The Prestigious Pantomime

I bought The Prestige on a whim during The Great Borders Purge. I had seen the movie and liked it. However it sat for months on my shelf untouched, so I suggested it for the Book Brigade to force myself to read it. This review is mostly spoiler free. As I said, I saw the movie first so my expectations were high. The book begins with a dull character in modern times, he was pointless and vague. I waved him away as necessary to the introducing the epistolary part of the novel. Then the real story started.

The first section of the story is told through the autobiography of one of the main characters, Borden. After a dry, lengthy depiction of his childhood the Feud is introduced. It is started accidentally by Borden who does something well meaning and seemingly harmless, and after Angier retaliates with a few small pranks it feels like it should be over. The bulk of this narrative is concerned with Borden giving you his theory on magic and not revealing to his secret which he has oh so cleverly kept for all these years. The most interesting bits of this section were when Borden explains the pact between audience and magician, and then goes on to tell you that this pact is in play in his memoirs, because he is lying to support an illusion. The parts where the illusion cracks and the lie shines through are marvelous, and if you don’t know the answer to the riddle you probably will think Borden quite mad. But then for absolutely no reason they return to the feud, a feud devoid of any cause for malice or anger. And their feud is mild, apathetic almost, they play a few tricks on each other. Borden is petty and obsessive, but seems too self-interested to plausibly continue antagonizing Angier without personal gain. They seem to be feuding merely to entertain themselves rather than out of the voracious spite they both claim.

When we hear Angier’s side of the story we are given a little justification for the feud, but he responds un-viciously, as if he does not really want to cause trouble. Angier at first seems to be a nicer person. He is gullible and earnest and a little weak minded, this sometimes masquerades as innocence and sometimes as pure idiocy. He is not particularly angered by Borden’s continued attacks and at one point attempts to abandon the feud. I suppose the real problem is that the characters never drive the feud and so it doesn’t really feel like a feud at all. When it finally ends, it is merely by accident. The characters simply go along with the events of the story instead of being the ones moving it.

Then there’s Olive Wenscombe/Olivia Svenson. She manages to completely ruin the small amount of respectability remaining to both of the main characters. While both of the main characters are built mostly on flaws, they share the good quality of being lovingly devoted to their respective wives, and you hope for happy redemption or reconciliation of some kind. But then Olive Wenscombe/Olivia Svenson comes along and deprives them, one after the other, of their only admirable quality. I don’t mind flawed characters as long as their flaws are there to shape them into something interesting and propel their story, I don’t even mind entirely rotten characters who are only self serving, but I do mind characters who are just pathetic and despicable out of a lack of concern or purpose. They are just following the story, they have no real motivations. It is the same problem with the feud, the characters are not weakly written, but they are weak, weak in will, weak in action. They do not stand for anything, they are not trying to accomplish anything they merely exist.

In between all this we are taken back to the perspective of the characters in modern times from the introduction. It seems like a completely irrelevant interruption until something truly horrific and shocking springs out of the middle. It is so sudden, so jarring, and so pointless, and so utterly awful. This thing is made doubly horrifying and by the fact that it has no discernable purpose. When we are taken to the modern characters at the very end of the novel, we continue in this extremely disturbing vein, slowly piling on the creepiness until at last the Author leaves on the last page with nothing but sheer terror.

Conclusion: While there are many things that irritate me about this novel: the fact that (spoilers) Angier’s mustache is never mentioned until we are introduced to a roomful of his frozen corpses, the Author giving long-winded accounts of each characters’ childhood as part of their introduction, and the failure by the Author to piece together any of the themes he laid out; the two mysteries are very masterfully and elegantly handled*, even through the difficult epistolary medium, which sometimes strains the narrative. But this novel loses out of sheer disturbing creepiness.

*Another high point is Hesketh Unwin. A background character if ever I saw one, but he wins the Most Awesome Name Ever award.