Aerin's Reviews > Inversions

Inversions, like so many of Banks' books, is slippery. Every time I think I have a hold on it, it slithers out of my grasp. It's this element that keeps drawing me back in to the Culture series, as strange and frustrating as it often is. I keep trying different techniques to pin these books down, thinking at some point I will find the right angle from which to sneak up on them. I hope I never find it.

The plot of Inversions is fairly straightforward - the book is really two interweaved novellas, called The Doctor and The Bodyguard, which both take place on the same medieval planet. The Doctor follows Dr. Vosill, personal physician to King Quience of Haspidus, who raises suspicions at court because she is a woman, and a foreigner, and because her treatments are strangely effective. The Bodyguard follows DeWar, chief of security to General Urleyn, the leader of the Tassasen Protectorate, halfway around the world from Haspidus. Like Vosill, DeWar is a foreigner and therefore inherently suspicious, but his devotion to the General has placed him above reproach. The world itself is in turmoil; meteor strikes a generation ago had killed thousands, altered the climate, and destroyed a global empire, leaving fractured states like Haspidus and Tassasen to battle for dominance. As Vosill and DeWar tend to their charges, the leaders prepare for war.

Inversions, therefore, reads like a fantasy - light on magic, but heavy on court intrigue and battle plans. It's not immediately clear how the book fits into the Culture series, which is about an intergalactic utopia filled with decadent aliens, hyperintelligent spaceships, and smartass drones. Nor is it obvious what the two novellas have to do with each other, despite the assurance in the introduction that they "belong together." These mysteries resolve in the bedtime stories DeWar tells the young prince, Lattens, about a faraway land called "Lavishia":

"In this land there lived two friends, a boy and a girl who were cousins and who had grown up together. They thought they were adults but really they were still just children. They were the best of friends but they disagreed on many things. One of the most important things they disagreed about was what to do when Lavishia chanced upon one of these tribes of poor people. Was it better to leave them alone or was it better to try and make life better for them? Even if you decided it was the right thing to do to make life better for them, which way did you do this? Did you say, Come and join us and be like us? Did you say, Give up all your own ways of doing things, the gods that you worship, the beliefs you hold most dear, the traditions that make you who you are? Or do you say, We have decided you should stay roughly as you are and we will treat you like children and give you toys that might make your life better? Indeed, who even decided what was better?"

This, then, pretty clearly lays out the premise of the book, and invokes a common theme in the series: the Culture's ambivalence toward colonialism (which I talked about in my review of the first book, Consider Phlebas, too). Vosill seems to be championing an interventionist approach, while DeWar adheres more to Star Trek's prime directive.

Where the book gets slippery, though, is in the outcomes - who was right, in the end, if either of them were? Inversions has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, several rogue variables that knock everything out of alignment. In the end, is this world better for having been visited by Vosill and DeWar? Are they better off for having done so? I know better by now than to expect straightforward answers from Banks. His characters just settle in my mind, asking their questions, smiling inscrutably at every answer I propose.