This is the novel written by Christopher Priest that the Christopher Nolan novel is based on. This is one of those novels that I didn’t know existed before the movie, and so my impressions on this come in additional to having seen the movie dozens of times (well like five).
Ok, so this novel is really good in a lot of ways, gets a little too off in the final chapters, but ends well. There’s a frame story throughout where Borden’s distant relative meeting up with Dangier’s distant relative and solving the mystery of the past. So inadvertently I have read another novel about a kind of literary set of detectives investigating texts.
So the bulk of the novel is written through journals and letters switching back and forth in large section with Borden’s journals first, who teaches you about magic, the industry, and the ways in which things work, and then eventually moving toward Dangier is retells some of the same story but through his own context.
Over all, I think it’s a very satisfying novel, and one that I would have loved, especially if I had read it when it first came out when I was in high school.
What reading the novel also shows me is how good the screenplay of this novel is. Rather than trying to capture the novel as it is, the movie makes some significant and needful changes to change storytelling medium, and it really works here. This was my first Priest novel, but now I am more interested in his work as a consequence.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/The-Prestige/dp/B000ICM1I4/ref=tmm_aud_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1571663860&sr=8-1)