INVERTED WORLD
I read this book after going through the "Classics" section in the New York Review of Books and noting down the ones that seemed interesting. I'm glad I did - it's been a long time since I read science fiction so intriguing in its ideas and concepts that it had me reading well into the early hours of the morning.

Helward Mann has reached "the age of six hundred and fifty miles," when he becomes a man and joins one of the guilds of "the city." The city is in fact a moving vehicle, constantly travelling north at a rate of about one mile every ten days, through an arid landscape where the local populace is stricken with poverty and disease. It is unclear, at first, where this book takes place - the citizens speak English and the locals Spanish, yet the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, and is not spherical but instead shaped like an inverted hyperbola.

Mann is put to work with the Traction Guild, constantly dismantling the rail tracks to the south of the city and reassembling them to the north. Here Mann learns that the city is travelling towards something called "the optimum," the ideal position for it to be in. He asks his supervisor if they will be able to stop when they get there, but is told that they will never get there, because the optimum is always moving. As Mann is shifted amongst the guilds, learning about the strange world he lives in, it gradually becomes clear that it is not so much what they are trying to reach, but rather what they are trying to escape.

The ominous foreshadowing Priest applies throughout this story, developing the fascinating mystery of the terrible thing that lies to the south, is brilliantly executed and makes for very compelling reading. I can't remember the last time I just wanted to sit down and read rather than do anything else, because I was so drawn into this world and determined to discover its secrets just as Mann was. I stayed up until 3.30 AM reading Inverted World, which is late even for me. So, yeah, DO NOT READ ANY OTHER REVIEWS OR SYNOPSES OF THIS BOOK, because you want to know as little as possible going into it, and quite a few of them (i.e. Amazon.com) give away significant parts of the mystery.

It is classic science fiction, mind you - the kind of dry characterisation, dialogue and description (just the facts, ma'am) that can only be supported by an excellent concept, as in the case of John Wyndham or John Christopher. Priest's concept is excellent indeed, so no complaints there.

The issue I have with Inverted World is the ending. The mystery of what lies to the south is resolved, quite satisfactorily (it involves very hard science fiction, but is explained perfectly well to the layman). But it doesn't answer all the questions about the city - about its origin and history, and certain outrigger mysteries - and it is in this second resolution that Priest falters a bit. He seems to have felt the need to bring the more outrageous aspects of the world down to earth, so to speak, and it results in an explanation that robs Mann's world of some of its magic, does not actually answer certain things, and seems almost crammed in at the last second - again, I'll compare Priest to Wyndham.

But this was only a minor issue in an otherwise excellent science fiction novel. Inverted World is a brilliantly crafted mystery that is original, intriguing and certainly worth the time of any science fiction reader.

FUGUE FOR A DARKENING ISLAND
I'm not sure why this book was bundled together with Inverted World. Aside from being science fiction novellas written by the same author, they don't have much in common. One is a gripping, creative science fiction mystery, while the other is a fairly generic dystopian apocalyptic story, which was both unremarkable and somewhat disturbing.

Fugue For A Darkening Island presents a tale of gradual social collapse that should be familiar to anyone who's ever read Wyndham or Christopher; typically the only variable in these stories is what causes the collapse. In this case it's a nuclear war in Africa sending millions of refugees flooding onto British shores.

And this is the disturbing part. For much of the book, I thought it was severely racist: a story of thuggish blacks invading the white British homeland and causing death, anarchy and destruction. It was written more than thirty-five years ago, before the UK became the multi-cultural melting pot it is today, when the idea may have reflected the concerns of many British citizens (or, alternatively, the concerns of many citizens in modern-day Australia). As the book progressed, it seemed somewhat less racist - the British government in the story is extremely right-wing, fascist and engaged in overt genocide, and the narrator is portrayed as a hapless civilian refugee caught up between the two forces, light and dark. He sums it up in the last few pages:

In my unwitting role as a refugee I had of neccesity played a neutral role. But it seemed to me it would be impossible for this to continue in the future. I could not stay uncommitted forever.

In what I had seen and heard of the activities of the Secessionist forces, it had always appeared to me that they had adopted a more humanitarian attitude to the situation. It was not morally right to deny the African immigrants an identity or a voice. The war must be resolved one way or another in time, and it was now inevitable that the Africans would stay in Britain permanently.

On the other hand, the extreme actions of the Nationalist side, which stemmed initially from the conservative and repressive policies of Tregarth's government (an administration I had distrusted and disliked) appealed to me on an instinctive level. It had been the Africans who had indirectly deprived me of everything I once owned. Ultimately, I knew the question depended on finding Isobel. If she and Sally had not been harmed my instincts would be quieted...

Priest appears to be arguing here that while we will always harbour a natural instinct to distrust the Other, defend our family and fight off outsiders, we should rise above that with our intelligence and civilisation, and hold to the better part of human nature. This is a wise argument, which is also the defining theme of Cloud Atlas, one of my favourite books of all time.

Yet there are certain elements of Fugue For A Darkening Island that still seem racist - white Secessionist forces always treat the protagonist more humanely than black militants, there's an unrealistic shallowness to the portrayal of African refugees (a fairly unified force that speaks Swahili across the board), and there's the squirming feeling I get simply from reading this scenario put into words. It's not an unreasonable hypothesis - the population of the Third World greatly outnumbers that of the First, and Europe and Africa are geographically close... though you'd think continental Europe would cop the brunt of it, rather than Britain. I would be remiss if I didn't point out the handful of Muslim riots in France, which right-wingers interpret as evidence that immigration has turned Paris into a corpse-strewn wasteland identical to Mogadishu, and that some kind of apartheid should naturally be introduced.

I digress. I don't want to accuse Priest of being racist. Science fiction is all about exploring speculative scenarios, especially with a political bent to them, and while significant parts of the book made me uneasy I'm not going to cast judgement on his decision to write it.

But, having barely cleared the political correctness board, Priest must now pass the literary merit test. And he fails.
Fugue For A Darkening Island, allegations of racism aside, is simply not a very good book. The bulk of it consists of the protagonist scavenging, conflicting with other parties of survivors, picking up what bits of news that he can and wandering through refugee camps and ruined towns looking for his family. It's not a badly realised world, but neither is it an original or compelling one. This isn't helped by Priest's decision to tell the story in four different timeframes at once, rapidly switching between them, mixing up pointless adolescent sexual misadventures and taking us through the protagonist's marriage problems. Finally, the cold and detached tone that seemed perfectly natural in Inverted World does him a great disservice here, portraying the narrator as an emotionless bastard with a tediously analytical mind. Fugue For A Darkening Island is a fairly unremarkable book, which is why I was so puzzled at the decision to bundle it with Inverted World, an excellent science fiction classic. ( )

Disturbing read.