyncratic, home to a myriad dialects and seem to stretch from the equator to colder, more Northerly climes. For our hero, Alesandro Sussken, from the moment he glimpses the nearest islands as a child, they represent an alluring Other, a place to escape.(and he needs to escape). Even the names seem to hold promise: Dianme, Manlayl, Derril, Callock, Gannten, Unner, Leyah, Cheoner.
Sussken is a composer, living in the drab, grey country of Glaund, a state ruled by a junta and perpetually at war with its neighbour, Faiandland. We are told that there is little freedom in Gland. one must renew identity documents every three months and report to the police if away from home more than three nights. Everyone is required to carry a certain amount of cash. The entire country is under curfew on certain days, and everyone must be assigned to a church whether religious or not. (Priest is studiedly vague about the religion of this church or churches).
Military service is compulsory. At the start of the book, Sussken's beloved older brother is called up by the army and much of the subsequent story is a quest to come to terms with this, or to find him again. The grim background of Glaund is vividly conveyed, but that said, Sussken seems to flourish, building his musical reputation and subject to no censure even when he dares name a musical piece after one of the forbidden islands (they're not supposed to be referred to at all).
Indeed he is even, eventually, permitted to join a cultural trip to the Archipelago when relations thaw somewhat. The book is necessarily much concerned with travel, both the practicalities - tickets, luggage, accommodation, Customs procedures - and the psychological effects of exposure to different cultures and places - so Sussken's life isn't as cloistered as you might fear or even expect, given the realities of life in Glaund.
It is though exclusively travel by ferry or cruise ship - there is no sign of air travel, an interesting omission in a world that seems technologically to be equivalent to ours (there are cars, Internet, CD players, plastic). From the geography, vague as it is, this obviously is not 'our 'world, not even an alternate timeline version, but on the other hand it is a recognisably modern society of 'our' kind and indeed at one level the story only works because much of what is alluded exists in our world. For example, at one point it's mentioned that social networking was introduced to Glaund then rapidly banned again, an allusion that only really makes sense in a world where social networking is a reality.
It's in other words a shifty, impressionistic, world, furnished with props from ours: items and cultural things that could only originate in certain social situations that exist here and now being, used to make points or flesh out Priest's invented reality (jazz is another example - such a context specific form of music that it rather surprises the reader when it's mentioned, but it functions perfectly to represent the sort of music that Sussman doesn't like: his forte is austere ultra modernist stuff). Priest hasn't then felt the need to create a whole self-sufficient world like Tolkien, or like most fantasy writers. That shows I think a very confident, very mature writer who trusts his own ability to keep the reader's focus where he wants it without the need for a scaffolding. A confidence that is completely justified - the scenes and events in the book have much greater resonance than would if supported by a wholly invented structure.
Things in this story are shifty in other ways too. As I said, early in the book, Sandro's beloved brother Jacj is taken by the army. We then hear no more of him, with Sussken's career developing, including through his extraordinary trip to the Archipelago - which changes everything - till suddenly it's ten or more years later. For a moment I thought poor Jacj had simply been forgotten, but no: something odd is going on here and it's the attempt to resolve the mystery that eventually - one might almost say belatedly - brings Sussken into conflict with the authorities and takes him back to the Archipelago.
His life after this is far from plain sailing (sorry, I couldn't resists the pun). Travel between the islands has its own strange features. In a section of the book which has the island hopping overtones of a Conrad or Somerset Maugham and allusions to a pattern of islands which are implicit in the whole setup, there are more peculiar features, indeed dangers, to travel in the archipelago. Sandro doesn't understand them at first and he suffers the consequences. Much of this part of the book is about how he comes to an understanding of what's going on. (It's frustrating writing about this aspect because there are a couple of shocks in the story and it would be a shame to blunt them by giving away precisely what's going on).
One oddity worth a mention is the bureaucracy involved in island travel. Despite them being neutral in the war and subject to little central authority, the amount of paperwork and sheer checking involved in making even short island journeys is daunting and the details sometimes mysterious - there are episodes, presumably involving searches and questionings, that are never described in detail except by how angry they make Sussken. Indeed, at one stage he seems to find it easier to slip away from - and later return to - his martial-ruled homeland than travel between two of the apparently peaceful and paradisiacal islands. This is one feature we never quite get to the bottom of - a reminder perhaps that Priest's Dream Archipelago has a deeper and wider existence than in this book.
