(Review by Nick Gevers, Ph.D., Cape Town, South Africa)

In Inversions (1998), the sixth novel in his ‘Culture’ series, Iain M. Banks has fashioned one of the most cunning narratives in recent Science Fiction history. Of course, Banks, a Scottish author who has also produced sardonically experimental mainstream novels, has always been fond of crafty narrative stratagems and texts full of warring discourses; but Inversions employs these methods with unusual verve and force. It is an ornate labyrinth of disguise, subtle contrast, and revelatory comparison.

The first trick played by Banks in this book is his caginess about its status as a ‘Culture’ novel. Only observation of the resemblance between a never-never-land mentioned by one of the characters and the Culture as depicted in earlier volumes suggests that the Culture is involved here (although a joking cross-reference on the first page might also be cited). But Banks is not being willfully difficult in this: the absence of the Culture as a point of reference is fully appropriate. In the other volumes, the viewpoint of the Culture and its agents is always present, and usually central; after all, the Culture is all-powerful, an ultra-technological galactic utopia, which observes, and sometimes intervenes in, the affairs of backward planets. Its utopian perspective allows Banks to comment on our own forsaken condition. But as the series has advanced, Banks has allowed his texts to express skepticism concerning the Culture’s own virtues and methods (see Use of Weapons [1990] and Excession [1996]). Inversions shows us how the people of a barely post-mediaeval civilization experience the Culture’s covert interventions in their lives; two of them narrate, and as they can only guess at what has truly happened to them, the Culture and its wonders are not in their vocabulary. Their world is all they can know. And we can finally judge, without the Culture’s manifestoes obscuring our vision, how the primitives see the gods who manipulate them.

Inversions is split, by means of alternating chapters, into two opposing and inverted narratives, which complexly question and illuminate each other. In one, a young medical apprentice tells of Doctor Vosill, his mentor, a Culture agent who has come to the kingdom of Haspidus to treat the sick and, more specifically, to become court physician and influence King Quience towards more enlightened attitudes and practices. Vosill faces malevolent palace conspiracies, and comes to employ rather sinister methods herself; but before she leaves, she has done much long-term good. Her ethic is that of altruistic intervention; she does not profit personally, but helps others greatly. In contrast, the other narrative describes how a second Culture citizen, DeWar, becoming chief bodyguard to the Protector of Haspidus’s neighbouring realm, Tassasen, has no positive impact there. His philosophy is that one should not intervene to help others, trusting that they will come right on their own. As a bodyguard, he can only defend one man; where Vosill is pro-active, he is merely reactive. Tassasen falls apart, undermined by war and palace intrigue, and eventually DeWar flees with the Protector’s beautiful assassin, gaining personal happiness at the expense of the greater good his forceful intervention might have secured. So: although Banks sharply interrogates the Culture’s role as an interstellar policeman, he in the end implicitly endorses First World amelioration of Third World chaos. Suffering must be averted. But this conclusion, simple in itself, is reached guardedly, subtly, in twinned tales of magnificent exoticism, superbly engineered suspense, and deeply cunning ambiguity. Inversions is SF’s finest presentation of the ‘natives’’ viewpoint since Paul Park’s Coelestis (1993), and in some ways rivals even John Fowles’ A Maggot (1985).

ORBIT (UK). 1998. TRADE PAPERBACK.