Iain M. Banks - Against a Dark Background

[Against a Dark Background went from my To Be Read shelf to before my eyes with the news of Banks' illness. By the time he died, the review had been written for a few weeks. The temptation to sanitize it and remove any criticism was strong. One generally does not speak ill of the dead in even minor ways, after all. But reviews are not bad mouthing but rather conversation, and it seems to me far preferable for a writer for their work to be engaged with, both in positive and negative ways, after their death, rather than for their work to be eulogized in a well-lit but sterile corner.]

When not writing literary fiction as Iain Banks, Iain M. Banks was best known for his Science Fiction novels set in his famous Culture setting, my favorite of which is Player of Games. Against a Dark Background is one of his few SF works that does not share that setting, though the Golter system that it develops is not far off in terms of Banks’ usual inventiveness. Problems in its plotting and pacing hold it back, but it does still possess power in its dark conclusion.

The novel follows Sharrow, a noblewoman that once led a crack mercenary team. She is drawn back into action when a religious organization, the Hushz, obtain a legal warrant to kill her due to their longstanding dispute with her family over a long-lost and incredibly devastating weapon known as the Lazy Gun. Accordingly, Sharrow gets the old team back together and goes after the Gun herself. Things get progressively more complicated from there. Other players operate in the shadows, and each step closer to the Gun forces her closer and closer to her family’s secrets.

Sharrow’s search takes her through just about all of Golter and the planets around it, giving Banks a book’s worth of opportunities to play tour guide. Luckily, his creations don’t disappoint. Against a Dark Background’s setting is a dystopic satire of the late twentieth century filled with hilarious people, ideas, and institutions that are as zany and often as awesome as anything Banks has created. Unlike in the Culture, technological progress did not bring Golter to enlightenment. Golter’s people reached the stars, but their system was impossibly distant from anything else. As Banks writes: “[Golter] had found itself alone and it had spread itself as far as it could and produced so much, but it was still next to nothing” (p. 4020).

Technology brought no wisdom. Instead, numerous wars left humanity sitting in its own rubble. Marvels from the past, known as “antiquities” (p. 22), are hunted by teams like Sharrow’s, the world’s fragile peace is maintained by the litigious and bureaucratic World Court, and we all sit on piles of weaponry more than sufficient to annihilate one another. Religious cults of increasing strangeness abound. Some of the faithful keep themselves permanently chained to walls, a kingdom is run by the Useless Kings that style themselves the “Prime Detesters of God the Infernal Wizard” (p. 227), and a roving band of pirates is composed entirely of solipsists.

It’s a setting that allows endless, madcap adventure, and Banks capitalizes on it. As Sharrow travels to first recollect her team and then follow the clues she finds toward the Lazy Gun, the book is divided into a succession of miniature arcs that are separated by changes in scenery and that each culminate in grand set pieces. There is an SF train robbery, the thieving of priceless and closely-guarded jewels from a city of boats, ambushes in bars, escapes from armored cars, contended battles through miles of woodlands, assassination attempts via flying beasts, and much more. To all that Banks adds a series of flashbacks detailing Sharrow’s past and youth with her team and her family, many of which manage to be genuinely touching – and to explore yet more corners of Golter.

Alas, problems soon set in with these adventures, beginning with the sheer number of them. Moving onto a new chunk of Golter, or even onto a new planet, after each heist breaks up any momentum that might have otherwise built up. Save the team, everyone else is left behind, and Banks’ ingenious creations soon start to have the feel of theme park rides: thrilling and well-constructed but suited to one purpose only and best left as soon as that purpose is done. Up until the very end, the intensity of the heists itself doesn’t change much. Though the prize of the Gun does get closer with each victory, hunting down clue Y rather than clue X does not feel like appreciable progress.

More importantly, Banks somehow manages to find the perfect, unbalanced position between a character that can do anything and a character that is helpless against the odds, and the result is a near total lack of tension. When Sharrow and her team hatch a scheme, it will succeed. We never see them outwitted in action, at least not for long. Whenver they decide to avoid the Hushz, they do so with ease. But, with no warning at all, Sharrow is frequently outwitted and captured. Those scenes are so abrupt that not only can Sharrow do nothing against them but also the reader has no sense of building danger. Whether or not a given scene plays out in her favor seems entirely out of her hands or anyone else’s. Banks doesn't so much incorporate both Sharrow’s abilities and the danger she faces as he does veer wildly between them.

