The Gradual by Christopher Priest
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Spiritual Relativity

The Gradual is an allegory, and a fairly complex one at that. As with any allegory, it remains impenetrably obscure without some hint as to the key for its interpretation. I think the key here is medieval monasticism, specifically Gregorian Chant as the undisclosed but barely hidden theme of the book.

The first clue is of course the title itself. It refers to a ‘time gradient’ which affects travellers as they move about in Priest’s decidedly dialectical world from evil and ugliness to peace and tranquil beauty. But a Gradual is also a liturgical book of the Catholic Mass. it typically contains only the musical parts of the ceremony and not those that are merely spoken. Most of the music is ancient and anonymous, passed down and progressively modified with no accreditation by generations of monks. The music is written in Gregorian notation which uses four lines and three spaces as the range of average, probably untrained, voices without instrumentation. The protagonist of The Gradual, Sussken, is a composer who travels from his homeland to the Dream Archipelago, first for business, then for refuge.

The set of four lines in Chant (rather than the five in modern music) is a musical stave upon which the square-shaped notes are placed. Seen from a distance, this is the impression one gets of the islands of the Dream Archipelago floating in the Midway Sea. According to Sussken, “Every island had a different note.” In fact his initial musical inspiration comes from the three islands he can see from his room on the mainland of Glaund - corresponding of course to the three spaces in Gregorian notation. For Sussken, “The islands formed a pattern, a format, a structure in the way I understood structure: movements or parts that while being single and separate made up a whole. Islands, I had thought, would be like a sonata... “

A stave, of course, is also a kind of staff or pole. In The Gradual, the stave is a small staff which is an essential tool for managing the time variability in the Dream Archipelago. Time is lost or gained, seemingly randomly, as one travels eastward into the ‘score’ of the islands. Sussken is mystified by the absence of a reliable time standard: “Every day my watch appeared to lose or gain time –one day it gained four hours, or lost eight. I was not sure which.” After his first trip, he experiences a sort of Einsteinian Relativity - his nine weeks away are almost two years elapsed at home.

The most distinctive feature of Gregorian chant is that it has no definite time signature, no fixed rhythm. So, for example, Chant can be slowed to a lyrical lilt or speeded up to a rapid clip depending on liturgical circumstances and the whims of the choir master. Perhaps the most striking modern version of this is Vaughn Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in which the time of the music seems constantly and unpredictably to expand and contract. Just as does time for Sussken in the Dream Archipelago.

At the port of entry on every island of the Archipelago (all inter-island transport is via ship), a group of young ‘adepts’ awaits and scrutinizes arriving passengers. These monk-like adepts, both men and women, claim to have exclusive knowledge of how to adjust inadvertent time distortions for those who suffer from them - much like the clerical claim to intermediate between God and human beings. The adepts generally do not intrude upon the privacy of travellers but once they have found a willing mark, they solicit for ‘donations’ at every opportunity. They carry small etching tools as a sort of mark of office, not unlike the habit and crucifix of a medieval monk.

Once approach to the adepts is made, out of a kind of spiritual turmoil brought about by the fluctuations in time, the process of adjustment is highly liturgical. It involves the constant presence of, and attention to, the stave, upon which the adepts make arcane notations. ‘Clients’ of the adepts, upon making a necessary donation, are required to follow precise directions without question in a quasi-mystical ritual which reverses any previous ‘tidal aberrations’ of time they have experienced. Whether superstition or artful science, the process does appear to yield results: clocks become synchronized.

Throughout this ritual ‘adjustment’ the client is required to carry all the baggage which has been taken on the journey into the Archipelago. Baggage is cumbersome and tiring to lug around, thus provoking consideration of what is really important and necessary to one’s existence. Clothes, books, and other personal possessions are progressively dumped as it becomes clear they are not worth the effort of possession. In monastic jargon, this is equivalent to a novitiate, a testing of the intention and suitability of the candidate for inclusion in the spiritual community, and as Sussken realises “a purging of the old.”

Glaund, Sussken’s continental homeland, is a cold, northern, industrialised state in a more or less permanent war with its closest neighbour. It is ruled by a military junta which conscripts a large portion of each generation to fight endless battles on an obscure continent - a sort of distant military chess board which spares the productive capacity and civilian population of the home countries. Think Vietnam, or Iraq, or Syria. This is more or less the modern secular world and its material obsessiveness.

The Dream Archipelago, on the other hand, is composed of thousands of independent island states which live in harmony with each other. They have adopted but adapted a definitely medieval form of polity: “... the ways of a benign government that had devised a modern way of operating the ancient feudal laws of the islands.” Sussken’s artistic creativity is seduced by this alternative reality: “It was in every sense a real world away, halfway around the globe, and past concerns seemed for the time being minor and irrelevant. The music I lived for was finding fruition. I wanted to stay in these islands forever.”

The islands are climatically temperate, tranquilly sociable, environmentally aware and try to maintain good but arm’s length relations with the warring continental states. “The Dream Archipelago was the largest geographical feature in the world, comprising literally millions of islands, but it was closed to warmongers.” It is not much of a stretch to consider each island as a large monastic establishment whose principle threat is the militaristic and economic ambitions of the secular world. The monastic theme is made almost explicit in referencing “the sense of enclosure created by the wealth of islands.” Henry VIII certainly noticed both the enclosure and the wealth of the medieval equivalents.

Aside from permitting both warring parties a bit of R&R in their paradisiacal enclaves, the islands have two primary defenses against the secular powers: the time variability, a spiritual condition really, which only the islanders know how to manage; and the fact that there are no maps or charts of the entire Archipelago which might allow an invasion. This theme of hidden or arcane knowledge lends a certain gnostic flavor to the islands which is not inconsistent with the earliest desert monasteries. But like those early monastic establishments, the islands also change, and not necessarily for the better. Even paradise has its dialectical flaws.

I could be wrong in any of the detail suggesting the connection between The Gradual and medieval monasticism; but I think the overall conclusion is sound. The book, for me, has echoes of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion among other allegorical fantasies. Certainly this is not the only possible key to Priest’s tale, but I hope it’s a productive one.

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