an american story [christopher priest]

Sometimes books define their importance not so much through their excellence as literature, but through the courage of the writing, or even, perhaps, the necessity of the writing. Books that say things that need to be said, and in the saying, affirm the potency of literature, as a force. The pen mightier than the sword. 

Priest’s novel is one of those. It’s not a complex book, despite the multiple timelines, some of it set in the future and much set in the past. It is narrated by a scientific journalist, Ben Matson, who has become obsessed by 911, for understandable reasons. His then girlfriend, Liv, was on the plane that was flown into the Pentagon. Or, as the novel speculates, was reported to have flown into the Pentagon. Matson, over the course of twenty years, investigates what really happened that day. However, the author is smart enough not to make his narrator an obsessive. He’s someone who doesn’t want to believe what the evidence points to. Who would have been happier accepting the official story. Except for the fact that, as the book shows, the official story doesn’t make sense.

This is where Priest’s text becomes subversive. In fact, the very mundanity of the prose (in general) and the book’s hero, help to heighten this subversiveness. Put simply, it doesn’t feel as though it has been written with someone with an axe to grind. There’s a constant tension between the matter-of-factness of the authorial voice, distilled through that of his protagonist, and the explosive nature of the information that is being disseminated. 

At which point, an aside. I find it hard to believe that anyone with a curious mind wouldn’t run up against some of the obvious incongruities of the events of the day which have shaped this century and our lives to such an extent. Even a cursory reading of the given facts suggests more questions than answers. Furthermore, you don’t need to be a Shakespeare scholar to know that history is written by the winners. The given story of 911, the one which launched two wars (at least), and whose residual effects quite possibly include the new wave of nationalism, is tenuous. 

Priest constructs the character of a naturalised US-Russian mathematician. who is employed by the US govt, (and interviewed twice by the narrator), to meditate upon the profounder effects of 911 and its received story on political culture, the way in which the truth is less important than the story, something the author overtly links to Brexit and Trump. The fictionalisation of the facts, which Priest never hides, (this is, after all, a novel), permits the author to re-present those facts that have been dismissed, discounted, or concealed. Of course, the reader can question whether these facts have veracity, but by presenting them within a fictional context, the author implicitly accepts that there can be no authoritative version of “the truth” of that day. Which also implies that the official story should never be accepted as authoritative.

I have never come across Priest, and only know of his work via Nolan’s adaptation of The Prestige, a story about magic. An American Story displays a master of sleight of hand analysing the work of another perpetrator of sleight of hand, albeit a perpetrator so ephemeral that we will never know their identity (or identities). In a way, the terror that might once have been generated by the defrocking of the sleight of hand which Priest conducts has dissipated. Time salves wounds. The truth becomes an interpretive science. Things happened that will never be known. The world moves on. All that is left is the wake of the lies, which continues to wash up against the shore of the present.