Despite all that, the last hundred or so pages do manage to tie much of the novel together and to deliver a powerful thematic punch. The comedic, light adventures of pursuing the Lazy Guns and the clever wit packed into the guns themselves and the quest is set against the titular dark background of Golter’s degenerate state and even of mankind itself. As the novel nears its conclusion, that background grows, and we watch it swallow the tiny pinprick of light that is our main characters and their quest. The reader has the tendency to clutch onto the light all the harder, to hold onto it like a man dangling over a cliff. But Banks stomps on our fingers and lets us fall.

Golter is a world shaped by violence, a world scarred by the destruction wrought upon it to the extent that men can never forget it, keep circling it endlessly, afraid to move away lest any change trigger more upheaval. As Sharrow knows, “All I’ve ever been was made by weaponry and death” (p. 483). The only way out, Geis tells us, is to tear it all up and move on: only a new order can save poor Golter, only some new message can win people’s hearts and minds. All you see here, however precious it might be to us, might have to be sacrificed. Perhaps we need a new beginning; a clean slate. Perhaps that is our only hope (p. 473). Reform is impossible. The system must be torn up entirely and remade anew.

It is this kind of reformation that Sharrow comes to oppose in the novel’s (stupendous) final chapter. Destroying the remnants of the past system will only lead to further horror. The well-intentioned upheaval planned by Geis will be an upheaval like any other save that it will be even worse for its totality. As Sharrow acts to destroy his new order, rejecting his half-hearted apologies for the carnage and his offers to her to join him, she thinks: Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming (p. 484).

By its final pages, Against a Dark Background has become a clear-sighted and devastating work. Banks acknowledges the horrors of the world. He doubts that any subtle, peaceful reform can change it. But he also knows with a cold certainty that any attempt to tear it up, to force disobedient and warring men into a utopia is a cure worse than the disease – indeed, is a cure that only revitalizes and intensifies the ailment. Though the institutions that we have cause great harm, Banks tells us, the horror is not truly in them. It is in us. No new configuration can change that. His is a novel that, despite all of its fun and wit, brings us up to the problem of the world’s darkness, and, instead of offering an easy way out, it discards the solution that the people of Golter (and of Earth) have tried so often in the past.

After all that, Against a Dark Background is a rather hard book to review. It has problems. The pacing is off, the thrills are not spectacularly thrilling, and much of its middle quests pointlessly. But it also has some of Banks’ strongest, most cutting writing and thinking. Though I wouldn’t start here, I will say that I think that Against a Dark Background is an essential work for anyone that wants to grasp Iain M. Banks’ full vision.

Iain M. Banks - Consider Phlebas

Consider Phlebas was the first published Science Fiction novel of Iain M. Banks. The massive scale and thematically-conscious plotlines that mark Banks's style are both present here, but the novel is still a far less mature work than next year's Player of Games, and it is littered with structural and pacing problems.

The plot focuses on a war between the Culture and the militant and theocratic Idirans. Our viewpoint is actually an enemy of the Culture, a shifter agent named Bora Horza Gobuchul. He's sent to retrieve a Culture mind that was forced to crash land, but the Culture, too, is coming. And yet none of that takes up even close to a majority of the novel's page count. I've said before that Banks is more about the journey than the destination, but Consider Phlebas takes that to new, digressive levels. In his later novels, Banks is a master of structure – which is why it's so surprising to see the structural mess that this book is. The main plot is forgotten about for chapters on end while Horza falls in and out with mercenaries and gallivants around an unrelated Orbital.

Consider Phlebas tries to hold itself together with theme – Horza being exposed to various elements of both the Culture and the universe and their implications – but the themes aren't carried through. The text is built on the ideological struggle between the Culture's arrogant utopia and the rest of the world living as is, but the resolution is an inherently human one. The thematic elements aren't wrapped up, because there's no real way to handily do so and the side that Banks favors is obvious throughout. A character-focused resolution after so much attention to theme leaves the reader feeling like huge tracts of the book were bloat, simply getting between the opening and the ending so that Banks could play tour guide for a while longer. The book's ultimate conclusion is the difficulty of one man in making a difference, in the titanic, inevitable and perhaps irrelevant nature of war and grand change, but those elements are diluted by the book's other explorations and vica versa.

