A city on rails and curious distortions of perception.

“The girls were now no more than three feet tall, and their bodies had distorted even further. Their feet were flat and wide, their legs broad and short, their torsos round and compressed. In this perception of them they became grotesquely ugly, and he found that in spite of his fascination with the physical changes coming over them the sound of their twittering voices was irritating him.”

Bluepoint Hoptical Illusion
Steel Rail Xtra Pale Ale

Inverted World opens in the first person, with the initiation of young Helward Ward into the guild of Future Surveyors. From the first sentence, “I had reached the age of 650 miles,” readers are aware that something is deeply wrong about this world. We know it has something to do with the relationship between space and time, but beyond this we can only guess.

Slowly, Priest allows the details to leak. The guild arranges a marriage for Helward, but before he can visit his wife they take him outside the City of Earth for the first time. He’s stunned at the sight of the sun. He had always been taught that it was round, but it now appears differently, “a long, saucer-shape of light, spiked above and below with two perpendicular spires of incandescence.”

Helward has little time to meditate on this discovery, however, because he goes straight to his apprenticeship with the Track Guild. These men concern themselves with moving metal tracks out from behind the city and putting them back in front of it. Helward soon realizes that the city is always moving north, which the guildsmen call “up future,” and away from the south, which they call “down past,” trying to keep pace with a place they call the optimum. Every Guild plays a part in this endless struggle. The Traction guild winches the city forward along the tracks; the Barter Guild purchases labor and borrows women from the ignorant locals (the city’s women are mysteriously unable to bear female children); the Bridge Builders arrange passage across rivers and ravines; and the Future Surveyors venture up north so that the Navigators can plan the city’s route. They return from the future curiously aged.

Interestingly, the need to keep the city moving also distorts the relationships between people inside. Helward’s wife, Victoria, wants to know things about the outside world, but he has been sworn to secrecy. When he dodges her questions about the sun by saying merely that it’s “very bright,” she responds, “I’d like to find that out for myself.” Helward has never before thought about women’s exclusion from so many areas of life in the City of Earth. He begins to question the guild’s intentions.

It’s not just the relations between men and women that are soured by the demands of this moving city, either. The locals hate the city-dwellers, who live in relative luxury, pay them for their labor, borrow their women, and quickly move away. The residents of the city recognize the irony of claiming to be more civilized than the “tooks” while simultaneously treating them barbarously, but the Guildsmen’s eternal response is that “The city must keep moving.”

At this point, the stage seems set for Helward to find a way to release the city from its strange bondage. If things turned out that way, the book would fall predictably into the category of Hard SF, which John Clute, defines in an illuminating new afterword as “that kind of science-fiction tale in which a clearly defined protagonist (almost always male) leaves his endangered home on a great adventure, during the course of which he begins to understand the true nature of his world and, through a clearly defined, science-based cognitive breakthrough, comes to grips with the danger that threatens it.”

But what takes place is far wilder than any problem-solving plot line. When Helward’s guild sends him down past to escort some native women back to their local village, we finally learn why the city must keep moving. It’s the ground itself that’s always drifting south, he learns towards a place where the fabric of reality seems to come apart at the seams. Priest depicts this in a series of increasingly terrifying yet exhilarating scenes depicted in paradoxically calm language.

Helward returns to find that years have passed and many things have changed. The city’s population eventually splits over the question of whether it should keep sacrificing everything to keep moving or soldier on, and Helward’s role in this conflict is far from that of the liberating hero. But the book’s real genius is that neither group is quite right. The curious knot in time that prolongs their suffering is not an illusion, as the resistance claims. After all, we’ve seen through Helward’s eyes the bizarre fate that awaits there. But nor is it quite true, as the Guildsmen argue, that that knot has always been or that it must always be.

What makes Inverted World shine like no other book is that it illustrates so perfectly how human beings create the context for their own suffering, yet this explanation never dulls the agony of Helward’s predicament. And while Helward’s story is tragic, the underlying narrative is hopeful. We create the chains that bind us, so therefore it must be possible for us to cast them off. But if we could do this, help one another to do it, would we know what to do when we got free?

Helward certainly doesn’t. But his journey is a fascinating one, and anyone interested in fiction that explores the most radical reaches of the possible world would do well to pick up Inverted World.

I recently read The Inverted World and the first thing I noticed was the beautiful writing style. It was as if there was always just the right word and never one too many or too few. It flowed with the same elegant precision of the novel's city itself. Told through the observant personna of Helward Mann, an elite of the city, the real star is the city. The workings of the city, down to the tiniest details, were well thought and explained.

If the book had a flaw, it was that the ending felt a bit glossed over. After the level of detail in the description of the city throughout the novel, I'd been expecting a convincingly detailed explanation of the mystery of the city at the end. Instead, it felt a little rushed.

I still give the book very high marks as it was such a pleasure to read for it's elegant prose and the details of the fascinating city. It was a clear example of the journey being more significant than the destination. I came away wanting to read more by Priest. ( )

Inverted World by Christopher Priest.
I first read this book back in the late 1970's when it was fairly new and I concluded that it was a good story, though based on an interesting idea which unfortunately did not work very well. I have been provoked to read it again by the Go Review That Book! group, and I enjoyed it, though without changing my opinion.

The main character, Helward Mann, who relates most of the story, is brought up in a mysterious city which calls itself the City of Earth. We are asked to believe that he has never even seen anything outside the city and that his education has told him nothing about conditions outside. This device permits us to learn slowly, along with him, just how strange the outside world is, for example, as some of the covers for the book show, the sun is not round.

Already during Helward's learning period, the basic plot device starts to creak a little if you stop to think how things fit together, but the pace of the story can carry you past that. In the second half, the City undergoes turbulent times, both in its relations with outsiders, who consider, with some justification, that the City has been exploiting them, and in its internal politics. Helward then makes a discovery which pretty much makes it impossible for the City in its previous form to continue to exist. Luckily he has also met an outsider, Elizabeth Khan, who may be able to help towards a less than disastrous resolution to the problems. How it turns out, we are not told.

As a science fiction story, the book suffers from insufficient description of how the world works: the plot in fact requires that there should be two good explanations for Helward's experiences. On the human interest side, we have Helward and Elizabeth each having great difficulty understanding the other's point of view, but they seem to give up too easily.

I have an extensive summary, with spoilers, here.

(Penultimate paragraph, "As a science ...", added 2008.03.30.)

This book is utterly and deliciously surreal. Priest's world is so intricate and so inscrutable that the thing grips from beginning to end, despite the slow, detailed, scientific prose. I found myself contemplating cutting class to finish it-- I just wanted to know what the heck was going ON.
The ending is particularly haunting, despite the obtusely science-fictiony aspects of it. I found this rather frustrating. Yes, I knew it was a 'hard sci-fi' novel when I picked it up, but that doesn't mean that I suspended my personal opinions about what's most important in fictional writing when I decided to tackle it. The final scene, though, makes up for any disappointment. It's brilliant. The afterword was also instructive-- in a way, this NYRB Classics edition presents the work less as a novel and more as a study in science-fiction style. Which is, of course, all right.

Like science fiction at all? Read it. Like surreality and have a rather large suspension-of-disbelief muscle? Willing to throw yourself into something? Go for it. Read it now. But anyone unwilling to go the distance is going to find themselves bitterly disappointed. ( )