I'm in danger of rambling on now. This book is simply so good and there is so much that one might say about it that it's hard to know where to stop. It's extremely readable and immersive from the first page. Its world is well portrayed and convincing. The language can be playful, fun (at one point we visit Ilkla, a "place of high windswept moors... where almost the entire population seemed to speak a heavily glottal patois." Remind you of anywhere?) There is also a whole musical dimension I haven't even touched on, being totally unmusical myself, with Sussken's musical tastes and development and even the milieu in which he works convincing described, including how he is influenced by the Archipelago. Indeed the book has a deep musical sensibility throughout linking people, events and places.
Above all, the book has heart. While Sussken comes over, at first, as a bit of a cold fish - fussing over his luggage, passively going along with the petty restrictions of Glaund, fumbling himself into a marriage against all expectations - he is really a deeply human character, a man who loses such a lot in a pitiless and inexplicable world that one can't help but warm to him.
And, in keeping with that, he does thaw.
I'd recommend this book highly both as a remarkable story and a demonstration of modern fantasy at its very best, showing what can be done and how to do it.
Simply brilliant.
January 18, 2022
Looking forward to reading another Priest novel. The tediousness of going through customs on every island reminded me of the Mexican bureaucracy. We need another document— this time the original. Now you can carry this document across town to the immigration office—what? Oh that’s a new requirement. And your policy—original and copy—isn’t sufficient proof that your car is insured. Anyway, I love the connection between the islands, time, and music.
April 8, 2018
2.5 stars.
The Gradual is in a way a complex book about artistic inspiration and the passage of time. The protagonist, Alessandro Sussken, is a composer in a fascist state called Glaund. It is at heart a time-travel novel, but not at all the standard type. There's no intentional passage back and forward in linear time, no hand-wringing about paradoxes. Sussken moves to-and-fro in time as he moves from island to island in a great, expansive archipelago. Each journey causes slippages, and each slippage is subjective.
The Gradual is the second of Priest's books I've read, the first being The Adjacent (which I gave 4 stars). Both books have a peculiar feature, which I was willing to forgive in The Adjacent but which began to irritate me in The Gradual. That is, there's a very strong focus in both books on the mundane aspects of travel and for me this detracts from the more compelling parts of the story.
In The Gradual, Sussken is musically inspired by the mysterious islands that extend far into the horizon from his home. Their very existence is denied by the fascist junta under which he lives, and so when he explores the archipelago each island is a strange and unknown discovery. From a story-telling point of view, this has huge potential.
Yet somehow the book spends practically most of its focus on the boredom of travel, of how irritating boat travel can be, of the mechanics of dragging luggage here and there, how different places subject travellers to peculiar bureaucratic customs requirements and checks, of having to exchange money at a local bureau, etc. At times I could just imagine Priest drawing his inspiration from a cruise holiday he must have spent that, despite its pleasures, also left some enduring and uncharming impressions. These mundane moments don't just feature; the entire concept in The Gradual hangs off them.
This is made worse by Sussken himself. Towards the end, he states:'I became passive, accepting, not enquiring, letting myself be moved around and told what to do.' This actually describes him throughout. As a means of keeping the central mysteries of the book vague throughout, Priest gives us a character that passively follows along, never asking obvious questions. Sussken moves from place to place, and there are a few impressions of purpose offered: to find his long-lost brother, to find the musician that has plagiarised his work, to settle on an island he once spent a couple of days on, or to find the woman he had a brief fling with in his youth. These pursuits are resolved, though often by coincidence. And none of them are ever particularly convincing pursuits, even to Sussken himself.
What results is a meandering story that feels like it's hesitating to get to where it wants to go (much like Sussken himself). If it wasn't for Priest's clear and engaging prose, I probably would have given up at about the half-way point.
The Gradual is in a way a complex book about artistic inspiration and the passage of time. The protagonist, Alessandro Sussken, is a composer in a fascist state called Glaund. It is at heart a time-travel novel, but not at all the standard type. There's no intentional passage back and forward in linear time, no hand-wringing about paradoxes. Sussken moves to-and-fro in time as he moves from island to island in a great, expansive archipelago. Each journey causes slippages, and each slippage is subjective.
