Subject: Review of three novels by Iain M. Banks

From: [email-masked] (David Cortesi)
Date: 03 Jan 94 05:38:31 GMT

Bloody Good Reads

              A Review of Three Novels by Iain M. Banks:

	CONSIDER PHLEBAS  --  USE OF WEAPONS  --  AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND

Review Copyright 1993 by David E. Cortesi

Iain M. Banks writes great galumphing adventure tales, packed with
invention and incident.

Barring one important reservation that I'll come to later, I can
recommmend any of the three reviewed here as a page-turner that would be
perfect for whiling away the hours of a long layover at Dallas-Fort Worth
airport or a rainy  weekend in Tacoma, WA.

What follows are capsule summaries, spoiler-free, of the three titles
above. After them I present one important reason you might NOT want to
read any of them, and add some general comments on Banks' work.

CONSIDER PHLEBAS takes place during a war of galactic scale. Horza, a
stoic, bitter, and angst-filled member of a dying sub-species of humanity,
is caught up in events and given a dangerous mission: to quest for a
missing Mind, a super-AI, hiding in a cavernous labyrinth on a proscribed
planet. He pursues this task doggedly, violently, across a staggering
variety of awesome landscapes and through a vivid succession of perils. In
the end he achieves what is at best a Pyrrhic victory.

CONSIDER PHLEBAS takes place in Banks' "Culture Universe." The Culture is
a culmination of sorts to humanoid evolution. It is Banks' speculative
answer to the following very interesting question: We can now foresee a
time when, through genetic engineering -- or robotics -- or nanotech -- or
mining the asteroids -- or (here insert your favorite deus ex technica),
we will be able to banish all material want.  Then what do we do?

All of our economic and social mechinery is built on axioms of scarcity. 
Everything we do is related in some way to the allocation of scarce
resources among too many recipients.  But in a world in which any human
could command literally any material good he or she desired, what
foundation would remain for human culture? How can we define ourselves to
ourselves when there are no degrees of richness and no "work" that needs
doing?  I first saw this question posed in a James P. Hogan novel.
Hogan's answer was: we would compete for the good opinion of others
(respect is always in short supply).

Iain Banks' answer is: by good works.  The Culture, a multiracial
civilization that spans the galaxy and possesses technological power
beyond magnificence (which it wields with verve and a complete lack of
parsimony) finds its inner purpose in helping younger civilizations along,
as subtly and unintrusively as it can -- like an elephant attempting
dentistry on a mouse.

Banks' Culture folk are well-meaning, hedonistic, possessed of dire powers
yet withal a bit vague and ill-focussed. Their benign interventions often
go painfully wrong with tragic consequences for their pawns. The Culture,
in short, is a European writer's sharp caricature of Americans. The
satire is not pressed as such, but it is clear and remorselessly funny.

USE OF WEAPONS also takes place in the Culture universe. Cheradenine
Zakalwe is a soldier of fortune, the stoic, bitter, angst-filled survivor
of too many military misadventures -- some carried out on commission from
The Culture, others free-lance adventures.  The story is structured as a
series of flashbacks that spiral toward the source of Zakalwe's angst.
These are interleaved with the account of his final mission for The
Culture.  He pursues it doggedly, violently, across a  staggering variety
of awesome landscapes and through a vivid succession of perils. In the end
he achieves something rather less than a Pyrrhic victory.

AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND is not a Culture novel.  Instead it is set in a
single solar system, one which, we are given to understand, is so isolated
from other stars that the inhabitants have never been able to make the
leap to interstellar travel.  They have populated all the planets of their
system; indeed several space-faring civilizations have risen and fallen. 
The present civilization is a colorful, decadent texture of opposing
religious and commercial interests, loosely ruled by a hereditary
commercial aristocracy.

Sharrow is a daughter of an aristocratic house (as she curtly  tells a
functionary who insists on having her last name, "I don't have a last
name, I'm a fucking aristo"). She is -- yes -- stoic, bitter, and
angst-filled.  Unlike the heros of the previous two books, Sharrow has
solid reasons for being so, and these are made clear early in the story. 
She is stoic because she is an ex-soldier, a successful squadron leader in
a recent war.  She is bitter because a religious cult has been granted
judicial leave to hunt her down and kill her (also for a number of other
reasons that are revealed as the story unfolds).  She is angst-filled
because, indirectly and inadvertently, she caused a few million deaths.

The deaths came about from the misuse of the second-to-last remaining
Lazy Gun, a relic of a previous civilization. Sharrow had it, but turned it
over to the improper authorities, who blew up themselves and a city with
it.  Now, to save herself from that religious cult, she has no choice but
to search for the final Lazy Gun.  She reassembles her wartime squadron
and sets out on the quest. She pursues it doggedly, violently, across a
staggering variety of awesome landscapes and through a vivid succession of
perils. In the end she achieves something a little better than a Pyrrhic
victory.

Very well, I've been poking fun at the fundamental sameness of these
stories. In truth, the formula is only evident in retrospect. There is a
lot to praise in these books. (There is also a lot to find fault with.  In
fact, there is simply A Lot in each of them.)

Here's why you might want to pass them all up and read something else: 
Banks kills his sympathetic characters.

