Transition is somewhere in between Iain Banks’s contemporary novels and his alter ego Iain M. Banks’s science fiction operas, and it is all the grander for the admixture. It opens with a baffling prologue involving scene snatches from the points of view of mysteriously named characters, some in our world, some not. The attentive reader (and anyone not willing to work at a novel like this won’t read it in the first place) soon discerns that although the novel is nominally set in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in fact this is a multiverse sci-fi novel. There are multitudes of parallel worlds and on one version of earth called Calbefraques, a shadowy outfit called the Concern has a monopoly on a drug that allows people to shift between universes. Banks’s chief character is Temudjin Oh, a Concern assassin, but there are others, some more mysterious than others. Like the best multi-strand movies, Transition takes the length of the entire novel to mesh these characters together, and he does it superbly.
In Transition, Banks is at his best stylistically, changing voices, capturing dialogue well, and riffing in full flight whenever he can. The plot twists and buckles, the author always in charge. The business of world shifting is handled evocatively and entirely plausibly. I haven’t had this much fun streaming through a smart, complex, plot-and-character-driven sci-fi blinder for years. Highly recommended.