INVERSIONS discussion (The Culture group read)

   

On a backward world with six moons, an alert spy reports on the doings of one Dr. Vosill, who has mysteriously become the personal physician to the king despite being a foreigner and, even more unthinkably, a woman. Vosill has more enemies than she first realizes. But then she also has more remedies in hand than those who wish her ill can ever guess.

Elsewhere, in another palace across the mountains, a man named DeWar serves as chief bodyguard to the Protector General of Tassasen, a profession he describes as the business of "assassinating assassins." DeWar, too, has his enemies, but his foes strike more swiftly, and his means of combating them are more direct.

No one trusts the doctor, and the bodyguard trusts no one, but is there a hidden commonality linking their disparate histories? Spiraling around a central core of mystery, deceit, love, and betrayal. Inversions is a dazzling work of science fiction from a versatile and imaginative author writing at the height of his remarkable powers.

This thread is for the discussion of Inversions, the sixth book set in the Culture universe.

Posts with spoilers should be marked SPOILERS at the beginning, and the spoilers should be placed within <spoiler>spoilers here</spoiler> tags like this – spoilers here. Both are necessary because the spoiler tag feature is new and doesn't work for everyone yet.

The Culture group read: Wiki page | Organisational thread

I have belatedly got round to picking up Inversions (knowing that I've got a bit of a race to the finish now if I still want to read all the Culture books before year's end) for my reread. I don't recall how long it's been since I first read this, but I think I enjoyed it more this time around - perhaps because I didn't have such expectations. I suspect I was frustrated on my first read that this was a Culture book that had so little of the Culture in it; rereading it now I find it quite satisfying in its own right and the late-encountered line that 'she was indisposed due to special circumstances' may be a favourite Banksian witticism.

I enjoyed the stories within the story told by the bodyguard DeWar that lay the clues to his and Vosill's identities (and I like that Banks plays with expectations here, as my reading is that these identities are gender-flipped), and I actually quite like that we are ultimately limited by the point of view of the local civilisations. We can't know the truth, because our narrator cannot know the truth - we can only make slightly more informed assumptions. His comments at the close on memory and narrative seal this quite nicely.

The nature of the novel makes it harder to spot overarching themes in the way that I did with the first trilogy; Inversions is literally at the opposite end of the Cultural spectrum to Excession, although the presumably less-than-fictional discussion of morality and duty between Sechroom and Hiliti is arguably a human mirror to the Minds' quandaries in Excession. I'll have to mull a little more before I can clear draw any further parallels, but I'm delighted to say that in the absence of Minds, Inversions at least gives us human characters who can be respected, enjoyed and even loved.

...overall, it does make me wonder whether I'll similarly be better-disposed towards Matter (which I outright hated on first reading, and have never revisited until now).

I'll probably leave Inversions for one of the last Culture novels, simply because the surprise has been spoiled by my rather indiscriminate reading of reviews and commentary on the novel. On the other hand, your post her holds out the promise that I can get some satisfaction reading from a slightly different perspective than I likely would have had, originally, if I'd be able to read with zero knowledge of the book.

I do wonder: was the book marketed as a Culture novel when it was first published? If so, presumably that in itself was enough of a spoiler for most readers (perhaps better: an open secret) to figure out the identities and what was going on. And further, perhaps I'm not coming to the book with that much actually spoiled.

My copy certainly says 'A Culture novel' on the front - I vaguely remember double-checking that when I first read it way back when, as it didn't seem to be a Culture book once I got started.

I think it makes a fairly average non-Culture novel - whilst there are some vibrant characters (UrLeyn's son Lattens is a joy, as is conflicted Oelph) and there's some political shenanigans, the surface-level plot is far simpler and I thought less absorbing than your usual Banksian fare and I didn't feel the world-building was up to his typical standard either (compare and contrast the worldbuilding in Against a Dark Background, where he goes to town bringing places to life only for the story to move on and leave them behind very quickly - although I suppose given his love of playing the title through the book, perhaps he had to go to the effort there. It is indeed a dark background ;)

However, if you read it knowing what it is (i.e. that you will find the Culture if you look for it), the multiple levels make it fun and fascinating. So no, I don't think you've been spoiled - I'd go further and argue it's better reading knowing (although I'd be curious to know whether sakerfalcon agrees, as I think it was her first ever Culture novel on first reading, so she may have a very different perspective!)