by Bailey Shoemaker Richards

Created on: October 01, 2009

Christopher Priest's 2005 novel, The Prestige, was made into a fantastic piece of film starring some incredibly well-known names: David Bowie plays a cameo role, while both Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale star in the main roles. Although the movie version of the novel received some acclaim, the novel itself fails to live up to its own potential. A story of magic and murder should leave readers with a satisfying sense of mystery -whether solved or not -and yet what The Prestige gives to readers is a shabby trick executed so poorly that even the most gullible of readers will see through it.

Priest's story follows decades of bloody, violent and jealous conflict between three men making their careers as magicians the Victorian and Industrial Era. Their conflict leads them to lie, steal and murder, and eventually it destroys each of them completely. Thrown into the mix of characters is an element of magical realism; a true wizard is also found within the story. While the set-up for the story and its final magical tricks is enticing, when readers truly enter the arena of the work, disappointment is all that remains to be found.

Told from both a personal narrative and the perspective of journals and letters, the writing in The Prestige is occasionally as witty, mysterious and unpredictable as its story tries to be; however, in many cases the writing becomes inconsistent, impenetrably obtuse and frustratingly shallow. A far cry from the magic, murder and mystery promised by the book's premise, The Prestige is at its core an unsatisfying read.

The competition between the magicians is an attempt to discover the methods and tricks used in the others' best trick; in one case, amazing sleight of hand is used, and in the other, true magic is at its root. At this point in the story -which is towards the end in an explanatory section -the characterization of the magicians loses coherence. A main trait of these men is the desire to make money and earn fame; there is no satisfactory explanation for keeping the truth of a true magic trick secret, since its publicity would make its user wealthy beyond all imagination. The arrival of a deus ex machina also proves to be an unsuccessful "trick" employed by Priest, and its use limits the scope of the book, which lessens its impact greatly.

Nor is there any truly well-founded reason for the pseudo-scientific explanations used by Priest to both hide and reveal the truth behind the story; both the fake science used in the narrative and the appearance of the deus ex machina will leave readers feeling cheated of what could have been a truly mysterious, fascinating piece of science fiction. What readers are given instead is a group of occasionally disconnected trains of events, unreliable narrators that do not allow the reader to explore their unreliability against any impartial view and a story that fails to convince its audience of its own magic tricks.

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