The Gradual is the second of Priest's books I've read, the first being The Adjacent (which I gave 4 stars). Both books have a peculiar feature, which I was willing to forgive in The Adjacent but which began to irritate me in The Gradual. That is, there's a very strong focus in both books on the mundane aspects of travel and for me this detracts from the more compelling parts of the story.
In The Gradual, Sussken is musically inspired by the mysterious islands that extend far into the horizon from his home. Their very existence is denied by the fascist junta under which he lives, and so when he explores the archipelago each island is a strange and unknown discovery. From a story-telling point of view, this has huge potential.
Yet somehow the book spends practically most of its focus on the boredom of travel, of how irritating boat travel can be, of the mechanics of dragging luggage here and there, how different places subject travellers to peculiar bureaucratic customs requirements and checks, of having to exchange money at a local bureau, etc. At times I could just imagine Priest drawing his inspiration from a cruise holiday he must have spent that, despite its pleasures, also left some enduring and uncharming impressions. These mundane moments don't just feature; the entire concept in The Gradual hangs off them.
This is made worse by Sussken himself. Towards the end, he states:'I became passive, accepting, not enquiring, letting myself be moved around and told what to do.' This actually describes him throughout. As a means of keeping the central mysteries of the book vague throughout, Priest gives us a character that passively follows along, never asking obvious questions. Sussken moves from place to place, and there are a few impressions of purpose offered: to find his long-lost brother, to find the musician that has plagiarised his work, to settle on an island he once spent a couple of days on, or to find the woman he had a brief fling with in his youth. These pursuits are resolved, though often by coincidence. And none of them are ever particularly convincing pursuits, even to Sussken himself.
What results is a meandering story that feels like it's hesitating to get to where it wants to go (much like Sussken himself). If it wasn't for Priest's clear and engaging prose, I probably would have given up at about the half-way point.
February 6, 2017
Jeg kan ikke helt skjønne hvordan jeg kunne rekke å bli nesten 40 år gammel før jeg oppdaget Christopher Priest. Jeg har jo visst at han er noe av en legende innen fantasy og science fiction, men det har aldri blitt til at noen av bøkene hans har havnet på leselisten. Nå som jeg, som nevnt, snart er 40 og Priest har rukket å bli 73 var det strengt tatt på tide.
Jeg startet med hans siste bok, fjorårets "The Gradual", og den var en fenomenal opplevelse. Vi følger reisen til det musikalske talentet og komponisten Alesandro Sussken som har vokst opp i et grått fascistregime. Et regime som til stadighet ligger i krig med den like grå og autoritære naboen. "Music and bombing. These were the two main events of my childhood."
Fra loftet i barndomshjemmet kan han skimte en rekke øyer i det fjerne, og han aner at det gjemmer seg mange hemmeligheter der ute. Når han som voksen har etablert seg som komponist får han mulighet til å reise på en kulturell utvekslingsreise til flere av øyene. Lengselen etter disse øyene farger musikken hans, og de lever opp til forventningene når han endelig kommer dit. Allerede mens han og resten av orkesteret er på tur begynner flere å ane at det er noe galt med tiden. Klokkene på skipene går i utakt. Perkusjonistene i orkesteret klager over at resten av musikerne halter tempomessig. Men det er ikke før han kommer tilbake at det store sjokket kommet: I løpet av de åtte ukene han har vært på turné har det gått over et år hjemme. Dermed starter en enda lengre reise tilbake for å finne ut hva som har skjedd og hva som egentlig styrer tiden i øyriket.
Språket er kjølig og reservert, men vakkert. Stemmen heves aldri. Og jeg har sjelden lest bedre beskrivelser av musikk:
"Music for me was the voice of the human spirit. It existed only in the space between the instruments that produced it and the ear that appreciated it. It was the movement and pressure of molecules of air, dispersed and replace instantly and unceasingly. It lived nowhere in reality."
Det er en nydelig bok om tid, kjærlighet og musikk.
(Så nå må jeg gå bananas på Amazon og fylle Kindlen min med resten av Priests forfatterskap.)
Jeg startet med hans siste bok, fjorårets "The Gradual", og den var en fenomenal opplevelse. Vi følger reisen til det musikalske talentet og komponisten Alesandro Sussken som har vokst opp i et grått fascistregime. Et regime som til stadighet ligger i krig med den like grå og autoritære naboen. "Music and bombing. These were the two main events of my childhood."