Shortly after joining Kraiklyn's "free company," Horza and the other mercenaries raid a temple to try and take the treasure. The firefight is tense, the twist unpredictable, and Banks builds the entire confrontation into an interesting metaphor for the war by the end of the subplot. But the whole thing is ultimately and utterly unnecessary. The raid has no effect on the book's overall plot. It's an inventive whim embarked upon and concluded without altering the book's main arc in any way shape or form. One or two such diversions are, of course, fine, but Consider Phlebas is practically constructed from them.

Some of the individual sections, too, are not as thematically persuasive as Banks no doubt intended them to be. There is a lengthy section where Horza is captive on a desert island staffed with religiously fervent cannibals, forcing Horza to confront the brutality that the Culture opposes. It's not a convincing section, however, because the cannibals are simply silly. They're pushed to such an extreme that they feel more like something that should be found in Gulliver's Travels, and comparing them to the brutality of some of the books other sections is beyond jarring.

When it comes to high octane, super sized plot, Banks still displays skill, though his abilities are, again, more scattershot here. There are several gripping action sequences in which Horza and other characters defy expectation again and again, but there are also several drawn out set pieces that don't feel nearly as exciting as one would hope, more ponderous than monolithic.

The characters are expected to give us continuity throughout the whole affair, but they, too, aren't a complete success. Horza is a sympathetic narrator, and credit must be given to Banks for allowing his views to feel just as convincing as the other sides. Horza's main opponent, Culture agent Perosteck Balveda, is also well done. She's not a particularly deep character, but her beliefs and travails humanize her. The rest of the cast is a far weaker. Horza's love interest matters to the reader because she matters to Horza, but she's never developed, and the rest of the crew is a list of names, some of which are given a characteristic to help us distinguish them, some not.

Banks' prose has never been flashy, but his writing in his later books is assured and descriptive, humorous and evocative. It's obvious here that he tries for some of the same heights, but for the most part his writing is simply there, neither a positive or negative. The main missing element is the humor that comes to so characterizes much of Banks' style later. Consider Phlebas isn't a dry book, but it does go for an unrelenting seriousness that leaves what levity there is muted and often hard to spot till it's dropping out of sight.

Consider Phlebas is an interesting book, but it's far from Banks' best and is plagued with odd decisions, lacks the stylistic and structural flair that defines much of Banks' catalog, and has several sections that simply do not work. Once you know something about the Culture, this book will give further depth to those ideas, but I'd not recommend starting here.

Iain M. Banks - Player of Games

"This is not a heroic age," [Gurgeh] told the drone, staring at the fire. "The individual is obsolete. That's why life is so comfortable for us all. We don't matter, so we're safe. No one person can have any real effect anymore."

"Contact uses individuals," Chamlis pointed out. "It puts people into younger societies who have a dramatic and decisive effect on the fates of entire meta-civilizations. They're usually 'mercenaries,' nto Culture, but they're human, they're people."

"They're selected and used. Like game pieces. They don't count." (p. 22)

Player of Games is a book of layers, intricately constructed and meticulously engineered. Ferociously clever, Player of Games manipulates reader and character as one and makes its mark through its shifting focus and through what's there just off-screen to be either interpreted or rendered inconsequential. At the same time, it also manages to be a damn fun book.

Like most Culture books, Player of Games is not focused on the utopian Culture. The novel's main setting is the Empire of Azad, a brutal and imperialistic place focused on exactly what the Culture is not. In the Empire, people are defined by their status. Position in worth in the Empire are decided by the game of Azad, a game so complex and challenging that it is believed to be an accurate representation of life itself. The winners in the tournament rise in their careers, and the ultimate winner becomes the emperor.

