Coming to Christopher Priest after reading Alfred Bester is like leaving an all-singing, all-dancing, high volume production of Guys and Dolls and walking into a vicar’s tea party.
Priest’s prose is flat and bland and colourless. Things are described at a steady even pace. There are hardly any metaphors or similes. There are no colours. People are either men or women and that’s as much descriptive excitement as you’re likely to get. The two female leads are named Victoria and Elizabeth. There are no nicknames. There is no humour.
Reading Priest’s prose is like crawling across a drab and barren plain, BUT – his unornamented flatness turns out to be totally appropriate for this absorbing, uncanny and disturbing novel.
Inverted World
For the majority of this 300-page novel we are transported to a world light years from earth, and into the mind of young Helward Mann, citizen of Earth City.
As I’ve discussed in various other reviews, one basic science fiction trope is the Stranger in a Strange Land, also known as The Sleeper Awakes or, if it’s an Ursula Le Guin novel, The Anthropologist Explores trope.
The author has conceived a science fiction future or alternative world in great detail and now faces the problem of how to explain it to us. Well, there are a number of tried-and-tested tropes or approaches:
- someone has fallen asleep (or been put into cryogenic sleep) who now awakes and is shown round the world of the future (Looking Backward, News from Nowhere, The Sleeper Wakes)
- a visitor arrives from a strange planet, or a more primitive part of the home planet, and is shown round (The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness, Brave New World)
- a teenager comes of age, explaining to the reader what they know of the world they’ve grown up in, and then taking us through the process of being inaugurated into its adult secrets
Inverted World is the last of these. It is told in the first person by young Helward Mann who, in a typically disorientating move, we are told is now 650 miles old and so has come of age. (Later on there are sections told by a third-person narrator, and from then on the book alternates between Helward’s view [1st, 3rd and 5th sections] and the objective narrator [prologue, 2nd and 4th sections].)
Up to now Helward has been raised in The Creche of Earth City and the story opens with him coming of age and so having to choose which to join of the half dozen or so ‘guilds’ which run the City.
A city on rails
Slowly, slowly, very slowly, Helward is introduced to the mysteries of his world and so is the reader. He discovers that: the city is built on a massive steel plate which is attached to railway wheels. The entire life of the guilds is devoted to picking up railway track from behind the city, lugging it in carts round to the front, and laying it out again. When half a mile or so has been laid, the engineers attach winch cables to stanchions out ahead and then slowly and agonisingly winch the city, inches at a time, that half mile or so, and then it stops and is secured. Then the work teams go round the back and dig up the rails it has just come over and begins the process of laying them at the front, to extend the railway.
Why? He slowly gets introduced to the idea of ‘the optimum’. There is an optimum. Optimum what? Don’t ask. The optimum moves beneath the earth’s surface and the city must follow it. Why? Don’t ask. Just because. It is in the oath of the guilds and it is described in Destaine’s Directive, a document written by the city’s founder.
Later in the novel we discover this has all been going on for over 200 years!
Thus the guilds include a guild of Futures, who ride out ahead on horses to scout the future path of the city, equipped with maps and surveying equipment; Track, who supervise the laying of the track; Navigators, who make the executive decisions; a Militia armed with crossbows to guard the workers from occasional attacks by stray natives, who the city dwellers refer to as ‘tooks’. Back inside the city, there are castes of food engineers, carers for the city’s children, teachers and so on.
Young Helward is slowly introduced to the hard manual labour all this requires, and discovers that the City co-opts the labour of nearby villagers, groups of surly men who reluctantly work as packs or teams under the supervision of Track guildsmen. A little later he discovers that the reason these tooks are often surly is because the City ‘buys’ some of their women. The process is known as transference and there is a Transfer centre where eligible men meet with these women and pair off.
Why? Because for a reason no-one understands, the birthrate of female City-dwellers is always low; female foetuses are aborted or stillborn. Therefore the tradition has grown up of buying local women from the villages the city passes, impregnating them, looking after them well: if they have female children the city keeps them; if they have male children, they can choose whether to take them back to their settlement. Now he thinks about it, Helward realises that his own mother left him when he was small and his father didn’t like talking about it. Obviously she was a ‘native’.
At the same time as Helward had to choose a Guild to join, he was ‘married’ to a young woman his own age, scion of a respectable City family, Victoria. Through the first half of the novel, we trace their uneasy relationship, in which she takes a feminist view that why should he have all the adventures outside the city while it is her role to be stuck in the City, never allowed outside, and just get pregnant and have babies, hopefully female ones?
