Immediately before reading Christopher Priest's The Islanders, I had read a biography of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the remarkable Englishman who trekked across Europe on foot in 1932 as a very young man, exploring the places, people and lives he met in those distant, pre-war years. He spent time after his walk living in the Balkans; during the war, he helped lead insurgent forces on Crete, mingling with the Cretan shepherds and (through speaking fluent Greek) mingling with them invisibly. After the war, he settled in Greece, living on the Peloponnese coast and writing about his travels on the mainland and around the islands of the Aegean. So when, through a fairly random choice, I opened The Islanders, I was ready for a novel made up of gazetteer entries for imaginary islands set in an imaginary sea, populated by artists, writers and scientists, leading lives that only seem ordinary on the surface.

The stories in this book are set in the "Dream Archipelago", a profuse scattering of islands in a great world-sea between two warring continents in north and south. The world they are on is not ours, and yet bears outward similarities to our own. But there is much about the Dream Archipelago that is illusory. Time and space are sometimes not fixed quantities; the world of the Dream Archipelago stands at an angle to our own, and the familiar may sometimes flip over into the fantastic. At first, this is only reflected in some of the gazetteer entries and some of their handy hints for travellers that bring the reader up short; but then. as we go further into the book, we encounter stories about individual inhabitants of this world, first as historical background material and then later as individual accounts, and we see the world, and specific events in it, through different eyes. Gradually, our own perception shifts and our interpretation of events is challenged.

Priest started writing stories set in the Dream Archipelago in the late 1970s, with the first three appearing in book form in his collection An Infinite Summer in 1979. In his introduction to that book, Priest says that the stories were inspired by a holiday in the Greek islands, but that there were a number of other locations that went into the mix, especially the Channel Islands (a small group of islands just off the northern French coast, but held as the semi-feudal property of the British Crown for many hundreds of years). Indeed, Priest gives the islands of he Archipelago a legal and administrative system that seems to come directly from Jersey or Guernsey. He also said in that introduction that the individual stories should not be considered as being linked in any way; other than being set in the Dream Archipelago, they had little or nothing in common. But he kept returning to the subject, and by the time all his Archipelago stories were collected together in The Dream Archipelago in 1999, some of the earlier stories had been revised to make them fit more directly into the loose series that these stories had become. His 1981 novel The Affirmation also had segments set in the Dream Archipelago, although that part of the novel portrays the protagonist's own psychotic retreat from his (and our) reality into a world that appears to be of his own making. But this is a game that Priest is playing with us, because in The Islanders, there are references to a novel written by a character in this book, called The Affirmation. Later Priest novels, such as The Adjacent (2013) and The Gradual (2016) are set, partly or wholly, in the Dream Archipelago. Yet it would be unsafe to think of these books as constituting a series of some sort, but rather a setting that Priest returned to as ideas occurred to him that would befit from the shared setting.

So in The Dream Archipelago we piece together some lives - and deaths - from different viewpoints, and over an extended reading, rather like the way we who read history piece together our own interpretation of events based on differing interpretations of the same events as seen from different viewpoints, or relating seemingly un-associated snippets of information that go together and make a whole story. This approach will always leave some narrative holes, whether we are reading about real events or fictional ones, but that just gives a book like The Islanders a special smack of authenticity, just like real life. It is a prime example of the sort of speculative literature that I think of as a "puzzle novel"; but in this case, there is no one answer that is right. Rather, the reader has to arrive at an answer that they personally find satisfying. For Truth is Beauty, and Beauty Truth. And if you find this novel to have beauty, you will find truth in it, no matter how fantastic the events or how fragmentary the beauty. ( )

A very quirky collection of inter-related short stories centered around a group of islands. The writing is very good. The author presents ambiguity as a type of approach to story-telling and characterization. ( )

I like so many of the elements included here, but was not hugely fond of how they were employed. Much of the writing is in a dry catalogue style, interspersed with some more interesting short stories. There are hints and references woven throughout the work, at least hinting at an overarching theme, but I don't really buy that. Instead I feel like there were themes and stories and ideas begun all over the place, but most were never resolved. Moreover as you don't know whether any will be, it becomes a frustrating read. I'm open to the idea that there was a deeper storyline that I just didn't pick up on, and perhaps if it was pointed out to me I would have enjoyed the book more. As it is I want to know more about any of them, really, the mystery, the character sketches, the technology, the social politics, the geography, any of it. ( )

Ce livre de Christopher Priest se présente comme un guide de voyage pour quelques îles parmi les innombrables qui font partie de l'Archipel du Rêve. C'est ce même archipel qui a servi de théâtre pour l'action de deux précédents livres de l'auteur, le roman La fontaine pétrifiante et le recueil de nouvelles L'Archipel du Rêve. Cette troisième forme choisi par Christopher Priest est la moins accessible. En effet, l'auteur dissémine dans des chapitres consacrés à certaines îles des informations qui transcendent ce guide de voyage, mais il faut néanmoins lire tous ceux qui n'en contiennent pas, et cela rend la lecture assez laborieuse. Il semble s'agir là d'un exercice de style, qui a semble-t-il plu à certains puisque l'œuvre a obtenu le prix British Science Fiction du meilleur roman 2012 ainsi que le prix John-Wood-Campbell Memorial 2012. Me concernant, il résulte de ce guide de voyage un petit plaisir mêlé d'une grande frustration. ( )

I have no idea what to say about this book. I have no idea what it is all about. But I suppose I should make some sort of an effort. The Islanders is not really a story, it is a travel guide. A guidebook to the Dream Archipelego, and of course I haven’t yet read the book of that name, so perhaps it would help with this one if I did. However at least parts of The Affirmation were set there, so I did have some little background. Most of the chapters describe an island, giving a bit of history, or information on the island’s culture & society. And every now and then there is a chapter which tells a bit of a story. They are all tied together around the possible murder of a famous mime artist, and a love story.

Or at least I think they are.

I have read other books by Priest and often I have been left with the impression that I didn’t quite get all that was going on, but never have I finished one and thought that I had no idea what any of it was about and why it was written in the first place.

But, and here is the thing, I still finished it. So I guess on some level it worked. I was interested enough in the early hints that I continued through to the end. I’m not entirely sure if it was worth the effort however. There are some great ideas. And I like the style of writing. But I prefer a story and characters to a travel guide with hints at a story and characters ( )