Of course, a game to determine the emperor is a concept so bald facedly absurd that it's hard to approach it seriously, a metaphor so obvious that it seemingly loses all effect. In order to make the game work, Banks needs to draw a fine line – a step too far into the alien renders the concept comprehensible but unaffecting, a step too far to the familiar renders it absurd. This is a line that Banks walks well. Creating a world where everything is decided by a game would serve to cheapen and render silly the rest of the world. That's not what Banks has done. Instead, Banks has created a world of games within games, with only one of the layers being so brazen as to announce it as such. Azad society and interaction is itself artificial, devised and constructed, and it soon becomes clear that, in many ways, the Empire did not shape a game to resemble it but rather shaped itself to resemble a game. As a high ranking Azad official says two thirds of the way through the book, the Azad try to live according to the laws of God, Game, and Empire. (p. 220)

Azad is rendered exotic by several means beyond the game, some of which work better than others. Their society is divided into three sexes - male, female, and apex - but the division feels generally superficial, more for differentiation's sake than anything else; the apex's are human males for all intents and purposes. Still, such things are ultimately inconsequential when the feel of an area comes through as well as Banks depicts the Azad cities. For the majority of the book, we're cut off from the mainstream of Azad life as Gurgeh broods in hotel rooms and dominates in stadiums, but the moments when he enters the city at large are excellently rendered barrages of bizarre imagery:

They half walked, half ran down twisted wooden corridors, past many rooms and doors. He was lost in a maze of sensation; a welter of sounds (music, laughter, screams), sights (servants, erotic pictures, glimpsed galleries of packed, swaying bodies) and smells (food, perfume, alien sweats). (p. 160-1)

Coming from the Culture to the Empire of Azad, the "Player" of the book's title, is Gurgeh. Gurgeh does not fit in with the Culture, his very nature running counter to its central tenants. Left adrift in the Culture's post-scarcity society, Gurgeh has tried to give his life meaning through games. He has risen to the top of his field, and yet contentment did not follow success. Gurgeh lives for the rush that comes with winning a game and values himself according to his status and possessions; amidst the Culture's benevolent state of enlightened near-anarchy, Gurgeh is left with nothing he can truly achieve. When Gurgeh joins the Azad tournament, the competition's eventual turn into an ideological struggle is an obvious development, but that doesn't render it any less powerful. Walking through its cities, Gurgeh's viewpoint of the Azad is startlingly negative, and the events seen, the almost absurd pace with which atrocities are on occasion thrown at the reader, feels almost blatantly manipulative…

Which, of course, it is. The Culture may be benevolent, but it is surely not a fan of live and let live ideals. The fact that the reader is aware of the Culture's manipulation and the narrator is not does little to change its effects; the Empire of Azad is a horrifying place, and the reader cheers as the Culture targets the tyranny within it. But that's not to say that this is a black and white read. Reading the final pages of the novel leaves the reader with a feeling of deep ambivalence. It's near unquestionable that the Culture's society is "better" than the society of the old Empire, and yet this was not the natural movement of progress but rather liberty at the point of a foreign sword. While they may have been the "good guys," it's difficult for the reader to get over the final images of the Culture's Special Circumstances quite literally playing games with other civilizations, no matter their ultimate intentions.

Player of Games is far from the only intelligently crafted Banks novel. Far from it. In fact, you could even say that admirable structures that subtly reinforce the novel's theme are sort of Banks' thing. A more up in the air element is, sometimes, how the already referenced clever structure restricts the novel's success at being, you know, enjoyable. Matter, for instance, was arranged in a way that excellently highlighted the various levels of power at play – an organizational strategy that rendered the finale utterly unsatisfying even while it was intellectually interesting.

So how does Player of Games fair when it comes to the more visceral aspects of any novel, namely the reader's reaction to the characters and their drive to continue reading? Quite well, as it turns out. I wouldn't say that Player of Games is always as much fun as Surface Detail, but the novel also manages to accomplish far more. This is the best integration I've yet seen of Banks' two sides, namely the Let's Discuss Ethics, Right, and Motivations side and the Let's Build A Huge Space Ship With a Ton of Guns one, and the whole thing is spiced up by Banks' humor. While he's not as openly jocular here as in some later works, this is still a book that refrains from taking itself too seriously, something made abundantly clear by ship names like Gunboat Diplomat and So Much for Subtlety.

