A whiff of paranoia

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 many writers spoke of feeling immobilised. The scale of the attacks and the world’s shared experience of the media event seemed to demand a response; but simultaneously writers such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Jay McInerney described a sense that the tools at their disposal were inadequate — that the reality of what had taken place exceeded fictional representation. These three all recovered from their shock reasonably quickly, contributing to the flood of 9/11 fiction that poured into bookshops during the 2000s.

In recent years this torrent of novels and stories has slowed, but as Christopher Priest’s eerily powerful An American Story demonstrates, it most certainly has not stopped. Set a couple of years in the future, in a world that may or may not be our own (electric cars have become standard and an independent Scotland is part of the EU), Priest’s novel is narrated by Ben Matson, a freelance journalist who earns his living writing for science magazines. As the book opens, Ben is living in Bute with his partner Jeanne and their two sons. It’s a happy life, but that changes when Ben notices a news item mentioning the death of the Russian mathematician Kyril Alexeyevich Tatarov.

The announcement of his death, together with the discovery of the wreckage of what seems to be an airliner off the east coast of the United States reopens Ben’s long-standing obsession with the question of what really happened to his former lover, Liv, who was supposedly on board American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon.

Priest unravels Ben’s efforts to discover the truth about Liv’s disappearance with the deliberate, almost icy precision that is his trademark — a precision made the more uncanny by the gradual unstitching of the reality it so carefully describes.