Outside Helward begins to grasp why most of the inhabitants are never allowed outside: it is too weird and upsetting. In his first introduction to the outside by a slightly older colleague, Future Denton, Helward is shown dawn over their world and sees the sun appearing as a kind of spindle, a fiery ball with prongs at the top and bottom. He is told that the City is on a planet a long long way from the mother planet Earth referred to in Destaine’s document, and that the older guildsmen live in a long-held hope that rescuers from planet earth will one day find them, arrive on the planet, and save them from this endless toil.
Variations
Having conceived this extraordinary scenario, you can see how a novelist would then want to ring the changes or take the situation to it logical consequences. And so:
– Helward gets caught up in a riot by the tooks, which is only put down with some violence by the militia
– The city comes to a significant hurdle, a bridge over a ravine with a fast flowing river at the bottom. The process of a) building the bridge across the ravine, and then b) of winching the city across the scarily swaying bridge, and then one of the massive cables pulling it dramatically snapping when it is half-way across, is genuinely nailbiting.
By this stage, Priest’s slow, pedantic boring prose has utterly pulled you inside his conception. It is an imaginative triumph.
Down past
But then Priest takes the fantasy to a whole new level, and gave me – at any rate – a fictional experience of unparalleled weirdness and intensity. When the transferred women have delivered their babies, they are sent back to their villages, accompanied by a guildsman. It is Helward’s turn to do this and so he is given provisions and a map and told to head south, what the citydwellers call ‘Down Past’.
What he finds is that, as he travels south, the world around him, including the native women, becomes subject to an amazing distortion. The women become shorter and shorter and wider and wider. They come to the ravine he remembers crossing a few weeks earlier and it is now a much shallower, narrower canyon.
In an utterly convincing, extended passage Helward grasps why the city must keep moving: because the world behind the city becomes distorted in time and space. Eventually the women he’s accompanying become so flattened as to become invisible, and the landscape appears to drop off into darkness. What had been mountains in the distance become small bumps in the landscape as he finds himself hanging by the crampons and mountaineering rope he had been given for his expedition.
It is an astonishing imaginative feat, a really mind-boggling stroke of the imagination. I’ve never read anything so terrifying and so convincing. Slowly Helward pulls himself back up the cliff, using what were mountains as slight ledges under his feet, as the world slowly slowly spreads out again, becomes more level and comprehensible. Eventually he is merely walking up a steep slope. Finally the world reverts to something like flat again. Even so, when he finally makes it back to what had once been the ravine he finds is a shallow ditch with a stream at the bottom.
Terrified, he finally identifies the city’s tracks, though these are distorted, appearing very wide, very shallow and very close together. It would seem that the ‘optimum’ is the place where ‘normal’ conditions of time and space apply, but anywhere south of it rapidly distorted in the bizarre ways described. He meets another guildsman coming in the opposite direction – heading down past – with a couple of native women he is meant to be returning, and struggles to put into words what he is likely to encounter, as the guildmen in the city were all strangely coy and oblique about what he would meet.
Because Priest’s prose is so slow and steady and undramatic, the reader is utterly drawn into this paralysing, terrifying alternative reality, in a way few books I’ve ever read have managed to do. I, too, became terrified at just the thought of a world like this, a world where one mistake could mean the city coming to a halt and rotating with the planet’s movement further and further from the optimum, into a zone where time and space become so utterly distorted that life would become impossible… but in a peculiarly upsetting and terrifying way…
It is one of the lesser consequences of the whole thing that when Helward gets back, he discovers that a year has passed and his uneasy relationship with his wife, Victoria, has collapsed. She had their child, who was stillborn, went through grieving for it and her missing husband, and now has married another man. Although this failed relationship is a big issue for Helward when he finally arrives back at the city, sunburned, haggard and aged, it is not for the reader, who is still reeling from the nightmare scenario Priest has so terrifyingly conjured…
Spoiler
And then, in the book’s final 30 pages or so, comes one of the most humongous twists in all science fiction, a revelation which turns everything you’ve read and experienced about this horrifying world on its head, upside down, inside out. It’s so awesome, that, for once, I won’t reveal the plot. You should read it for yourself. It is a genuinely mind-boggling novel.
Books & Boots 