Fra loftet i barndomshjemmet kan han skimte en rekke øyer i det fjerne, og han aner at det gjemmer seg mange hemmeligheter der ute. Når han som voksen har etablert seg som komponist får han mulighet til å reise på en kulturell utvekslingsreise til flere av øyene. Lengselen etter disse øyene farger musikken hans, og de lever opp til forventningene når han endelig kommer dit. Allerede mens han og resten av orkesteret er på tur begynner flere å ane at det er noe galt med tiden. Klokkene på skipene går i utakt. Perkusjonistene i orkesteret klager over at resten av musikerne halter tempomessig. Men det er ikke før han kommer tilbake at det store sjokket kommet: I løpet av de åtte ukene han har vært på turné har det gått over et år hjemme. Dermed starter en enda lengre reise tilbake for å finne ut hva som har skjedd og hva som egentlig styrer tiden i øyriket.
Språket er kjølig og reservert, men vakkert. Stemmen heves aldri. Og jeg har sjelden lest bedre beskrivelser av musikk:
"Music for me was the voice of the human spirit. It existed only in the space between the instruments that produced it and the ear that appreciated it. It was the movement and pressure of molecules of air, dispersed and replace instantly and unceasingly. It lived nowhere in reality."
Det er en nydelig bok om tid, kjærlighet og musikk.
(Så nå må jeg gå bananas på Amazon og fylle Kindlen min med resten av Priests forfatterskap.)
August 11, 2018
While far from a terrible book, this really just wasn't for me. The 'gradual' in the title seems to refer to the intolerably slow pace during which we have to suffer the narrator's whining as he travels ever so slowly around some 'magical' islands where nothing actually seems to happen. It's a full third of the way through the book before there's any glimmer of interesting events, and that fades very quickly. Worse, by the time we find out that yes actually there is something quite cool to find out about, the pace has descended into jumpy fragments and a bit of a mess, imo.
Full review on LittleFrogScribbles.
Full review on LittleFrogScribbles.
October 17, 2016
The composer Alessandro Sussken seeks inspiration and his brother by travelling through the Dream Archipelago, a journey which Priest readers have made many times. This time, though, going from island to island means negotiating baffling shifts in time. Priet's understated style delivers beautifully exact other worlds. There aren't the existential or alt-historical shocks of The Affirmation or The Separation; it's a haunting meditation on time and how we make sense of it, in this case through music. Unlike his contemporaries McEwan and Amis he hasn't lost it with age and can still thrill. Reminded me of Ishiguro 's The Unconsoled.
November 12, 2016
Alesandro Sussken n’a connu que la guerre, son pays, une sorte de dictature repliée sur elle-même, est en conflit perpétuel avec son voisin, et la musique est sa raison de vivre. Devenu un compositeur reconnu, il a l’opportunité de visiter les îles de l’Archipel du rêve, lieu mythique et auréolé de mystère déjà évoqué dans plusieurs œuvres de Priest.
[Vous pouvez lire la suite sur mon blog, merci :)]
[Vous pouvez lire la suite sur mon blog, merci :)]
April 24, 2018
Lived up to it's title - it gradually pissed me off.
Much easier to put down than to pick up again. It may end up being a good yarn but it's all too gradual for me.
The narration style is just too dry and emotionless as well.
Seems to be another love it or hate one, although some of the people that hate it love other works of his.
In two minds about trying any of his other novels.
Much easier to put down than to pick up again. It may end up being a good yarn but it's all too gradual for me.
The narration style is just too dry and emotionless as well.
Seems to be another love it or hate one, although some of the people that hate it love other works of his.
In two minds about trying any of his other novels.
November 5, 2017
A book that started off well and then went from weakness to weakness to such an extent that by the end I just didn't care about the main character, the story or anything to do with the book. one to avoid
October 7, 2016
A brilliant meditation on aging, longing, loss, and hope.
November 7, 2020
"Home is the sailor, home from the sea"
-- from 'Requiem' by Robert Louis Stevenson
In many ways a genre-crossing novel, The Gradual exhibits the kind of features I have now come to expect of Christopher Priest's books -- a sense of viewing reality in a distorting mirror -- solitary or alienated protagonists -- a planetary romance blending aspects of science fiction with the kind of magic we associate with fantasy -- allusions and illusions that create dream-like images and sequences.
