BOOK CLUB
Adam Roberts celebrates a reality-skewing classic
Adam Roberts flips for 1974 classic Inverted World.
I can’t claim disinterested objectivity where Christopher Priest’s Inverted World (1974) is concerned. Reading Priest is a main reason why I became a science fiction writer myself. His debut, the dislocated and atmospheric Indoctrinaire (1970), a Kafka-writes-New-Wave-SF marvel, blew my mind not despite but because I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on in it. Both Fugue For A Darkening Island (1972) and A Dream Of Wessex (1977), two intensely English novels, connected in powerful but hard to articulate ways with my own conflicted sense of Englishness. Priest’s plain but poetic and oddly estranging style, his expert way with the hauntingly expressive image, his imaginative rigour and emotional elusion, barrelled through my young brain like a freight train. Or like, we might say – turning to Inverted World – a huge city being winched inexorably along railway tracks through a devastated land inhabited by hostile tribes.
This city, called Earth, is home to the novel’s young protagonist, Helward Mann. Life in Earth is divided between various quasimedieval guilds, each of which has responsibility for an aspect of keeping the city moving: pulling up rails from behind to lay in front of it, securing the winching cables, surveying the landscape obstacles ahead. The city has to keep moving to survive: if it can keep near the ever-moving “optimum” point, life is normal, but if it slips too far behind – lagging into the landscape from which they have come, which the novel calls “the past” – increasingly deforming gravitational fields will crush it. Worryingly, the city is slipping further and further behind. Young Helward’s emerging maturity, his increasing understanding of the world in which he lives, the various crises in the city itself, all are grippingly rendered.
But the real genius stroke is the novel’s central idea. Inverted World taught me that the High Concept can be more than just an intriguing hook on which to hang a story – that it can, in the right hands, be the most powerful and eloquent thing in the writer’s toolkit. And Inverted World’s High Concept is high enough to out-Everest Everest. We humans live upon a finite world located in an infinite universe. This novel says: what if we flipped that about? What would life be like lived on an infinite planet that is located in a finite universe?
A different sort of writer might have taken this premise as an excuse for phantasmagoric fantasy or acid-trip weirdness. Priest works through his premise with a cool thoroughness so involving that its radically destabilising nature creeps up on you. Inverted World problematises the difference between a straight line and a curve in ways that reflect back on the moral as well as the practical challenges of life. It makes us radically reconsider the relationship between perception and reality. Thinking how small we are, in relation to the cosmos’s vastness, is a conventional enough thing to do; for Priest to suggest that it’s the universe that’s small compared to our various human infinities, is a play as bold as it is brilliant. Oh – hai, concept!
The novel’s central section, when Helward travels as far from the city as his world allows him, contains some of the most wonderfully dream-haunting set-pieces in all SF, and the novel’s twist-ending, though it has divided critics, to me slots into place as neatly as the final jigsaw piece in a puzzle – although this is a puzzle in which the finished picture suddenly doesn’t look like the one you thought you were assembling. Much 1970s SF is forgotten now; but Inverted World is unforgettable.