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The Extremes, by Christopher Priest (Simon and Schuster, £16.99).

'Human kind cannot bear very much reality', sang T.S. Eliot's little bird in The Four Quartets; as if in refutation, many of Christopher Priest's novels are explicit investigations of the limitations of mere reality, and of the tension between our imaginations and our responsibilities in the real world.

Priest's A Dream of Wessex (retitled in the US as The Perfect Lover) explores emotional tensions in what appears to be a community off the south coast of Britain 150 years in future, but which is actually a virtual reality world synthesised from the imaginations of 39 of its inhabitants. The plots of The Affirmation and The Glamour also pivot on struggles for control of imaginary or unreal worlds; after the near-future dystopia of The Quiet Woman, Priest returned to the theme of illusion and reality in The Prestige, in which a journalist becomes caught up in the legacy of a deadly feud between two Victorian stage magicians. And in his latest novel, The Extremes, he once again uses the imaginary landscapes of virtual reality as an overt metaphor for psychic terrain.

Teresa Simons is an FBI agent, newly widowed after her husband, also an agent, was shot by a crazed gunman in a small town in Texas. Teresa was born in Britain but raised in the US. During compassionate leave after her husband's death, she is drawn to Bulverton on Sea, a small town on the English south coast where, on the same day that her husband was killed, Gerald Dean Grove went on a shooting spree, killing 23 people and injuring many more.

Teresa believes that she may find relief in analyzing a horrific event coincidentally connected to that which caused her husband's death, but soon she tangles with executives of the GunHo Corporation, a virtual reality company which is paying for the stories of survivors of the Bulverton tragedy. The GunHo executives claim that Teresa's unofficial research may blur the witnesses' memories and cause unwanted 'fast-lane crossovers' between the two events, spoiling their plan to market an Extreme Experience scenario based on Grove's shooting spree.

Teresa is already familiar with the immersive, highly realistic virtual reality scenarios of Extreme Experiences, or ExEx. They are used by the FBI to train agents by simulating past violent crimes; agents must role play over and over until they find the correct solution. But now she discovers that she has only just begun to explore the limits of ExEx, for as the GunHo executives hinted, participants are not merely passive observers. Successive immersion in the scenarios not only changes the perception of the participants, but may also change the scenarios themselves; indeed, Teresa's investigations in the real and virtual worlds soon begin to blur together. When she finally challenges Gerald Grove in a simulation of his killing spree, she finds that she is trapped within nested levels of virtual reality, with an opportunity to finally decide her own future in a place seemingly without limits.

Priest's exploration of the extremes of the violent outrages perpetrated by inadequate, psychpathologically unstable men is understated yet unflinching. He avoids sensation and melodrama, and instead concentrates on the reactions and emotional devastation of the survivors. Interwoven with Teresa's story is that of the managers of the hotel in which she is staying. Nick Surtees is the son of the former owners, who were shot dead by Grove; Grove also killed the husband of Nick's lover, Amy Colwyn. Nick and Amy are both beginning to wonder if their relationship is held together only by their common tragedy, and when offered large amounts of money by the GunHo Corporation they separately consult lawyers and are able to at last escape the confines of their pasts. In contrast, Teresa obsessively reruns ExEx scenarios, seeking to change their parameters, trying to discover what lies beyond the limits of their program codes. The claustrophobic repetition of the intense quiddity of these scenarios is superbly done, and nicely contrasted with the more inwardly focused passages set in the real world.

The danger of stories based on virtual reality is that they have a tendency to collapse into ambiguities of the 'it was all a dream' variety, or to engage in unconvincing Freddie Kreuger style single combats in nightmare landscapes where anything can happen but nothing has any real significance. Priest skilfully steers his story between these cliches. In The Extremes, as in his previous novels on this theme, the solipsism of unrestrained fantasy is seen as a trap or a regression. Unless we can bear the face up to unforgiving reality, our fantasies are a negation rather than an affirmation of the richness of the world. With this understanding, the ending of this finely constructed novel can be seen as a moral rather than a narrative ambiguity.

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