Above all there is his literary sleight of hand which seems to be part of his trademark style, consisting of a bit of mystification assisted by misdirection. He is kind enough however to reveal to his reader sufficient clues for them to partly work out what's going on, only to then introduce a plot twist which turns the tables on us.
The Gradual is the testament of one Alesandro Sussken, composer and musician on a world simultaneously similar to but yet completely different from ours. And just as a music composition is an unfolding in time of a sequence of sounds, so Priest's novel too is about sounds, and time, and even space.
The author set some of the action of previous novels in his Dream Archipelago -- The Islanders and The Dream Archipelago, for example, and The Adjacent (the only one I've read so far). But this novel starts during a bitter war on the mainland between the Glaund Republic and Faiandland. Alesandro grows up with his elder brother Jacj and parents in the Glaund city of Errest forever under the intermittent threat of shelling. After some years a ceasefire takes place, and a proxy war begins in the southern continent of Sudmaieure; Sandro's brother is drafted into the army and Sandro himself pursues a career in classical music, performing in the capital Glaund City and developing as a composer.
So far this is all redolent of recent or current conflicts in our world -- Syria for example, or the Ukraine -- with the totalitarian Glaund Republic somewhat like Russia, or its satellites, its client states. But this is not our world, however much we may see echoes in names, in politics, in climate: this is a world with a northern land mass, a southern continent and an archipelago girdling the equator and the tropics, but it is also a world where time behaves in a very odd fashion, a world in which adepts and other sensitives not only experience it differently but interpret it, responding in creative ways and even manipulating temporal reality.
A major key to the novel comes in the multivalent title, simultaneously a musical term, a reference to a physical object and a description of the tempo of passing time. In the Latin mass the gradual is a prayer sung or spoken on the steps of the altar, deriving from the Latin gradus, meaning a step or rung and, in the sense of 'grade', rank or position. When something is 'gradual' then it is done step by step or incrementally. In chapter 55 Sandro realises that the term he constantly hears in the islands -- the gradual -- equals the gradients of time.
This bundle of gradual associations continually surfaces in the novel, but it's not the only one. Another is the sea voyage, and here I'm reminded by Robert Louis Stevenson's poem 'Requiem' written on his final destination, the island of Samoa. Here was another creative type who, for his health and peace of mind, sought peace and solace in an equatorial Pacific island, much as Alesandro attempts to do, "under the wide and starry sky" instead of the polluted haze of a dismal industrial country and the heel of a repressive regime.
But there the similarity ends: the disconnect between Sandro's life in Glaund and the musical tour he joins is more than a simple contrast between the wintry republic and the balmy island hopping -- he seems to have lost a significant amount of time unaccounted for by a few weeks of travelling by ferry, which costs him dear. When an unwelcome musical commission is forced on him many years later he looks to escape to the paradise he remembers. Will he ever return to his home -- home from the sea -- and the life he used to know?
I very much admired this novel, not least for the musical aspects and what constitutes the wellspring of creative inspiration. In this first-person narrative we see everything through Sandro's eyes, so we too go through his confusion, his disappointments, his successes; we learn about the republican junta and adepts, his search for lasting relationships and the nature of detriment and increment; and we puzzle at the seeming somnolence and lack of curiosity of so many people in this curious world where the anomalies, which the reader can clearly see, are concerned.
To conclude let me mention a symbol of the novel's miltivalency, the wooden staff which Sandro is given to travel around the islands. On this staff -- properly a stave -- mysterious lines are scored by individuals later identified as adepts. To the words stave and score my training in classical music immediately adds the image of a conductor's baton, and in truth the scored stave in visual terms closely resembles this tempo indicator.
But when we consider the adepts whom Sandro encounters (and later associates with) the additional image of a magician's wand also suggests itself. With these beguiling concepts Priest intones his spell over the reader.
⛴ Dream Archipelago ferry routes ⛴
July 26, 2020
This was unlike anything I’ve ever read and not what I thought it would be at all. I loved it!
January 25, 2022
The Gradual is an unusual novel which follows a composer who lives in a country controlled by its military. From a young age he sees islands in the distance from his window, but knows hardly anything about them. In the end he has the opportunity to visit them through work, but when he returns nothing is the same.
I enjoyed parts of this book and it is incredibly clever. However, it didn't grab me and I wish there was more closure at the end of the book.
I enjoyed parts of this book and it is incredibly clever. However, it didn't grab me and I wish there was more closure at the end of the book.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 122 reviews