As Abigail Nasbaum noted in her review of the novel, Player of Games is structured like a sports story. Though there is the occasional – generally brief and not particularly satisfying – action sequence, the mainstay of the novel is the game of Azad and Gurgeh's struggles, both in-game and out, against the Empire's various master players. When dealing with a fictional game the rules of which are never disclosed, it's frankly a miracle that Banks manages to make Azad not only interesting but gripping enough to sustain the novel and draw the reader on.

Of course, most sports stories have a rather obvious conclusion: in the end, the good guy, the underdog, is going to win. It's possible that that's a statement more of my inexperience with sports stories than it is of the genre itself, but it still seems like a reasonable bet that the sympathetic guy who just happens to have a camera/author behind him every step of the way has slightly better odds than the antagonist when push comes to shove in the last scene. Furthermore, the revelation of Culture and Special Circumstances having been involved all along is roughly as surprising to the reader as the revelation that the trade paperback wasn't copied out by hand.

But this isn't a plot focused book in any sense of the word, something made abundantly clear by the lackadaisical pace of the opening section. This is, instead, a story of themes explored via characters, and Banks succeeds admirably at both of those goals. Gurgeh is not precisely likable, a result of his frequent callousness and naiveté, but he is still sympathetic, and the society of the Azad is vivid enough that the reader will read on for every new scrap of information they get. Moments do drag here and there – most noticeably at the several points when Gurgeh just figures he'll sit back and let things play out – but none of those moments are anywhere close to fatal.

Player of Games is a masterful science fiction novel, one of the clearest examples of Science Fiction as a vehicle to explore ideas and ideologies that I've ever seen. This is a thought provoking novel that will thrill you while it troubles you, and this is (so far) the best novel I've read by one of Science Fiction's most imaginative and intelligent authors. Essential.

Iain M. Banks - Surface Detail

The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells. (p. 117)

Like a lot of Iain M. Banks’s works, the greater part of Surface Detail is spent on the journey. The core of Surface Detail is the gathering in Sichultian space and the real world climax of the hells, but the majority of the pages are spent wheeling the various players into place, only actually addressing the physical result of the hells after a huge number of pages has passed. Unlike Matter, however, the characters are interacting almost right from the starts, the various factions and groups of characters almost immediately established. As a result, the characters grow, jostle, and play off of one another throughout the book, leaving the actual arrival at Sichultia to be almost as much capstone as climax, the events already predetermined and obvious as a result of everything that came before.

There’s a lot of meandering and slowly building tension here, and it’s there that Banks excels. The hells are the core of the book. Does a culture have the right to maintain order through the threat of post-death punishment? And, more importantly, do those who find the custom barbaric have the right to stop those who find it necessary? Banks approaches the topic from several different perspectives.

The two sides – galactic do gooders and cybernetic demon-supporters – are both too civilized to outright blow each other up in the Real, at least not while things are going their way. To settle the issue, the two factions have been waging a virtual war for decades, millions of soldiers on both sides killing and dying dozens of times in a simulated war.

Vateuil is one of these soldiers. We first meet him in a pseudo-medieval theater of the war, where he’s a sub-grunt soldier expected to help tunnel into the enemy’s castle. Everything here, looking back, fits perfectly into the idea of a simulation. The little details that one uses as a grounding in reality are all there – the multitude of complaining workers, the superior officers, the grit of the subterranean air in one’s throat – but there’s a sense of wrongness running through it all, not the least of which is the contrast between the last chapter’s behemoth space ships and this one’s stone-throwing war machines.

When we next meet Vateuil, and in all of our subsequent meetings, he’s moved up in rank and, soon, Vateuil has proven himself sufficiently to join his side’s virtual war council. So which side’s that? Good question. With each reincarnation – or, at least, with the first few – Vateuil finds himself sans memories, only aware of the direct battle in front of him. As a result, exactly which side of the whole thing he’s on is a bit of a mystery for most of the text. As things start to go badly for…whatever side he’s on…Vateuil is placed on the forefront of the mission to circumvent the hells by whatever means necessary. Hacking the simulation, if they can manage it. Or, if it comes down to it, taking the war directly to the Real.

It’s not enough, however, to see the hells from a distance, a moral wrong that’s most certainly something worth fighting against. No, Banks introduces us to the hells firsthand, subjecting us to torments unimaginable through the eyes of two Pavuleans, Prin and Chay. The two snuck into hell to try and prove what’s there, but Chay was left behind and is now subject to the continual, everlasting tortures of a place designed to do nothing but extract pain for as long as inhumanly possible.

