Inverted World
★★★★★
Helward Mann is coming of age, moving out from his isolation in the city creche to join the guild system and take his place in the world - a world far stranger than he could ever imagine.
Through Helward’s eyes, Priest slowly reveals a world fundamentally distorted - a distortion that may be physical or may be perceptual, but which drastically shapes the lives of the city’s inhabitants. The city itself feels isolated and authoritarian, steeped in medieval ritual and tradition, barely holding together on the edge of collapse. Beyond, civilisation appears fallen, returned to a primitive state that the city unwillingly exploits in dehumanising ways to secure its own survival.
As he ages, Helward finds comfort in the rituals and hard labour, and an accommodation with the nature of his society and his place in it, finding purpose within the very structures he once questioned. He becomes institutionalised even as the mysteries of his reality become clear, finally resistant to salvation when it presents itself. His life has found a quiet bucolic slowness that he’s reluctant to surrender.
Priest’s uncluttered prose and single plot line with its almost exclusive focus on Helward’s life, echoes and reinforces the treadmill of a city constantly moving, of a society built around a singular unquestioning purpose. He reveals its mysteries intimately, first person, through Helward’s eyes, but then alternates third-person chapters, casting the reader’s view wider to question the reliability of the narrator’s perception, teasing a reality beyond the comfort of the city’s parochial worldview.
This is a high-concept story in the vein of Adam Roberts - a Flatland-ish twist of reality that forms the backdrop for a richly rendered culture. The science may not entirely hold up, the worldbuilding is a little MacGuffin in places (lack of female births), but that doesn’t matter because it’s not about the hard science, it’s about the city, Helward, and both their journeys.
