Imagine a world where every toss of a coin, every tiny variation in some seemingly insignificant system, results in the spawning of another, completely independent reality, branching and re-branching like, erm, some sort of organism with branches. A tree! Yes, that'll do. A proliferating multitude of alternate realities, differing by perhaps only a tiny detail, a different-shaped gearstick on the Mini Metro, say. But perhaps we inhabit such a world already. I mean, how would we know?
Well, I'll tell you who would know. A group of people whose minds are not going to be blown by all this multiple simultaneous realities shit, and, moreover, have developed the technology to move between these multiple realities pretty much at will, with certain limitations. They call themselves The Concern, or, depending on your cultural background, L'Expédience, and they perform a sort of multiverse policing function while flitting between worlds, being able to glimpse the future consequences of certain seemingly insignificant events and take steps to prevent those events from ever occurring.
This is all a bit Prime Directive, of course, and one person's disastrous turn of events about which Something Must Be Done is someone else's wholly necessary and exciting developments. So even within the Concern there are disagreements, and for that reason a sort of High Council exists, headed by the practically immortal Madame d'Ortolan, to decide where events get left to take their course and where intervention is deemed necessary.
Our main protagonist, Temudjin Oh, is a sort of super-assassin entrusted with all the most difficult and dangerous missions. "Flitting" between worlds is achieved by the use of a specially-engineered drug called "septus", and in practical terms involves "landing" in another body for the duration of your visit, taking it over for a while and then vacating it again, presumably leaving the original occupant to return and wonder what's been going on, and perhaps why they seem to have just committed a murder and are in the process of being shot to pieces by whatever law-enforcing authority exists in this particular reality. Temudjin is viewed as being a bit of a loose cannon by Madame d'Ortolan and her advisers, mainly owing to his previous close relationship with renegade Concern operative Mrs Mulverhill, with whom they suspect (correctly) he is still in communication. Mrs Mulverhill believes that the Council under Madame d'Ortolan's leadership are out of control and pursuing a secret agenda of their own in violation of the Concern's original aims. Will Temudjin say leave me alone, Mrs Mulverhill and return to the fold or go fully rogue and try to bring them down?
This being an Iain Banks novel the narrative isn't presented quite like that though - it's broken up into sections headed with the character's name with no immediate clue as to how they interact. So there's The Transitionary (Temudjin Oh himself), Madame d'Ortolan, torturer-for-hire The Philosopher, London hedge fund trader wide boy Adrian Cubbish, and Patient 8262, occupant of a bed in some sort of sanatorium and seemingly trying to remember something hovering dimly beyond his mental reach.
This sort of set-up, where the reader is expected to do some dot-joining work while the main action unfolds, is just the sort of thing to get me salivating, and Banks does it very well. It's only a bit later as the plot is starting to unfold in a more orthodox manner that a few niggles start to form in the mind. For instance: the thing with the "flitting" between worlds being mediated by some sort of thing that the flitter has to physically consume, and moreover the achieving of unmediated flitting as a key plot point, are both straight out of Stephen King and Peter Straub's The Talisman, and the preventing "crimes" before they happen thing owes more than a little to Minority Report. The whole business with occupying other people's bodies and displacing their consciousness for a while raises a host of questions, none of which are really engaged with. Adrian Cubbish is the latest in a line of slightly tedious drug-crazed wisecracking cynics that also includes Complicity's Cameron Colley and Dead Air's Ken Nott. And there are a couple of trademark Banksian bolted-on bits of polemic which do little to move the plot along but are just there to allow him to vent some political opinions, most obviously in The Philosopher's lengthy opining on the pointlessness of torture, and indeed the existence of the character himself. And only someone really not paying attention, or just generally unfamiliar with how novels work, will fail to clock the true identity of Patient 8262 fairly early on.
None of that really matters, though, as this is generally a hoot and scoots along very entertainingly throughout. The Concern is another in the long series of Banks' imagined reality-controlling organisations unconstrained by considerations like material wealth, including most obviously the Culture, but in this case most closely resembling The Business in, erm, The Business. I would say it's the best non-M Banks I've read since Whit, but it was published under the Iain M Banks moniker in America and so exists in a sort of netherworld between the two. I suspect the rationale for leaving out the M was that all the action takes place on Earth, albeit a gazillion different parallel versions of Earth.
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