The Prestige

Christopher Priest

3 ideas

1. Two magicians, twins and a duplicating machine

   Alfred Borden performs 'The New Transported Man' by secretly being identical twins who share a single name, career, wife and mistress, alternating one public life. His rival Rupert Angier buys a machine from Nikola Tesla that truly transports a man, but each use leaves a copy behind at the starting point. Angier performs it nightly and hides the resulting bodies in the family crypt, so a century later his descendants inherit the question of which Angier survived.

2. The unguessable method is a sacrifice

   The strongest illusions stay secret less through clever apparatus than through a cost so large that observers rule it out without considering it. Suspicion is bounded by what people believe anyone would pay, so a willingness to pay beyond that bound is itself a form of concealment.

3. The confession as another performance

   Read a first-person record by someone whose trade is misdirection as part of the act rather than as testimony about it. Each rival's diary is written with a reader in mind, and it withholds, stages and redirects attention just as the stage show does. What looks like disclosure may be the most carefully built illusion of all, so ask what the account is designed to make you stop looking for.

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