"Infinities within infinities within infinities”, as one character observes. Iain Banks’s new novel can be a confusing place to be. No reality here is more than an aspect of an endlessly complex system of completely separate though ultimately related existences between which the leading actors “transition” (a verb here) more or less at will. SF-sophisticated fans of Iain M. Banks may feel instantly at home in this mesmerizing “multiverse”, while long-term readers of Iain Banks will be prepared for what awaits them; but newcomers may struggle to find their way.

Yet however many worlds we traverse in however many time schemes, we are always recognizably here on earth: Transition is not about space travel, as traditionally conceived. Instead, a fast-moving action flits back and forth between a Venetian palazzo; a Limehouse loft; a Paris cabaret; a casino; a derelict industrial unit outside Chernobyl. It might be any airport thriller, except for the less familiar locations, from the mundane (a British bus stop) to the fantastical (the Himalayan seat of a world emperor of the future). All these places are provisional, the articles indefinite: “I live in a Switzerland”, says Transitioner Temudjin Oh.

What goes for geography goes for people too: Temudjin is no more than a convenient working title for an individual who in the course of the novel slips from one existence to another, inhabiting many different persons, in many different worlds and times. The nearest thing we have to a central protagonist, he is an agent of the “Concern”, the government of this remarkable cosmos: in the course of a distinguished career, he has saved and taken many lives. How far these interventions, or the overall control the Concern assumes, can really be desirable is a question he comes to wrestle with as the narrative unfolds. Should he help Mme d’Ortolan defend the power and prestige of the Concern, the order it maintains and the protection it has offered over time against a variety of threats, or join the rebellion which Mrs Mulverhill is leading? Sex and violence, switchback pursuits and escapes ensue. Instead of the conventional car chases and shoot-outs, though, the action proceeds through rapid-fire transitions from persona to persona and in instantaneous flights from existence to existence.

Intervening episodes describe developments from the perspectives of opposing characters, or offer first-person commentary by individuals whose relation to what is happening is, for much of the novel, unclear. A northern English lad of the 1990s reinvents himself as a cockney coke dealer, then metamorphoses again into a City trader; “Patient 8262” describes the view from his hospital bed; the so-called “Philosopher” tells how he came to be a torturer in the state security administration and how his attitudes have changed over that time.

All these strands will eventually converge, the action accelerating into a terrific climax, though it takes a certain amount of patience on the reader’s part to get that far. And not just because of all the background briefing, on everything from the mechanics of transition to the structure and operations of the Concern, wearisome as this can be for the uncommitted or unconvinced. It is hard to find any sort of narrative terra firma in what is so self-consciously a fiction of shifting settings and perspectives, or any anchoring human interest in such quintessentially protean personalities.

In the end, for better or worse, this is a novel held together by its author’s moral vision. Transition may boast a postmodern plethora of worlds, but it offers a single old-fashioned world-view which all this random rattling about paradoxically reveals. “The eyes only see by moving”, says Temudjin. “We can fasten our gaze on something and stare intently at it only because our eyes are consumed with dozens of tiny involuntary movements each second.” This is Banks’s way of seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. With all its whirligig plotting and myriad complexity, Transition makes surprisingly straightforward sense as a political fable on the dangers of even the most benevolent forms of state control. And, more specifically, as an ironic commentary on the recent War on Terror, the costs it has exacted in inhumanity and loss of freedom. This is a thriller with a conscience, decent and timely, even if, amid all the blood and thunder, it sounds what can seem an incongruously still small voice.

Iain Banks
TRANSITION
404pp. Little, Brown. £18.99.
978 0 316 73107 2

Michael Kerrigan’s The History of Death was published last year. His other books include Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the “Beagle”: The journals that revealed Nature’s grand plan, 2005, and Lewis and Clark: Blazing a trail through the American West, 2004.

Explore The TLS

• TLS Selections

• TLS Archives

• TLS Arguments

• TLS Writers

• TLS Letters

• Poem of the Week

• Then & Now