The Adjacent

January 13, 2014
Priest (The Islanders) mistakes ambiguity for cleverness in this moderately ambitious tale of separated lovers. In a post-climate-change near future, recently widowed English freelance photographer Tibor Tarent returns from war-torn Turkey to find his homeland altered in the wake of a mysterious terrorist attack—one that looks eerily similar to the strange event that killed his wife. Both turn out to have been caused by “adjacency technology,” which disassembles matter and scatters copies of it through time. Tibor’s confused wanderings are intercut with scenes from other timelines, as versions of him and his wife try to find each other. Priest pauses to wax lovingly on vintage war planes and stage magic (recalling his earlier hit, The Prestige). The structure is neat and leads smartly to a surprisingly strong ending, but the plot collapses under the weight of stilted prose (“But physical action is one thing, while silence is a judged opinion”) and a thoroughly uninteresting yet inexplicably woman-attracting protagonist.

February 15, 2014

In the near future, photographer Timor Tarent is returning to Britain from eastern Turkey, grieving the recent loss of his wife, Melanie, in a roadside terrorist attack. But before readers can find out too much about Timor, the story jumps to World War I and a stage magician named Tommy Trent, and then moves to a World War II-era airfield and another avatar of Timor, interweaving back and forth among what appear to be echoes in time and space. VERDICT Priest (The Prestige; The Islanders) explores love and loss in all of these asymmetrical narratives, put together like a slightly disjointed puzzle. The unexplained echoes of characters throughout various time periods along with the lack of a detailed explanation of the mysterious weapons technology known as adjacency might leave some readers unsettled, but those receptive to a more open-ended storytelling style will find this novel utterly absorbing.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2014
Like some sort of self-assembling jigsaw puzzle, Priest's new novel starts out as a handful of stories that appear unconnected either by character or by chronology. But, as we follow the stories, we eventually realize that these characters, despite being separated by time, are linked via a Nobel-winning theoretical physicist and his discovery, the Perturbative Adjacent Field. Priest, a master of deception and misdirection (The Separation, 2005), is being especially mysterious here, leaving us to work out even such basic things as whether the book is set in this reality or an alternate version (the photographer's story seems set in a world in which Britain is an Islamic state, but, on the other hand, the story about a stage magician tasked by the British military to make airplanes appear invisible to ground-based observers seems pretty clearly set during the historical WWII). We frequently get the sense that, like a stage magician, Priest is deliberately focusing our attention on one thing, while he's doing something else, something subtle, between the lines. While it's definitely not a book for people who prefer their fiction to be linear, The Adjacent is a wonderful piece of fiction, an intricate puzzle that asks the reader to pay close attention and to read not just the text, but also the subtext and its implications.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)