Angier suspects that Borden uses a double, but dismisses the idea because he thinks it is too easy. The reader learns that Alfred Borden is actually not one man but two: identical twins named Albert and Frederick who share the identity of 'Alfred Borden' secretly to ensure their professional success with 'The New Transported Man'. The act seems to defy physics and puts all previous magic acts to shame. The two men are mutually antagonistic for many years afterwards as they rise to become world-renowned stage magicians, with the feud affecting the later generations of their families to come, including Kate and Andrew.īorden develops a teleportation act called 'The Transported Man', and later creates an improved version named 'The New Transported Man', which appears to move him from one closed cabinet to another in the blink of an eye without appearing to pass through the intervening space. During the scuffle, Angier's pregnant wife Julia is thrown to the ground, resulting in a miscarriage. Borden was upset that they had presented it as real when he realized it was an illusion. The central plot focuses on a feud between the magicians, begun in the fledgling years of their careers when Borden disrupts a fake seance being conducted by Angier and his wife after they had conducted a previous one for one of Borden's relatives.

As the diaries are read, the truth of the what happened to Andrew's twin is explained by the history of Angier and Borden. This leads her to search for Andrew whom she believes was the twin of the boy she witnessed die. Kate's story is related to a traumatic event that happened when she was five years old where she witnessed a small boy murdered by her father. Andrew's story is related to his childhood, being adopted and his current job as a journalist. The diaries are read by their great-grandchildren, Kate Angier and Andrew Westley (born Nicholas Borden) who meet in the present day, with the two diary accounts being interspersed with events of Kate's and Andrew's framing story throughout the novel. The events of the past are told through the diaries of nineteenth century magicians Rupert Angier and Alfred Borden. The novel received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for best fiction and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. The title derives from the novel's fictional practice of stage illusions having three parts: the setup, the performance, and the prestige (effect). Its structure is that of a collection of diaries that were kept by the protagonists and later collated. It tells the story of a prolonged feud between two stage magicians in late 1800s England. The Prestige is a 1995 fantasy novel by British writer Christopher Priest.

Pleasantville novel