Chay, however, proves to not be such an easy victim, not due to a rather fighting spirit but rather because of a defeatist attitude that leaves her utterly hopeless, numb to the pain. Though the opening chapters of the subplot are predictable – and, from a pacing/chronological perspective are introduced long after they should have been – the storyline soon manages to put the reader in the same state of mind as Chay, knowing that the upturns in fortune are not real but still praying that they are. Though the hells are vibrant, this section is a great deal more somber than the more colorful sections set in the Culture and elsewhere. For the most part, the change in tone further accentuates the content, but rapid switches between the two styles do jar in places.

The hells are the thematic core of the book, but the emotional center lies with Lededge. Killed in the opening chapter by the rich and influential Veppers, her quest for revenge is larger than life every step of the way, from the operatic backdrop of her murder to the warship that she rides back to her home planet. Using an abominator class warship to get to where you intend to get revenge on one guy is, apparently, the rough equivalent of taking an aircraft carrier to the other side of New York City where you plan to shout at someone for a bit, and the reader can’t help but wonder what the ship’s real purpose is – or if it’s just that the ship’s as insane as it looks. That abominator class warship, Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints, is one of the hands down best parts of the book, a mixture of earnest and sadistic that’s electrifying on the page – but the true marvel of the sequence is that, almost absurdly overblown circumstances packed into every pore, Ledege’s quest is still a human one, her emotions still real and vulnerable to the reader.

The characters and their interactions with the Culture are a joy to read. There are a decent number of Culture books by now (this is, by my count, the ninth), and the setting has become beautifully rich. And yet, despite the amount of background material available, Banks continues to play a light dance around the things we’ve come to expect. Endlessly packing your own setting with element after element, many of them seeming contradictions, is a dangerous game, but when your writing’s got as much charisma as Banks’s has, you’re free to do what you want.

Enter Yime. She’s a Culture secret agent of sorts, but not a member of Special Circumstances. Her hopes and successes were and are, instead, focused on Quietus, the more dignified step-brother of those SC cowboys. Quietus focuses on the relationship between the living and those in the various afterlives.

Unfortunately, with Yime comes the fairly obvious downside of meandering to and fro. It’s not that the stuff that we see with Yime is uninteresting; like just about everything in the novel, it’s fascinating and well written. Almost none of it, however, comes to really affect the plot. Take the bulbitian, for instance. The time spent aboard it is mysterious, well described, and filled with the same epic grandeur that infuses so much of Banks’s writing. What our time with it never does, however, is do anything but take a miniscule step towards ruling out a possibility that wasn’t introduced until the section started.

Still, it’s hard to get mad at Banks for his digressions, because, regardless of how direct your route is, his imagination is a great place to spend some time. Banks has the kind of far flung ideas that most science fiction writers would kill for, and he has the ability to write clearly and powerfully enough to bring those images from his imagination to yours, unsullied – or even aided – by the translation:

Intagliates looked like ordinary people only in silhouette, or in lighting conditions so poor you could hardly see them at all. Turn on a lamp, come out into the daylight, and they were revealed as the fabulous creatures that they were. An intagliate was covered, head to foot, in what was called a congenitally administered tattoo. Lededge had been born tattooed, emerging form the womb with the most fabulously intricate patterns indelibly encoded at a cellular level onto her skin and throughout her body.
…
Cut [an Intagliate] open and you would find similar designs on the surfaces of their internal organs, their designated motif carried into their heart and guts. Bleach their bones; the design would be stamped on the pale surface of their very skeleton; suck out their marrow and break their bones open, the ornamentation continued. At every possible level of their being they bore the mark that distinguished them from the blank sheets there other people, as well as from those who had merely chosen to have themselves in some way marked. (p. 69)

So, after all that build up, when the plot threads finally coalesce, what do we get? The ending seems simple until one gets to the epilogue, where pieces fall into place and new layers seem to come into focus and an alternative interpretation of events opens up, a twist that Banks actually entrusts with the main thematic thrust of his novel.

