The Prestige
First edition
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| Author | Christopher Priest |
|---|---|
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction, horror fiction |
| Publisher | Touchstone, Simon & Schuster |
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Publication date
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1995 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 404 |
| ISBN | |
| LC Class | PR6066.R55 P74 |
The Prestige is a 1995 novel by British writer Christopher Priest. The novel is epistolary in structure; that is, it purports to be a collection of real diaries that were kept by the protagonists and later collated. The title derives from the novel's fictional practice of stage illusions having three parts: the setup, the performance, and the prestige (effect).
The novel received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best fiction and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.
The events of the past are revealed through the diaries of magicians Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden. The diaries are read by their great-grandchildren, Kate Angier and Andrew Westley (born Nicholas Borden) in the present day, and diary entries are interspersed with events of Kate's and Andrew's lives throughout the novel. The central plot focuses on a feud between the fledgling magicians, beginning when Borden disrupts a fake seance being conducted by Angier and his wife after having conducted a previous one for one of Borden's relatives (Borden was upset that they were presenting it as real when in truth he realized it was an illusion). During a scuffle, Angier's pregnant wife Julia is thrown to the ground, resulting in a miscarriage. The two men are mutually antagonistic for many years afterward as they rise to become world-renowned stage magicians.
Borden develops a teleportation act called "The Transported Man", and an improved version named "The New Transported Man", which appears to move him from one closed cabinet to another in the blink of an eye without appearing to pass through the intervening space. The act seems to defy physics and puts all previous acts to shame. We learn that Alfred Borden is actually not one man but two: identical twins named Albert and Frederick who share the identity of "Alfred Borden" secretly to ensure their professional success with "The New Transported Man". Angier suspects that Borden uses a double, but dismisses the idea because he thinks it is too easy.
Angier desperately tries to equal Borden's success. With the help of the acclaimed inventor Nikola Tesla, Angier develops an act called "In a Flash", which produces a similar result through a starkly different method. Tesla's device teleports a being from one place to another by creating a duplicate at the destination, leaving the original subject behind. Angier is forced to devise a way to conceal the original to preserve the illusion. He bitterly refers to these "shells" as "prestiges".
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