The gradual

I'm not entirely sure how to review this book. It's unlike anything else I have read. Christopher Priest, like M John Harrison, has a style all his own. It is dreamlike, disconcerting, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time and leaves you thinking about what you have just read.

The Gradual is set in a world much like our own, the same level of technology, similar politics, but these lands are different. The largest land mass sees two countries at war, fighting that has reached a stalemate and where, by mutual consent, the conflict has shifted to the arctic continent. The rest of the world is made up of the huge, so-called Dream Archipelago, a network of millions of islands of all shapes and sizes. Travel there is forbidden to Glaundians.

Our protagonist, Sandro Sussken, lives under the rule of a military junta in Glaund. He's a composer and musician and Priest details his rise to fame, his life as a composer, under the shadow of military conscription. His brother, Jack, is called up and goes off to fight. Eventually Sussken is persuaded to join a musical tour of the Archipelago, a nine week trip that seems routine. But when he and his fellow musicians return almost two years have passed in Glaund. His wife has left him, his parents have died, his world is turned upside down. And that's just the first third of the book!

Later Sussken must escape Glaund and travels amongst the islands, experiencing their strange time dilations, being helped to correct this by the “adepts” who appear at every island port. It's an odyssey that takes him back to the island of Temmil where the musical tour had ended. It's a journey of discovery for Sussken, both geographic and spiritual.

The world Priest has created has its own strange logic to it. The mysterious abilities of the adepts to reconfigure time for travellers is never explained, it's simply a fact of the archipelago. Throughout the novel musical terms abound, the very title itself; the fact that travellers must carry a short wooden rod called a Stave; the importance of Sussken's music and its connection to the islands themselves.

The writing is superb, you really are immersed in this strange, off kilter world. I need to read more Priest. Recommended.