randy_byers | Entries tagged with iain banks

The Iain Banks novel was published in 1992, and this four part, four hour mini-series was produced in 1996. The adaptation is pretty faithful to the book, although one of the changes is that it moves the "now" to circa 1994 from circa 1990. This is mostly noticeable in that the background war is in Bosnia rather than Kuwait, but some of the other cultural references are also updated, such as Prentice wearing a Nirvana t-shirt to his grandmother's funeral. (One of the reviews of the novel I read made the good point that it's an excellent time capsule of the era it was written in.)

Other changes are the elimination of Prentice's younger brother, James, who was an almost entirely peripheral character in the book. We (and Prentice) also regularly see the ghost of Uncle Rory (played by none other than Peter Capaldi), and I guess that was done to replace the bits of Rory's writing that Prentice reads in the book. Those bits of writing are still in the story, but we don't get as much of them as we do in the book (where we read whole sections of it, although we don't know that until near the end). In the TV show Rory speaks to Prentice, urging him on. Which brings up perhaps the major change from the book: the mystery of Rory's disappearance is the center of the story from the beginning. The TV show is essentially a murder mystery, with moody Hitchcockian music over the opening credits. In the book the murder mystery only slowly emerges, and the genre of the story as a whole is more of a coming-of-age story crossed with a family saga. In the series those elements are subservient to the murder mystery.

If the TV show improves on the book at all, it's by making the story more focused. It feels less baggy than the book. Nonetheless the story is essentially the same, and I had some of the same problems with it. Most of all, I still found Prentice a not very interesting character, which is a fatal thing in a protagonist. His father, Kenneth, for example, is a much more fascinating figure, as is, for that matter, the eventual love interest, Ashley, who is a smart woman working in the tech industry in the early days of the internet. What kind of shit does *she* have to deal with? But I will say that I thought all the casting was great, and it was cool to see the novel's many characters embodied and played. Sometimes I had a hard time understanding the Scottish accents, but listening to the voices did fill me with the desire to return to Scotland and just putter about the countryside for a while, stopping to taste the single malt along the way. So I guess it works as a travel brochure at the very least.

I seem to be immune, if not averse, to Banks' mainstream novels. This is the second one I've read, and while I liked it better than Espedair Street, I still found it more than a bit of a slog. It ended well, which almost salvaged it for me, but by then I had built up so much resentment toward the thing that it was probably too late.

This a Scottish family saga, full of the requisite eccentric characters and loving strife. It's also, as the title tells you once the title has been explained, about death. As a story about death it arrives at a very satisfactory bit of wisdom, although it gets there by way of a murder mystery that felt completely out of place to me. It's also a coming-of-age story, and that may be the aspect of it that was least successful for me. The narrative point of view moves around, but the main point of view character is Prentice -- the middle son of one of the families whose saga this is. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Prentice is not entirely dissimilar to yours truly, I found him almost completely uninteresting as the protagonist of this story, and I got bored early on with his tales of getting so drunk he couldn't talk straight. The fact that he's callow and needs to grow up is basically the point of the coming-of-age aspect of the story, but maybe I'm too old for this shit. I just didn't care about his problems or his path. Neither did I find his part in the murder mystery in any way believable, but that's probably because I just didn't care for the character.

I dunno. The whole thing felt kind of juvenile to me, I guess. In the end we get some wisdom about death and a very sweet piece of morse code, but what else was there? A strong sense of the Scottish landscape and of the people. (Very funny, pointed observation at one point that English newspeople on BBC were perfectly able to pronounce the hard "ch" sound in Arabic names but somehow not in Scottish words like "loch".) Maybe if Prentice weren't such a prat (

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It's impossible to write seriously about this novel without serious spoilers, so THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. Consider yourself warned.

