A work that looks at virtual reality long before the computer driven virtual world we live in now...
A Dream of Wessex was first published in 1977, takes place in the 1980’s and moves forward (and backward) to the 22nd century. We found that it made our heads hurt and some of us admitted to having to slow down to try and get the timeline/plot/dimension right!
Julia Stretton is returning from a meeting in London at the headquarters of the Trust that funds the Wessex Project. She is angry and deeply disturbed at meeting for the first time in some years, her ex boyfriend. Paul Mason, is outwardly charming but he governed Julia’s life, breaking down her self-confidence. She escaped him years ago but just seeing him re awakens all her past fears. What makes things worse is that Mason hints that he, too, is going to be part of the Project now. The project is Julia’s ‘happy place’ and she cannot bear to think of him being involved.
The Wessex Project has Dorchester offices and a laboratory beneath Maiden Castle, its task is to try and find solutions to the growing problems facing Britain. There are 37 participants and, by inducing a coma - like state in all of them, the Project creates a collective dream of the future where the problems have been resolved. The participants are supposed to bring back solutions that can aid the ‘present day’. But other things gradually appear to take precedence.
Geographical features are changed somewhat in the novel, Dorchester now being a harbour town with a Mediterranean feel and a tidal bore that daily washes through the Blandford Passage, the narrowest part of a breach that separates Wessex from the mainland. It is an enjoyable task to sit with an OS map and work out where everything is; the site of the ‘Somerset Sea’, the new coastline and what was submerged and what remains. Drawing these on an old road atlas helped us plot various sites. Of course, most people reading the novel wouldn’t probably do this, but we were particularly looking at landscape and geography at this point.
The sites below are very good for reviews and further plot discussion
www.christopher-priest.co.uk
http://loopingworld.com/ /2013/08/07/a-dream-of-wessex-christopher-priest
http://thewertzone.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/dream-of-wessex-by-christopher-priest.html
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