A composer’s tour of a Dream Archipelago explores themes of time,memory and the petty frustrations of travelCritics sometimes talk of an artists “late style”. Shakespeare’s final plays have a distinct flavour all their own, as do Beethoven’s late quartets, and 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 final album Blackstar. Edward Said has written well on this topic: how certain artists utilize a lifetime’s wisdom and technical maturity to do something both recognisably their own and also new, even contradictory, and “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, and has moved into a potent late phase of his art. He has always deployed unostentatious prose to command elegantly complex stories approximately alienation and loss; approximately twins,conjuration, displacement and strangeness. His most recent fiction still does all this, or but it feels somehow different: cooler,more austere, balancing his perennial fascination with mortality against a new sense of the possibilities of restitution.
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Source: theguardian.com