A composer’s tour of a Dream Archipelago explores themes of time, memory and the petty frustrations of travel
Critics sometimes talk of an artist’s “late style”. Shakespeare’s last plays have a distinct flavour all their own, as do Beethoven’s late quartets, or Henry James’s densely fluid later novels. To pick a more contemporary example, we can ponder both the continuities and the differences between early David Bowie and his last album Blackstar. Edward Said has written well on this topic: how certain artists use a lifetime’s wisdom and technical maturity to do something both recognisably their own and also new, even contradictory, “a form of exile from their own milieu”.
Such thoughts are provoked by reading Christopher Priest’s new novel, since Priest, now in his 70s, has moved into a potent late phase of his art. He has always deployed unostentatious prose to tell elegantly complex stories about alienation and loss; about twins, conjuration, displacement and strangeness. His most recent fiction still does all this, but it feels somehow different: cooler, more austere, balancing his perennial fascination with mortality against a new sense of the possibilities of restitution.
Continue reading...via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2cmQq58
0 comments:
Post a Comment