Message-ID: <1303@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 13-Jan-85 21:16:07 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1303
Posted: Sun Jan 13 21:16:07 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 20-Jan-85 00:42:03 EST
Organization: University of Utah CS Dept
Lines: 50

I recently read THE MAN WHOSE TEETH WERE ALL EXACTLY ALIKE by Philip K
Dick, which is an excellent novel that has been disgracefully
neglected.  When I came upon Christopher Priest's THE AFFIRMATION
(Arena, London, c1981, L2.50 -- this is a 1983 British trade paperback)
I was struck by how inevitably Dickian the book seemed, especially in
the light of TEETH.  TEETH tries to be a 'mainstream' novel about the
'little universes' we all live in; its sf aftertaste made it
unpublishable at the time it was written, in 1960, and Dick was driven
to give up on mainstream writing (his next novel was THE MAN IN THE
HIGH CASTLE).  There are certainly some superficial similarities
between the novels.  THE AFFIRMATION has been billed as 'mainstream'
fiction (a bit of a joke -- the cover is very careful never to mention
the words 'science fiction', although no experienced reader would fail
to notice its sf nature), and it also has failed to find an American
publisher; I understand the experience has left Priest somewhat
bitter.  The careful prose and the distinctly English sensibility of
THE AFFIRMATION are quite different from Dick's work, however.  Yet at
a deep level there are consistencies: if I say that the psychology of
THE AFFIRMATION is like TEETH and the philosophy is like UBIK, perhaps
you'll get a feeling for what I mean.

Peter Sinclair's breakup with his girlfriend has left him deeply
disturbed with himself.  His image of himself is losing definition,
and as a defense he decides to write his autobiography, hoping to
rationalize his life, to give it theme and structure.  Soon he
discovers that his own memory is insufficient to reproduce his life --
when he writes about it, he finds that the events seem to have happened
to another person, the details threaten to trap him and prevent him
from characterizing the grand metaphors in his existence.  So he
decides to fictionalize: he will create a new universe for his
narrative, one that will have correspondences to his own but which he
can shape at will: he will write himself into existence.  After a while
we detect that something is wrong, however, and an accumulation of
little discrepancies lead us to wonder whether the narrator is entirely
sane, and worse, who is imagining who...

An added twist, for those who know Priest's work, is that the alternate
world which Peter Sinclair 'creates' is the same as the Dream
Archipelago in which a number of Priest's stories are set.  Although
Priest tells us (in the introduction to AN INFINITE SUMMER, a superb
collection) that the Dream Archipelago stories are not 'linked', it's
hard to avoid wondering about the connection between THE AFFIRMATION
and the story 'The Negation', especially when the latter features an
author who has written a novel titled THE AFFIRMATION.

I liked THE AFFIRMATION, although I suspect that another reading will
change some of my ideas about it...

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn@utah-cs.arpa
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    decvax!utah-cs!donn