Indoctrinaire

This is Christopher Priest's first novel. It is a good story overall but suffers from a very laggy first section that stops the story from progressing. It begins with the protagonist working in a secret lab far below the surface of Antarctica, a decision that seems to have been made only for the final stages of the book to have a jumping off point.

Research chemist Wentick is taken from the lab and into the jungles of Brazil where, after a long trek through the jungle, he's incarcerated in an abandoned jail and interrogated. The jail sections takes up 30% of the book and is a long meandering sequence of almost surreal events. Almost, but not quite. The whole section is given no meaning in the story apart from the suggestion of total disorientation. Wentick's captors are quite mad at time while Wentick himself is perfectly rational through it all.

At last he's moved from the 'jail in the jungle' environment and finds himself in Sao Paulo with a sympathetic associate and a new laboratory, except that he's 200 years into the future. There has been a nuclear war that has blown up most of the world and only South America survives without too much damage. It turns out that these future people think Wentick and his research has caused a severe problem that arose in the war and he's been brought into the future to set things right. This is quite a shift from the idea that people go back to the past to correct things.

The second half of the book moves along well and the characters are much more relatable. Wentick goes through a lot of thinking about time displacement as he considers that his wife and children are now long dead and probably didn't survive the war anyway. But with a bit of time travel left to him he makes a very unexpected decision.