The Prisoner by Thomas M. Disch

First published in 1967

Puzzling over their differing memories of their lives before arriving in the Village, Lorna (or is her name Liora?) asks: "What is real? Who am I? Do I wake or dream?" Those questions are at the heart of The Prisoner: both the original television series and Thomas Disch's novelization of the cult classic.

The television series can be viewed as anti-authoritarian, as a tribute to individuality and free thought, as an existential exercise in futility, as a statement about the nature of liberty and as a condemnation of secrecy and bureaucracy. It can be seen as a fable or an allegory. The great and maddening beauty of The Prisoner is that the audience was never given definitive answers: the location of the Village, the identities of the Village masters, the information the prisoner possessed and the reason for his resignation as a clandestine agent, whether the prisoner finally escaped ... we'll never know, and that's exactly what Patrick McGoohan wanted. (You don't have to believe me about this; you can read McGoohan's interview in The Prisoner: A Televisionary Masterpiece, a coffee table book that also includes a detailed episode guide.) Thomas Disch's novel captures the spirit of the television series, if not its scope.

That the book is a novelization of the show seems to have escaped some of the reviewers who gripe that the novel is too much like the show. What did they expect from a novelization? To be fair, the novel is not a scene by scene replay of the television series: it begins differently; the location of the prisoner's capture is altered; the prisoner's escape attempts in the first and second episodes are carried out more ingeniously in the novel; the woman who (supposedly) escapes in the second episode is replaced by an entirely new character in the book, a love interest who appears early in the novel. There are enough differences to make the novel fresh and appealing to the show's fans while remaining true to McGoohan's vision. And of course, with only 242 pages, the novel cannot cover all 17 episodes of the show; it wisely makes no attempt to do so.

Some reviewers complain that that the book doesn't answer the questions left unanswered by the series. Why would it? This is, again, a novelization of the series (it says so on the back cover). Why would the novel destroy the careful ambiguity of the original?

My only complaint is that a 242 page novel can't do justice to the television series. As I said, Disch captured the spirit but not the scope of the original work. The novel is nonetheless well worth reading, for fans of the show and for those who have never seen it.

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