The Inverted World
Does the Ending Work, or Suck?
I first read Christopher Priest’s The Inverted World (sometimes called just Inverted World) nearly 50 years ago and hated it, my biggest problem being that I couldn’t really make heads or tails of the ending. Since then it has come to be considered a sci-fi classic, with critics pointing to the ending as one of the reasons the book is so special. So about 10 years ago decided I would read it again and bought a cheap paperback copy, which I promptly lost. A couple of weeks ago I found it looking for another book (it literally fell on my head) and figured I would give it another go and write something for Spoilers Ahead!. So without further adieu…
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The book is about a small tribe of humans (I am guessing maybe in the high 1,000s) who live aboard Earth City, a structure that has for the past 200 years been winched forward along a series of tracks for reasons that become clear, or seem to become clear, at about the book’s half-way mark. “Earth City” is about seven stories tall by about 1,500 feet long, and described as resembling a “misshapen office block”. The book’s various covers often portray it as a big castle on train rails. So: pretty cool.
It is gradually revealed that while the world Earth City travels through bears a superficial resemblance to our world, it is not. In fact this world is not even a proper sphere, but a “hyperbolic parabola”. For science-y reasons, when someone born within City walls goes South or “down past” -- the way the city has come-- they feel a strange pressure on them that pushes them further South. Their physical setting begins to change, with objects flattening and growing wider. If that sounds hard to imagine (and I am not sure I am explaining it well), it leads to an extraordinary passage where protagonist Helward Mann literally hangs on to a mountain range by his fingers to avoid being swept South and (presumably) spaghettified.
And, odd as this already seems, the last half of the book stirs the pot further by bringing it all into doubt. Helward, who is a Member of the surveyors guild and has travelled frequently outside the city walls, meets a nurse/social worker named Elizabeth who claims to be from London, on Earth. Elizabeth claims further that the City is also on Earth, and has always been. She claims that Helward’s experiences South of the city, and similar experiences of other guildsmen over the years, are a perceptual distortion, a kind of hallucination that is one effect of growing up in proximity to the mysterious energy generator that has powered Earth City through the centuries.
Elizabeth tells her story to a meeting of city residents. Some believe her, and want to abandon their endless Northward journeying, as well as Earth City’s current Guild structure. Others (like Helward) wish to continue with the journey and, by implication, with the old social order, perhaps modified to meet new circumstances. So Earth City faces an existential choice.
Meanwhile it is approaching a body of water that may be unbridgeable: The Atlantic Ocean off Portugal, according to Elizabeth. Earth City’s journey may be coming to an end whatever its citizens decide…
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Without trying to sound too intellectual about it, I think the split in city opinion is supposed to reflect a Male vs. Female perspective, or The Male Vs. The Female Principle, or a Male vs. Female Ideology. Something like that. The push-forward/continue-with-the-old-ways crowd is represented by Helward, a product of an all-male guild system. The settle down folks, called terminators, can’t exactly be majority female, because the City’s mysterious power source has led to a gender imbalance that sees more boys being born than girls. However, their main spokespeople are Victoria (Helward’s ex-wife) and Elizabeth, the book’s two main female characters. And indeed one of their arguments is that stopping the city and turning off the generator that powers it will lead to better outcomes for the city’s women. In fact, they argue, stopping the city will allow everyone in it to live better and more justly: there will be no need to battle disgruntled locals whose land they pass over, no need to act as though they are in constant danger, like zealots driven by a false idea.
So the question being posed to the reader at the end of the book seems to be: can the men change their ways when they find out they’ve been wrong all this time—have been the authors of their own misfortune, as a matter of fact?
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There is quite a lot to admire about The Inverted World. The prose is quiet, almost pedestrian, but this works to the book’s advantage when its subject matter turns strange. And the early chapters, in which the reader is introduced to the day-to-day routines that allow a humongous building to be physically moved (laying tracks, building bridges) are vividly imagined.
But what everyone talks about, other than Helward’s journey South, are the big reveals in the concluding section. And there has always been the question amongst both reviewers and general readers as to whether the ending works, in the same way people have argued for years whether the ending of The Sopranos works, for example.
This is really two questions. In a narrow sense I think the book’s ending is a bit of a botch. When I first read it, for example, and came to the final lines I wondered if my copy was missing pages. Looking around the Net confirms that this impression is not mine alone. Many have felt similarly: the book just stops.
The larger question is whether the reveal a bit earlier (Elizabeth’s story) resolves the various mysteries that the book has piled up during its course in a manner that is, let’s say, logically sound and aesthetically pleasing. I’m less sure about this.
The thing is, it is genuinely difficult to judge which of the two accounts of the world given in the book should be accepted as real.
On the one hand, Elzabeth’s case is the more persuasive. And she is clearly a friend of the City. So when she tells the residents they can stop and settle down, her words are honestly spoken. In fact the book is filled with clever details that support her account of Earth City’s history, like the fact the surveyors are drawing their maps on 200-year-old IBM printer paper.
But on the other, the reader has already followed Helward on his journey South. This certainly does not read like a hallucination. And it should be noted that, of the four sections of the book that center Helward, only this part (Part II) is narrated in third person, with the others being told by the man himself. Some readers and critics have complained that Priest’s narrative choices here look arbitrary, but they make sense if the switch to third person is to lend credence to the events narrated. That is, it isn’t just Helward who observes these things, but the teller of his story as well. Of course there exist unreliable 3rd person narrators, but the reader is given usually clues to their unreliability that are not present in this book. In addition, Helward is accompanied by several native witnesses, who notice physical changes in him that are inverse to the changes he notices in them (he gets taller and skinnier as they get shorter and squatter). All of this suggests that Priest intends the events here to also be interpreted as Real.
So the differences between Elizabeth and Helward’s view of the world do not seem a distinction between false and veridical perceptions, but a clash of Realities. For the reader, its kind of a stalemate. Or at least, upon second reading, I still can’t tell who has the truth on their side, or whether it is some combination of both views.
Except that, if you reason forward from the actual ending to possible future scenarios, they all point in the same direction: Helward and his people are doomed. Given the events in Part II, it is clear that if they stay in place they will be swept South and destroyed. If they go forward they will be forced to bridge the Atlantic Ocean, or sail Earth City across it, both Herculean tasks.
And I think that’s a way in which the novel’s ending does work for the reader. You realize that you are witnessing the impending death of an entire Nation that is at once proud, compromised, unjust, and admirable.
I think the earlier comparison to the end of The Sopranos is apropos here. While the last episode leaves the exact details up in the air, if you think it through it’s clear that Tony, who the audience has come to know intimately through the course of six seasons, is about to get greased. It’s similar with The Inverted World. A People, in the large P sense of the word, that you have come to identify with, will be extinct soon. Which is quite sad.
PS. Priest wrote a short parody follow-up to The Inverted World called The Making of The Lesbian Horse. It is extremely rare, and nobody on The Internet appears tor read it. Love to know what it’s about.