An American Story by Christopher Priest

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My review of Christopher Priest’s fascinating An American Story (Gollancz) appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

An American Story contains a great deal of detail about doctored CCTV footage, conflicting eyewitness accounts, and supposedly expert testimony about the inability of burning jet fuel to melt steel beams – the sort of thing propounded by 9/11 “Truthers,” who refuse to accept the official account of the attacks. And the question arises: how seriously does Priest intend us to take this stuff? How seriously does Priest himself take it? In an Author’s Note, he is careful to distance himself from “crackpot conspiracy stuff,” but insists that “awkward questions” remain about 9/11. It’s an open question: how far down the road of real-world paranoia can a novelist lead us before we stop trusting him?

But An American Story is tricky in another, more traditionally literary, sense. Ben’s account of his experiences is written in a calm, rational, highly circumstantial prose – the prose, that is, of a sane, reasonable man. But as the novel progresses – looping around in time, digressing, resuming – it begins to dawn on you how strange his behaviour is, and how little evidence he has for his presumptions about 9/11. Small mysteries accumulate. Who is the woman – Jacqueline, or Jaye – who keeps turning up in Ben’s life? Why does Ben’s dementia-afflicted mother-in-law recognise Jaye and call her “Lilian”? Why does everyone in Ben’s life have some connection to 9/11?