And yet, even with the cool twist, there’s something about the ending that is, if not quite unsatisfying, at the least very expected. There are a hundred shifts in motivation and cause in this book, but none of them even go so far as to put the ultimate outcome in doubt. Yes, exactly how they got there is interesting, but when you’re going to a place that was marked out on the first page of the book, and your arrival has never once been really questioned, it’s hard to slacken a bit of a well, duh feeling to the climax itself.

Surface Detail is an Iain M. Banks novel with everything that implies. The author’s strengths are generally here, and there aren’t any really debilitating weaknesses, but the book does lack the wow factor of Use of Weapons, making it a good – very good, even – Culture novel, but not a great one.

Iain M. Banks - Matter

Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all the wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness. (p. 297)

Matter is one part semi-medieval revenge story, one part high tech adventure, and one part a boy’s coming of age (of sorts). The novel is packed with clever ideas and good moments, but every one of those comes at the expense of one of its other threads. It’s hard to fault certain elements of Matter for succeeding as well as they do, but, when those elements drag down the rest of the story, I don’t have much choice.

Matter opens with a close up shot of Sursamen, immediately throwing us into the trenches with Prince Ferbin. The first chapter is sheer chaos, punctuated by the staccato detonations of artillery shells. As soon as the reader begins to think they’ve found their footing, events conspire to pummel Ferbin again. First his advisor is blown apart by an artillery shell. Then, hiding in a building with gore and shit running down his leg, Ferbin is witness to the murder of his father, King Hausk.

The king’s death sends the first of the novel’s two strands into motion. The first is Ferbin’s quest to get his throne back. Knowing that his father’s old allies plan to kill him on sight, he decides that the only place to get help is above, where the aliens dwell.

What we see of Sursamen in the beginning is fascinating already. The technology of the world is half World War Two and half feudal, featuring Knights riding through the skies on flying mounts with automatic weapons in hand. Ferbin, though initially obnoxious, grows somewhat more bearable as time goes on and he matures, and his conversations with his loyal but insubordinate servant, Holse, are always amusing.

The second thread is Ferbin’s brother, Oramen, who must rule in his father’s place, unaware that his father’s inner circle is planning to dispose of him. Oramen, too, starts promising. The boy’s desire to live up to his father is touching, and his habit of speaking in a manner reminiscent of an overblown Shakespeare when trying to do so, freely cribbing as he does, is great: “If any energies of yours could bring our father back, I know you’d devote them to that cause without stint. That vigour instead will be turned to the good interest of all our people. ypou bring us sorrow and joy at once, my good tyl Loesp…" (p. 37)

When the camera zooms out, we see that nothing on Sursamen was anything like we’d thought it was. Sursamen is a shellworld, an artificial planet made up of a myriad of layers, each the surface of a world for all effects and purposes. That change in scale – and the concept of Shellworlds to begin with, which is downright awesome – is the unquestioned highlight of Matter.

Going hand in hand with the new perspective is our third main character, Anaplian. Anaplian was the daughter of King Hausk, but left her planet to become an agent of Special Circumstances, the shadowy organization that operates on the fringe of Culture space and monitors, and decides the fates of, the other civilizations that the Culture encounters. The shift between the dirty and (literally) shit smeared Sursamen and the gleaming Culture is almost dizzying, and it’s from here that we first see how miniscule the conflict on Sursamen is:

She had realized that [the king] was just another strong man, in one of those societies, at one of those stages, in which it was easier to be the strong man than it was to be truly courageous. Might, fury, decisive force, the willingness to smite; how her father had loved such terms and ideas, and how shallow they began to look when you saw them played out time and time again over the centuries and millennia by a thousand different species. (p. 84)

Anaplian learns of her father’s death and heads back toward Sursamen. Despite the fact that Matter often concerns itself with the bigger picture, we come to realize that the details of the galaxy, too, are important, the actions of the common man still important in the light of what are, effectively, giants and deities:

The stage is small but the audience is great, had been one of King Hausk’s favorite sayings. To some degree he meant that the WorldGod watched and hopefully somehow appreciated what they were doing on its behalf, but there was always the implication that although the Sarl were primitive and their civilization almost comically underdeveloped of, say, the Oct (never mind the Neriscene, still less the Morthanveld and the other Optimae), nevertheless, greatness lay in doing the best you could with what you were given, and that greatness, that fixity of purpose, strength of resolve and decisiveness of action would be watched and noted by those far more powerful people and judged not on an absolute scale (on which it could barley register) but on one relative to the comparatively primitive resources the Sarl had available to them. (p. 118)

So those are the three threads. Individually, each is very promising. Unfortunately, Banks focuses on the three so equally that none of them have time to develop, preventing any one aspect from really pushing the book to greatness.

