The Prestige

As one of my favourite books ever, this Christopher Priest novel-turned-movie starring Bale and Jackman is seriously underrated. This amazing book of magic realism is split up into various volumes.

Characters:

My favourite character is Nicky Borden. He seems to have his head screwed on right and the fact that his life is a mystery and we find it out slowly with a very interesting backstory only makes his character all the more intriguing. The entire game of his character is interesting because he's a journalist and his job is to find out the backstory - he ends up looking for someone and finding his own backstory.

Themes:

Well, my favourite theme of this novel is magic realism. I have always loved myself a good bit of magic realism, it restores my faith in humanity and gives me hope that magic does, in fact, exist. Magic Realism is the epitome of magic as a reality and this, in The Prestige is viable until the end of the third volume, and then it comes back later in the fourth when we start to find out real secrets of real magicians. 

Storyline: 

A kind of reads like those old Victorian novels. I feel like there's a deep connection between reader and protagonist and there's also a sense of you never know who because this is a big five between Alfred and Rupert. There's a sense off when you're reading one journal you think that their the hero and it's only after all of the Victorian decadence that we realise that we don't know what is actually going on and that's the true beauty of the novel. I think it's excellent. I think that this novel is one of the better post-Victorian Magic realism novels and after you read it you still feel like you're stuck in the limbo of the novel. I definitely feel a deep connection. 

Verdict:

Well I only could possibly give this novel a straight nine.

100% characters: Nicky is one of the most intriguing characters I've ever encountered. The sheer three dimensional perspective we get is amazing; and when we get further in the novel we realise that we're not actually looking at an image of post-Victorian decadence. We're looking at image of our protagonist. A mirror image.

100% themes: I love reading about magic realism. I love this sheer beauty of how we can mix the real-world with something so complex as magic. There's a brilliant sense of decadence there as well that is always lurking in the background; and I think with this we getting very 20s USA outlook of the world. 

As the novel moves on we get a brand-new perspective on the world because we seem to go straight through World War I almost without feeling. Then we take that step back for reflection, then we seen to see straight through World War II and the themes that come out of this are in tents and psychological I'm philosophical all at the same time.

100% storyline: As I said before, the storyline of this novel is revolutionary. A novel that lacks emotion yet evokes catharsis. Even though it lacks emotion we get a purging of the pathos. The storyline plus the language, plus themes and characters; could only equal a novel absolute beauty. 

No wonder this is one of my favourite novels.