I dislike and distrust authors who do this -- who create likeable,
sympathetic people and cut them down.  I will never read another book by
Elmore Leonard, not after he made me fall half in love with a female lead
and then let her be chased down and butchered with a submachine gun.  Joe
Haldeman disgusted me when he ended a recent book with a pointless bloodbath.
The characters in which an author invites me to invest my empathy are
supposed to end up *changed* -- possibly sadder and more scarred, but wiser
in some way.  Dead is not changed; dead is dead.  Unheroic death -- simply
falling a casualty to a plot element -- is a denial of the value of the
character and a nasty joke on the reader's trust.

Banks does this with regularity.  This is not a spoiler, it is a  consumer
alert: do not become attached to any character in the novels under review
here.  The odds are very good that the character you like best or
empathize with the most will not survive to the final page. All of these
books close with stages as corpse-littered as Hamlet's.

If Banks wrote ordinary eye-fodder, this ugly characteristic would make
the books unworthy of review. But there is more to them, both good and bad.

The most astonishing thing about Iain Banks' work is his every-changing
quicksilver flow of invention. He never seems to run out of new scenery
and plot twists.  As long as you keep reading and don't think too deeply,
the never-ending flow of images is spellbinding. Banks is profligate with
his scenery.  Larry Niven wrote two novels to explore his one Ringworld.
Banks uses a ringworld (he calls it an orbital) as the set for one-third
of CONSIDER PHLEBAS, then moves on to bigger things. (The Culture builds
ringworlds the way we put up shopping malls.)

The elements of this flow are derived from the standard components of
science fiction, but they are fractured and recombined by a kaleidoscopic
mind.  Banks uses the conventions of SF the way Robin Williams uses the
voices and slogans of pop culture: you recognize his quotes and
impressions, but they come so fast in such outrageous combinations that
everything is new and fun again.

Some of the fun is in the sheer effrontery of it.  You suddenly realize
the incongruity of what you've been reading, and you can only laugh at how
Banks' narrative skill has conned you into placidly accept something
completely over the top.  In the opening scene of CONSIDER PHLEBAS, Horza
is in the process of being executed by being drowned in shit.  In USE OF
WEAPONS, Zakalwe recalls in detail the process of being decapitated. (The
Culture zoomed in to rescue his head and regrew his body from it). The
object of Sharrow's search is a weapon with a sense of humor. Sharrow's
sister lives in a monastery where the penitents are permanently manacled
to little trolleys that run in tracks that criss-cross the walls and
floors.  And so on.

Mixed up with these cartoon visions are others that have the true
science-fiction Awe Factor.  Banks is just as profligate with these as
with the others (does he know the difference?).  For some reason I can't
forget one of the most domestic: a glass-bottomed swimming pool in 
AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND, cantilevered out over a cliff so that as you
swim you look down through water at a sunny landscape thousands of feet
below.

After his profligate imagination, Banks' greatest skill is in the
narration of violence.  I don't know another writer who can depict a fight
so vividly and with such pace.  You see and appreciate every bullet, blow,
laser beam or garroting. One of the most striking scenes in CONSIDER
PHLEBAS is a foot chase and hand-to-hand fight to the death that takes
place in twilight, in a ramp where giant hovercraft are coming up out of
the sea.  The characters claw at each other in the dark, the glare, the
noise and spray -- it has unforgettable, stark clarity.

And that brings up a reason why you might be cautious about recommending
these books to anyone young: they are unrelentingly violent. The
characters kill and are killed, torture and maim and destroy, and rarely
for ends that could be justified in any scheme of morals. CONSIDER PHLEBAS
is perhaps the worst on this account -- Horza kills twice to save his own
life, but he also plots a murder and carries it out for no other reason
than to steal a ship.  The others are saturated with painful and violent
episodes.  It's all coloful and cartoon-like, but behind it all is
acceptance of the idea that when all is said and done, the effective
resolution to any conflict can be found in firepower.  Well, Sharrow
tries to reach the opposite conclusion, but circumstances won't let her.

Finally, I could talk about the structure of the books: how they read as
if Banks didn't know the meanings of either "rewrite" or "enough" -- how
at least a third of CONSIDER PHLEBAS is tangential to the plot and
cuttable -- how the final resolution of USE OF WEAPONS is a twist that is
only slightly less manipulative than ending a story with "and then I woke
up, it had all been a dream" -- how the fussy, smart-mouth "drones" of the
Culture books are nothing but British stage butlers dressed up to look
like floating suitcases -- but what's the point?  These aren't supposed to
be great works; they are meant to be great sprawling entertainments, and
they succeed at it. They are bloody good reads, in all senses.

%A	Iain M. Banks
%T	CONSIDER PHLEBAS
%I	St. Martin's Press, NY
%D	1987
%I	Bantam Books
%D	1991
%G	ISBN 0-553-29281-1
%O	$5.99
%P	497 pp

%A	Iain M. Banks
%T	USE OF WEAPONS
%I	MacDonald and Co.
%D	1990
%I	Bantam Books
%D	1992
%G	ISBN 0-553-29224-2
%O	$5.99
%P	389 pp

%A	Iain M. Banks
%T	AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND
%I	Bantam Books
%D	1993
%G	ISBN 0-553-29225-2
%O	$5.99
%P	515 pp