In places, this is almost a comedy. In others, it seems to be a genre writer writing about being a genre writer - in this case, the p.o.v. character is a writer of crime thrillers. But the story is set in Priest's Dream Archipelago, so things don't always follow logically as one of the islands where the action takes place has high levels of 'mutability', which can make weird stuff happen. And said island has some Kafkaesque procedures to try to mitigate that mutability, but they cannot be misused, or even weirder stuff happens. Add not one, but two unreliable witnesses and a cold police case, and the result is a book I found highly readable and engaging.

The protagonist, the crime writer Todd Fremde (whose name, to German speakers, has connotations of "death" and "strangeness") muses a lot about the nature of crime and crime writing. One of the islands he visits claims to have no crime, though the police there spend a lot of time investigating "transgressions", and seem to have plenty of time on their hands to get involved in all manner of plots and conspiracies. As Todd gets drawn into the cold case and its inconsistencies, he shows us a lot of the writer's life, including the creative procrastination that many writers complain about but also practice. As Priest spent a lot of time musing about the nature of his preferred genre (science fiction - see the introduction to his 2019 collection Episodes), I can only see this as projection.

Themes and ideas from the other Dream Archipelago books (and indeed, from other Priest novels such as The Prestige) appear here. This novel also adds to my view that Priest's earlier novel, An American Story, is also a Dream Archipelago story, despite being set in a version of our world. For one thing, mutability occurs there, too.

Also, The Evidence shares the almost loving descriptions of travel - trains, ferries and airports - in the particular way these manifest themselves on islands. And there is a particular linguistic quirk over the naming of one chain of islands that helps single out the Dream Archipelago setting.

I find it interesting to see how the Dream Archipelago stories evolved. When the first two appeared in book form, in his 1972 collection An Infinite Summer, Priest commented in his introduction that these two stories shared a setting but were not otherwise linked. But over the time that he wrote about the world of the Archipelago, he first found that he couldn't resist slipping Easter Eggs into the stories; and then continued with his world-building until this book benefits from the reader having a lot of understanding the working of the world he has built (although it can be read as a stand-alone novel). ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3687296.html

Christopher Priest's latest book returns us to the Dream Archipelago, with the story of Todd Fremde (which is almost German for "strange death"), a mystery writer who gets sucked into a real mystery in the course of giving a lecture at a far-off university, in a world which is very like ours, except that a phenomenon called "mutability" blurs reality often and confusingly. Twins and magic pop up again, as they have done in a lot of Priest's other work (notably The Prestige). I see some reviewers complaining that the situation, and the mystery, are not adequately explained at the end, but I felt very much that the journey is its own reward (we are practically told as much in the text). Recommended, though I think I would not tell anyone to start reading Priest with The Evidence. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2022/04/review-of-evidence-by-christopher-pries... ( )