n the kingdom of Haspidus on a planet with two suns, an apprentice named
Oelph tells the story of his employer, Vosill, the king's personal
physician. The foreign-born Vosill isn't popular at the court of King
Quience: the doctor has strange, newfangled ideas on everything from
medicine to politics. Worst of all, Vosill is a mere woman. Besides being her apprentice, it is Oelph's job to spy on Vosill. His
careful observations find nothing incriminating, but much that is
strange.
Meanwhile, in the far-off Tassasen Protectorate, nobles and officials
are similarly suspicious of a man named DeWar, the bodyguard of
Tassasen's ruler, General UrLeyn. DeWar lives in a constant state of
paranoia, for UrLeyn's position is precarious: he murdered a king to
establish his regime and now he is at war with jealous barons.
When DeWar is not neutralizing assassins, he passes time with a member of General UrLeyn's harem and UrLeyn's
ailing son. DeWar regales the two with fanciful stories of a magical land
called "Lavishia." These tales gradually take on a dark and poignant cast
as he describes the end of a cherished friendship between a young man and
woman.
DeWar, of course, is telling an embroidered and altered version of his
own past and that of the physician attending the king on the other
side of the mountains. DeWar and Vosill never meet during
Inversions, but DeWar's stories link the novel's parallel
storylines, and hint at the motives of these two seemingly
opposite individuals--the healer and the "assassin of assassins."
Narrative sleight-of-hand
At first glance, Inversions is a surprisingly low-key, small-scale
production from Iain Banks, a prolific Scottish writer with a taste for
spectacle and narrative pyrotechnics. So much of the action happens offstage that Inversions could be filmed for about seven bucks with sets left over from a BBC costume drama.
In its own way, however, Inversions equals the audacity of such previous
Banks novels as The Bridge and Feersum Endjinn. Banks
reveals his story through the eyes of those who do not and cannot
understand what's really going on. The apprentice Oelph glimpses
mysteries that readers must solve for themselves; there is no drawing-room scene in which the investigator puts it all together. That's the reader's
job, and all information may be obscured by myth, bias, misdirection and
outright lies.
At the end of the novel, Oelph ruminates on the
significance of a pair of objects associated with DeWar and Vosill and
encourages readers to "blaze their own trails of speculation." There are
enough ironic inversions in the symbolism of the objects to fuel a
hundred undergraduate term papers.
Oelph's character strikes the only false note in what is otherwise a
composition of exquisite subtlety. He begins the story as a callow and
bigoted youth with divided loyalties. His futile infatuation with Vosill
turns into a forlorn attachment that grows tiresome to readers.
But overall Banks has pulled off a remarkable feat of narrative sleight-of-hand.
Inversions is extremely clever, yet not cynical. Perhaps the most
audacious thing about Inversions is its optimism, its sense of hope
and burgeoning possibility.
