I thought I’d read all the Culture novels… and I kinda had. But I needed something appealing to kick me out of the “but I could just keep… reading Cadfael?” streak, and a bit of Banks SF was a clear way to do that. Especially as the setting is a pseudo-medieval-Europe planet, so it even sort of felt like fantasy at some points. An author I know I love, and a comforting veneer of fantasy… what more could I want?
Well, not much, since it was bloody good.
Honestly, I had thought Banks had peaked around Player of Games or Use of Weapons, but nope, this is up there too. It was written some later, two years after Excession, and yet it feels very much on par with what I had previously considered his two absolute stand out science fiction novels. So yeah, resolution to keep reading the Banks archive I guess. I mean, I never was sat here saying the rest of the Culture novels were bad or anything, but there’s not the same feeling of “woah” you get when finishing Player of Games*. This… kinda did have that feeling.
Which sort of surprised me, because I just hadn’t heard it discussed anywhere near as much as most of Banks’ other main SF works**. Which either says to me that it’s one of those books I just irrationally glommed onto (Vellum by Hal Duncan I see you), or everyone else is a bit daft. I’m not ruling out either option, tbh.
Or, the premise, which isn’t… entirely obviously SF, is putting people off.
The book is made up of two interwoven narratives, that of The Doctor and The Bodyguard, with a preface suggesting that one was written by the doctor’s assistant, and the other collected from an unknown source, likely one of the characters in the tale of The Bodyguard, then the two adapted together by the doctor’s assistant. The narratives relate stories happening roughly contemporaneously in two states on a distant world, some years after the fall due to natural disaster of an empire of which they were both a part. Both states are in a fragile political state, recovering from the empire’s fall in different ways, and we see the King and the Protector and how they navigate this new world, through stories of people close to them – the King’s doctor and the Protector’s bodyguard. Both are in privileged positions close to the seat of power, allowed to hear and see things many others could not, despite not being themselves in a position of power to change events.
And the stories really are very well interwoven, not just in how the two plots overlap, but in the pacing and timing too. I often find with multiple perspective narratives, that there’s the one I just don’t care about, and spend much of their chapters going “ughhh come on get to the good one”. This is… not that. Each chapter seems perfectly calibrated to get you to “oh nooo don’t end now”, then a page later you’re just as engrossed in the other character. There’s definitely no “better” narrative, and the speed with which you alternate means no scene or theme gets to drag too long before you switch over to the next one.
Equally, for all that they are not their own narrators, both the Doctor and the Bodyguard are compelling main characters, both told from plausible yet intimate outside perspectives. The observer of the Doctor has plot-stated reasons to be paying very close attention to her, but it’s his ability to draw conclusions and to project his own feelings that make her narrative so compelling, and his ability to miss things that, in hindsight, should have been obvious all along, that makes him a wonderfully real narrator. For the Bodyguard, some of the interest lies in the mystery of who the narrator is – we are left to figure their identity out for ourselves – and so you get a more anonymous view, but one that equally draws a very close portrait of a fascinating character.
They’re both also people I found it very easy to sympathise with – they have clear motives that, while not wholly innocent and pure are understandable and supportable, and they have human but forgiveable flaws that round them out. You want them both to succeed, even if you don’t always know what the end goal is. There’s also interest in how well they lie in parallel – even their roles are closely different takes on the same aim – keep their employer alive. And I think that’s where the true joy of the book is. It’s one of the closest and best enmeshed split narratives I’ve come across, because clearly so much thought has been put into the subtler resonances between the two, as well as the obvious.
And then of course it’s all told with Banks’ usually wry style. Even when I’ve not loved the plot of one of his books as much, his writing remains consistently joyous – he’s never laugh out loud funny, but he is always smirkable, and he has a way of phrasing things that I can’t put words around, but if you showed me a bit of text I’d know immediately. And he has a way of seeing things from that slightly skewed angle, that make them all the more interesting, the more you think about them. And that writing style is possibly what pushes him, for me, into one of the top spots of SFF authors… because you never stop thinking that the words he’s put there on the page have been precisely crafted to make you smile, make you think, make you realise you missed a clue 50 pages ago, and that at every moment he’s set things up to leave you feeling exactly as you are. And well, Inversions doesn’t dispel that notion for me at all.
The only thing I would say, is that I’m glad I read it after the Culture novels. Or at least after having read a handful of Culture novels. And if you read the paperback version, look it up on Wikipedia afterwards for the post-script that for some reason they only included in the hardback.
But all in all, a fantastic book that rockets right up my list of his novels… frankly for me it’s sitting with Player of Games and Use of Weapons and there is something of a gap before you get to the rest. I should maybe read Consider Phlebas again, actually… see if it looks better in the light of other Banks novels. But anyway, this is stand out amazing, and it got 5 stars without question. It’s Banks banksing at full Banks, and I loved it.
*Or, and this is a direct quotation from me at the time, “what the FUCK?!” when finishing Use of Weapons.
**SPOILER (maybe? Depends how picky you are) – I’m dancing around it a bit, but this is almost certainly another Culture novel, and is listed as such on Wikipedia. I say “almost certainly”, because the contents of the novel hint very strongly at it, but it’s never actually fully said out loud. But it’s clear enough that it’s very much there.
Did I just immediately buy and read the second Cadfael book? It’s a mystery none shall ever solve.
I didn’t read anything immediately after The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, because it left me solely in the mood for murder mysteries, and I had none available. So when I was reminded of the existence of Cadfael in book form, it seemed the exactly ideal thing to pick up next. I’ve never actually read any of them, having only experience Cadfael in Derek Jacobian glory on tv instead. Which is fine, and happened long enough ago in childhood that I can’t actually remember any of the plots, only that it was great.
It’s 2019 (what… how…), I’ve read all I’m going to read for one year, so it’s time for my annual round up to see what I thought about things in the long view.
And so, the final book of 2018!
Do I blog about plays now? Apparently I do! But only when they’re written down.
One post for two books, because I’m lazy/want to get caught up by the end of 2018…
I read them both back to back, because well you would, wouldn’t you, and Winter just didn’t quite manage the story as well as Fall did. It’s still fun, it’s still pretty, but I didn’t care about the characters half as much. There just wasn’t the tension anymore? And when you’re so light on story anyway, you need everything you’ve got going for you.
And back to literary again.
This was so fucking weird. I don’t know what I was expecting – maybe something fairly standard golden age SF? – but this… was not it. It’s a tiny, tiny book and yet it produced so many questions. Primarily “what?”.
I’m not going to commit myself to reading the Booker shortlist every year (certainly not on top of the Nebulas and the Hugos), but I am keen to read more critically acclaimed literary fiction, as a general rule. And when I saw this on the Booker shortlist, and had it described to me as both being about myth and about language… weeeeeell. Easy choice. It promised much… and it delivered more.
A Reader of Else 