Let’s start with Oramen. The boy’s plot seems interesting to start, but the shallowness of it all soon starts to gall. The usurped king is a trope that everyone is, I trust, familiar with, and while Banks’s occasional irreverence to its finer points can be refreshing, the banality of the set up is never left far behind. The villain is always cartoonishly devious, the rightful heir always painfully naïve. After he misinterprets the third or forth attempt on his life, it’s hard to not feel that the antagonist should just kill him and get it over with already.

Ferbin’s quest takes us to several interesting locations, and involves some great dialogue, but the whole thing is pointless. Anyone who’s read a novel before can predict that the person who helps him out is going to be his sister – who happens to be one of the super powerful Culture, and just happens to be going to the same place as him – so everywhere else he turns for help just feels like a waste of pages. Hell, Banks all but acknowledges this at times, such as the scene with Hyrlis. Now, that scene’s one of the absolute finest in the novel, but the whole thing is completely unconnected to anything else and only makes the slightest attempt to even pretending that it relates.

Anaplian, the player who will obviously decide the game, spends the vast, vast majority of the book in transit. Like Ferbin, she enters into all sorts of weird and interesting locations and scenarios, but it’s, once again, hard to shake the feeling that we’re watching the actor’s walk to the studio, not the movie itself. Which is pretty much exactly what’s going on, because the action doesn’t even pretend to get started for her and Ferbin until the two are united and on their way back to Sursamen.

The core of Matter is the idea that the events on Sursamen, though central to the characters, are ultimately inconsequential to the universe as a whole. This is an interesting theme, but it works far too well. When events on Sursamen finally jerk into motion, everything is interrupted by an intergalactic showdown that comes out of nowhere.

Yes, I get it, it’s supposed to have come out of nowhere. Well, you know what? That doesn’t help. The fact that the entire crisis on Sursamen simply falls apart without anything even approaching a climax is not helped by the fact that it was supposed to, nor by the fact that Banks told me it would. A bad ending is a bad ending, whether you stick a sign on it or not.

And that intergalactic showdown? Its climax is just as bad, without even the slight balm of a reason for it being so. One moment, we’re wrapping up the character arcs we’ve had for the whole book. The next, the world’s being destroyed. By a robot with all the believable motivations of Mr. Freeze. Because. The moment after that, crisis over. No resolution, no falling action, just over. Done with. Go read the epilogue for another Tolkien reference, if you want, but certainly don’t start expecting closure.

The one element that does make it through to the book’s end intact is the prose. Banks is one of the rare authors that can evoke atmosphere through his creation, be insultingly irreverent to said creation, and have both the atmosphere and the joke still come off. For the conveyance of an epic scale, I give you Ferbin’s description of an alien world:

This was, Ferbin thought, the equivalent of a whole civilization, almost an entire galaxy, contained within what would, in a normal solar system, be the orbit of a single planet. What uncounted lives were lived within those dark, unending braids? How many souls were born, lived and died within those monstrous curling twists of tubing, never seeing – perhaps never feeling the need to see – any other worlds, transfixed for ever within the encompassing vastness of this unexplorably prodigious habitat? What lives, what fates, what stories must have taken place within this star-surrounding ring, forever twisting, folding, unfolding? (p. 393)

As for the irreverence, look no further than Banks’s naming system, which proudly christens high-tech potentially planet-destroying monoliths with names like Don’t Try This At Home and The Hundredth Idiot.

Matter has an interesting concept at its heart, and Banks brings both the world and the characters to life. Unfortunately, the book’s buildup is about five times longer than it should be, and the payoff is ten times shorter than it should be. Despite some intriguing ideas, Matter doesn’t live up to its promise. Still, Banks’s writing is strong enough, and his scenes vivid enough, that the journey is enjoyable, all the same.