The other must fail and only one can be remembered for creating the transported man!!! And this dear reader became their passion. Many of the magic and secrets are revealed through the book but none better than the extraordinary illusion of the transported man, drawing on the invention and introduction of electricity which was just being introduced at that time.Īs bitter rivals, the two magicians are aware that there is only one fear worse than having your secrets revealed during their stage performance and that is someone sabotaging your tricks and performances just at the point the audience is enraptured. A book that is told through two journals one a memoir and the other a series of journal entries relaying the events, secrets, and lives of two men obsessed with their art as an accretive and perpetuating resentment promises mutually assured destruction. The story begins and ends in modern day England but for most of the book we are transported back to Victorian England with its gas lit cobbled streets and to an era obsessed with the ‘theatrical’ and magic. The illusionists, the magicians, and the great pretenders. This is the story of Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden. Four magical stars for a book of “acquiescent sorcery” as the reader is plunged into the deviously powerful and enchanting world of magic and illusion, mixed with the dark and profane jealousy that dangerously consumes two of the most prominent magicians of their time.

The Prestige by Christopher Priest