The Prestige by Christopher Priest

I think this may be the first science fiction novel I have willingly read in my entire life (because I was misled by it receiving the World Fantasy Award, as well as the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). It's a certified pageturner and I was totally enthralled and busy guessing what would happen next. Inventive and intricate though it is, I really wasn't a fan of the authorial voice, which seems to remain the same throughout the narration. Though the point of view switches between a man in the 1990s, two (or three?) men in the 1880s-1900s, and a woman in the 1990s, the tone remains essentially unchanged, something in the way the story is told just feels uniformly dry and I found the voice unconvincing. Even thought I guessed some of the mysteries before they were revealed (meaning that they were predictable in parts, not that I'm so great), some of the novel was really surprising and startling, and one of the mysteries is left unresolved by the close of the book (at least, I think that it's unresolved, the supposedly satisfactory explanation offered in the text didn't feel right to me, but I can't explain what it was without giving things away). In both its style and subject matter, it owes a great debt to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which, if it counts as science fiction, is the only other sci-fi novel I have willingly read), and since Stevenson is one of my favourites, I greatly enjoyed being reminded of his novel. Despite the fact that I said it's a pageturner, it took a bit of time to get going, and the first (rather short) part is exceptionally dull, but I'm grateful that I struggled through it and got to the good parts. This book hasn't now made me a science fiction fan, but I enjoyed it a great deal, and it had some deliciously horrifying moments and quite a lively originality and inventiveness.