Inversions
by Iain M. Banks (Orbit)

Fiction uses time both as a location and as a character, and in this eccentrically hermetic novel, time is wearing a funny felt hat and tights. A narrator situates his story chronologically by saying: “It was the evening of the third day of the southern planting season.” Short passages of time are characterised as “within two or three bells”, or “two hundred heartbeats”. It becomes alarmingly clear that Banks’s fictional territory is a faux-medievalist one: castles, kings, rebellious barons, crossbows. To drum this in, the book’s first 50 or so pages are spattered with other precious archaisms of measurement: a palace’s architecture, for instance, is that of “a mighty conical tower half a hundred stories tall”.

Inversions tells two contemporaneous stories with separate climaxes but arcane correspondences, nested in various introductions and epilogues. One story concerns the Doctor, a woman named Vosill who having travelled to the court of King Quience becomes his personal physician. Her story is narrated by her apprentice, Oelph. The other story is of a bodyguard named DeWar, who shields the regicide Protector Urleyn from chainmailed and drug-fuelled assassins. DeWar’s actions are narrated by an anonymous character, who writes:

I have chosen to tell the story after the fashion of the Jeritic fabulists, that is in the form of a Closed Chronicle, in which…one has to guess the identity of the person telling the tale.

One might be equally mystified as to the identity of the person writing this book. It is Iain M. Banks, published by Orbit, and there is the happily traditional airbrushed hardware decorating the sleeve, so it must be science fiction. But, though it is clearly set on another planet, it looks like a mere low-tech fighting-fantasy romp. Moreover, the first few chapters are oddly clumsy for the Banks of any genre. Oelph tells us: “I was struck again by the Doctor’s physical presence, as I often am”, as a clumsy excuse for Banks to describe her limbs and “long, damp red hair”. Of the black-clad DeWar, we are told: “People generally called his gaze ‘piercing’” — yet the ascription of the cliché to the groupmind does not make it any less of a cliché.

The origins of both Vosill and DeWar are mysterious to their colleagues. The Doctor, especially, has a weirdly modern knowledge of medicine. She disinfects bandages; she shocks the uncomprehending courtiers by performing CPR and mouth-to-mouth on a stabbed Duke. She drinks, wears trousers, and has progressive views on the inefficacy of torture: “It produces not the truth but rather whatever those commanding the questioner wish to hear.” Eventually she comes on like a mixture of the forensic-pathologist heroine of Silent Witness, and Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3.

When the scales of the pastiche prose begin to fall away, Banks fires up his twin plots, which eventually acquire his old rollicking momentum. He combines deftness of characterisation with witty dialogue and marvellously pictured set pieces. Vosill attends a ball and is subject to the delicious crypto-sarcasm of her court enemies, while trying to remember complicated dance steps (although the orchestra is anachronistically given a separate conductor). DeWar accompanies Urleyn on a hunt, and has to save his master from being gored to death by the enraged horned quarry. There is trouble at a court play (oh, there always is), and there are brilliantly entertaining conversations laid out scriptwise in which Machiavellian courtiers murmur in a tent, swapping pleasantries while between the lines they delicately spin plots of murder, torture and treason.

Vosill is finally framed for a murder and imprisoned in the dungeon. It is at this point that an extraordinary transgeneric device is armed, for the Doctor and Oelph are saved from death by a technological interpolation from Banks’s previous science-fiction novels, a sort of gladius ex machina. This simply cannot be understood from within the context of Inversions itself, since Oelph professes himself completely baffled by what happens, and anyway has his eyes shut at the time. Those who have read Consider Phlebas, Use Of Weapons etcetera will experience a thrill of amused recognition, although their appreciation of that universe will not be appreciably deepened.

The whole novel begins dangerously to resemble an in-joke footnote to other books, written solely to the author’s pleasure, perversely cordoned off to non-initiate readers. But the initialled Banks is arguably just extending the logic of his genre. He began by writing space opera — a term which has nothing to do with divas, but was constructed on the model of “horse opera” for the Western genre: it denotes a widescreen, epic breed of sci-fi rather than in-depth technological dissertation. Now the space opera becomes a soap opera, too. Banks is explicitly staking an aesthetic claim for his science-fiction work to be read as an organic series. The puzzle with this violently clever but ultimately self-disabling novel is that as a conceptual addition to the series, it is so slight.

Leave a comment: