For those of you not familiar with Iain M Banks’ Culture novels, I suggest that you do not read this book.
Not right away.
No, I would suggest that you acquaint yourself with the Culture by reading, at the very least, Use of Weapons or Consider Phlebas.
And then you read this book.
Because, although at first glance it is very easy to disregard Inversions as having anything to do with the Culture, and it could possibly be enjoyed without that prior knowledge, it gains so many more levels after familiarising yourself with Banks’ imagined universe.
Yes, it reads almost exactly like an historical drama, a faux-medieval setting populated with kings and dukes and ladies in waiting and guards and waifs and wastrels. Given that this sort of setting is so beloved by fantasy stories, it is not hard to read it as a tale of magic, even if the “magic” is so subtle that it’s plausible you could explain it away prosaically; maybe it’s just an inaccurate telling of events by a sloppy story-teller. (That last clause when applied to Banks could not be further from the truth, of course.)
Yes, it is possible to enjoy this book without knowing an ounce about the Culture. It is possible to enjoy whilst ignoring the intimations that the story is science fiction: two suns and many moons; a character’s seeming preternatural ability to listen in on conversations she shouldn’t be able to. (These could easily be worked into a story of full-blown fantasy, after all.) It is possible to enjoy the rounded characters and thought-provoking situations at face value.
But to get the full dimensionality of the story, to read it as I think Banks intended, you do need to know about the Culture.
Because, once you have some experience of the Culture, you will know of the existence of Contact, the branch of the Culture that deals with contacting alien species. Once you know of Contact, you will know of Special Circumstances, the intelligence arm. Once you know of Special Circumstances, you will know they like to send agents to do intelligence, or even interventionist, work on those alien species, with a view of bringing them into contact with the wider Culture (and indeed wider galactic society) once they are deemed ready.
Once you know these things, Inversions is elevated from a straight character study to a slightly-less-straight character study that mixes pre-industrial primitives with a galactic civilisation, with the associated moral implications of a technologically superior civilisation interfering in another, far less able, society. Once you know these things, you can begin to see the fingerprint of Special Circumstances throughout the story. You can begin to see that not all is what it seems. That is the beauty of the story: there is one meaning in the text, and there is yet more behind it if you know where to look.
The story itself is two parallel narratives, indirectly connected. Each narrative is told by a third party. The first narrative, the Doctor narrative, is told in the first person by the apprentice of the eponymous doctor, and is in the form of a report to the apprentice’s “Master”, an unnamed, but by no means sinister, person who otherwise has no place in the story. The doctor, known as Vosill, has risen inordinately quickly to prominence as the King of Haspidus’ personal physician, doubly so considering she is a woman and misogynistic attitudes are rife.
The second narrative, the account of the Bodyguard, is introduced by an initially unknown narrator and is presented as a “Closed Chronicle” after the fashion of the “Jeritic fabulists”. Which only means it is told conventionally in the third person, although as an added attraction the reader can try to guess the identity of the narrator (“Now With Added Fun!”). The land of the bodyguard, who is called DeWar, is a Protectorate many miles from the Kingdom of Haspidus.
The narratives never cross, and therefore the characters never do either, save some oblique references here and there.
Armed with the knowledge that this is a Culture novel, and that there are Special Circumstances operatives somewhere (nowhere is it ever explicitly mentioned, although the throwaway line in the Epilogue, where one of the characters “… [declines] the invitation, citing an indisposition due to special circumstances” is revealing), it is tempting to label the doctor, Vosill, and the bodyguard, DeWar, as agents immediately.
The decision to split the narrative structure in two certainly points towards there being two Special Circumstances agents (as does a “fairy story” told in parts throughout the book), one at each location, and it’s natural to hone in on the main characters. But Banks, via his narrators, is very adept at not letting concrete information out. It takes a substantial portion of the novel before you can begin to say with conviction who is who and what is what. And confirmation is surprisingly hard to nail down.
There seem to be clues everywhere, but remember that you are seeing events through the narrators’ naïve eyes. For example, Vosill is purportedly from the exotic nation of Drezen, many weeks’ travel over the sea from the Kingdom of Haspidus. As the narrator observes Vosill attend the King, and others, with far more sophistication than the other court doctors, he muses that this is perhaps because, in Drezen, they have greater knowledge of medicine than in Haspidus. The reader may think, on the other hand, that Vosill knows so much because she is a Culture agent. Either interpretation is valid, but which?
I am inclined to think the narrator is in error, and the reader the more fully informed; it makes more sense to me. But Banks enjoys playing with readers’ expectations and it seems to me that one of the themes of this book, whether intended or not, is an investigation into the nature of perceived truth, despite what the underlying reality might be.
Indeed, DeWar’s narrator says:
[…] Truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.
The tale of DeWar is even harder to discern. Bodyguard to the Cromwellian Protector UrLeyn, DeWar is portrayed as highly competent and extremely loyal, yet otherwise untoward. In fact, he displays many traits that would seem to preclude him being a representative of the Culture. He has an innocence that is repeatedly exposed during his meetings with Perrund, favoured concubine of the Protector, where the two play games of strategy and skill. DeWar is obviously not stupid, but the way in which Perrund plays him offers the reasonable assumption that perhaps it is Perrund and not DeWar who is the agent.
It is not necessary for Banks to keep up pretenses forever, whether he meant to pretend in the first place or not. The method he chooses to tell the story (through the eyes of naïve narrators) necessarily means that people and incidents are reported as is, with no understanding that might have been conferred by a more omniscient story-teller. This, of course, is the whole point of the book, and the choice of the title Inversions: Banks is telling the tale of Culture intervention in a primitive society from the perspective of that society. I don’t think it is Banks’ intention to deliberately mislead, but only to offer the best recount of events that the ignorant primitive society can muster. That the reader may be deceived as a byproduct is a bonus, for both the author and the reader. It also means that Banks is not held to keeping any pretense going forever: through his narrators he can give clues, or even threaten to give the game away entirely, whenever he wants.
As I alluded to above, another dimension to the book is the underlying social commentary Banks chooses to make. Through the Special Circumstances agents, the story deals with two different political views on how best to bring a primitive society forward. Do you as a technologically and socially superior civilisation physically thrust the primitives in one direction or another, which can often only be accomplished through violent means: assassination of impedances, allowing favoured leaders free rein to implement their (read “your”) policies? Or even precede your arrival on the alien world with a bombardment of meteorites to take out regimes and whole peoples that might prove resistant further down the line? Or do you gently guide from the background, suitably disguising the advice so that your aims are achieved, but the primitives think it is all their doing?
Of course, this skips the initial ethical dilemma of whether it is even moral to intercede at all. But, this being Special Circumstances, I guess a reason could be that these primitives left to their own devices may one day become extremely powerful in their own right and challenge the Culture. And in a worst case scenario, destroy it. Best to intercede early, no, before it comes to that?
Not content to explore these political views in their own light, Banks muddies the water and gives his agents personal, sometimes very personal, feelings towards the people they are trying to guide. Both agents get involved emotionally with the people around them, and even the hands-off agent physically intercedes. People get killed, and the agent’s ideology is compromised.
Banks does not make any overt judgment calls on the respective merits of each political view, sullied as they are, but come the end of the book, one system seems to be doing much better than the other. Was the favourable outcome because the political methodology employed was untarnished by personal feelings, or was it the opposite?
And speaking of outcomes, it is gratifying to note that there are a number of proper denouements covering the fate of various characters, and most questions are answered. The clues as to the nature of the Special Circumstances agents, when looked back upon, make sense in light of these denouements.
I didn’t really notice it while reading it because I wasn’t thinking about it, but in retrospect, unlike most of Banks’ other Culture novels, where characters and locations abound, Inversions feels positively claustrophobic. Or perhaps intimate is a better word. Banks is able to spend more time with each character than is usually expected in a space opera. A lot happens through dialogue and there are a number of satisfying set pieces, both on an intellectual level and a pure thrill level.
Having said that, it is often what happens off-page that is most devastating when it comes to building a character. Banks has a wonderful way of leaving connections unspoken, and it’s up to the reader to make them. Yet, the connections the reader will make are undoubtedly the ones Banks wants, and they are often the ones that tell you the most about a character. Such as how a number of deaths in the Kingdom of Haspidus are unexplained (or even unexplainable) to the narrator, yet the connections we can make to the Special Circumstances agent tell us in no mean terms that the agent is almost sociopathic when it comes to removing obstacles.
In a character-driven story such as this, you would expect that action is not as abundant as it would be in a story dealing with, for example, vast fleets of hyper-powered interstellar craft about to make war on each other. But that’s not to say there is a lack of action: there isn’t. In fact, when it appears it is quite shocking: for one, it doesn’t happen often, and for two, interventionist Special Circumstances agents have some quite devastating weaponry at their disposal.
Inversions is not your typical science fiction story. In fact, it has to be the least unlikely science fiction story I have read, and almost, although not entirely, relies on the reader’s interpretations to make it so. I don’t doubt that a number of Banks’ Culture fans will balk at it. But when it comes to science fiction disguised as historical drama with just a hint of faux-medieval fantasy, Inversions is about as good as it gets.
