And for my next trick ... Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson in Christopher Nolan's adaptation
When I heard they were making a film of The Prestige, Christopher Priest's novel about feuding 19th-century stage magicians, my first response was a fan's excitement. The Prestige is a book I love, so I couldn't wait to see it translated onto the screen: to admire the gloomy music-hall Victoriana of the setting; watch Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman embody the duelling conjurers Borden and Angier; find out, in short, what the director Christopher Nolan would make of Priest's novel (his tricksy, sinister films suggested he was perfect for the job). My second response was a fan's jealousy. The Prestige is a book I love. I wasn't sure I liked the idea of all those movie people getting their hands on it.
Priest is the kind of writer it's easy to feel proprietorial about. Several years ago a friend gave me a copy of The Glamour and, with the faint air of sedition that sometimes accompanies such gifts, told me that here was a brilliant writer who was shamefully under-appreciated. After reading the novel, a genuinely uncanny take on the venerable sci-fi concept of the invisible man, I agreed, and couldn't understand why I'd never come across him before. Priest was one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists in 1983, but has never risen to the prominence of contemporaries such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. Perhaps this is because he seems less interested in capturing the zeitgeist than in exploring private, inward territories, or because those territories occupy a borderland between science fiction and "literary" fiction; perhaps his work is too cold-blooded for some. But Priest deserves all the wider exposure that a film adaptation can bring, and with any luck, those of us who enjoyed having him to ourselves will have to manage without that privilege. For fans of the novel, then, there is only one real concern: will the film irrevocably alter our perception of the book? Can you keep your relationship with the words on the page (a private relationship, in which you are an equal because you do part of the work) in the face of an overwhelming spectacle that tells you: you are the audience? Do you really want beautiful Hollywood faces plastered across the faces of your characters? Can you even remember what they used to look like, before?
As it happens, The Prestige is the best kind of film adaptation, deeply faithful to the source and at the same time startlingly new. The core story remains: Borden and Angier compete bitterly throughout their lives - and beyond - over who can perform the most astounding version of a magic trick called The Transported Man. Both film and novel are structured around the same secrets, but oddly enough this doesn't mean that either version is a spoiler for the other. As the magicians tell us, it's not the secret that matters, it's the trick you use it for - and Priest's trickery is so inseparable from his prose that the filmmakers have had to invent their own equivalent tricks in their own medium. Who has the better version of the illusion isn't really something the audience needs to worry about, when it can gawp at both. If you've read the novel first, the film will set its mechanism running in your mind all over again. On the other hand, if you've seen the film first, the novel will be no less unsettling - you'll only think you know its tricks.
Readerly jealousy aside, the film of The Prestige is a gift to existing fans of the novel, and I'd like to think that it will create more. But the question remains: is the big-screen treatment always a bonus, or does it bother you when Hollywood works its magic on a beloved book?