Use of Weapons was the first (and perhaps only) Banks novel to really bowl me over, so it's fitting that it's the first one of his that I've now read a second time. What was interesting about the reread was that I've always remembered the big reveal of the bone chair that has haunted the protagonist of the novel his whole life and driven his hunger for atonement, but I'd completely forgotten the book's second punchline, which is that the protagonist isn't who we (or he) thinks he is. He is not Cheradenine Zakalwe, he's Zakalwe's cousin, Elethiomel, who murdered Cheradenine's sister (who was Elethiomel's lover) and made a chair of her bones in attempt to destroy Zakalwe's spirit and thus win the war he was waging against him.

So this novel is famous for its twist ending and for the elaborate structure (borrowed in a slightly different form by Christopher Nolan for his memory puzzle movie, Memento) in which one set of thirteen chapters moves forward in time in alternation with another set of thirteen chapters that moves backward in time. Banks says that this structure is actually a simplification of what he came up with when he originally wrote the book in 1974. (The revised version was published in 1990.) But to what purpose are the twists and structure put? The purpose is a complex meditation on the use of weapons.

I think I've already mentioned that one of the things that has struck me about the Culture novels as I've been reading them lately is how much they are military novels. They are almost all about war and about the secret military wing of the anarchist utopia that is the Culture. Sometimes, as in this book, they are about the attempts by the secret military wing of the Culture to secretly guide less advanced civilizations toward a less militaristic mode of social organization. The ironies and contradictions of this meddling are the central theme of Use of Weapons. Zakalwe, for reasons that are slowly revealed over the course of the novel, is the perfect weapon for the Culture to use in its proxy wars. He embodies the contradiction of their efforts: he is an amoral murderer seeking to atone for his unforgivable crimes by trying to use war to create peace. His self-hatred makes him the perfect pawn for the elements of the Culture who are trying to act selflessly. Elethiomel's dissociation from his own identity rhymes with the Culture's dissociation from their own biases and compulsions. That's ultimately what gives the novel its great power: Zakalwe/Elethiomel is a perfect symbol of how the Culture's quest for progress and peace by any means necessary turns them into amoral monsters willing to turn anything into a weapon for their cause. Once again, as in most of the other Culture novels, this is a kind of critique of Western liberalism and its intolerance of intolerance.

Coming back to Use of Weapons after having read all the later Culture novels, there were aspects of it that did feel a bit primitive in comparison. The Minds, and especially the drone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, are almost buffoonish characters here, although to some extent the slapstick is a diversion from the fact that these are incredibly powerful beings. Perhaps it's implied that the Minds hide behind a comic persona to make the humans feel more comfortable with them. Banks got much better later at depicting the Minds as godlike in their powers, which some people feel reduced the human characters to insignificance and which in turn one can argue became a great theme of the later books. Probably the one area where it felt as though Banks was cheating regarding the Minds in Use of Weapons is their ignorance of Zakalwe's history and true identity. He tries to finesse this by presenting Zakalwe as a refugee from a planet that the Culture knows nothing about, but it's highly unlikely that a Mind as portrayed in the later books would have been unaware of Zakalwe/Elethiomel's personality dissociation, even if the exact nature of his identity was elusive.

But of course this is another Culture novel in which the Culture is largely seen from a non-Culture viewpoint. On that level it's a predecessor of the far more radical experiment in Inversions, in which the whole novel is told from the point of view of characters who don't even know that the Culture exists and are at a technological level that would find the Culture incomprehensible. In fact, Use of Weapons also explores some similar arguments about whether it's right to intervene in other cultures. By grounding the action in the "primitive" civilizations that Zakalwe infiltrates as an agent of the Culture, we are given an argument for intervention in the form of examples of cruel and unthinking behavior, but Banks continually questions whether the Culture is really any better on a moral level. Again, their willingness to use Zakalwe as a weapon of intervention is equated, via the structure of the novel, with Elethiomel's willingness to murder his own cousin and lover and use her bones as a weapon.

Does the novel still work when you know what the final twists are (even if you've forgotten one of them)? I'd say yes, because as much as the novel is structured to punch you in the gut, the structure also works brilliantly in the service of the novel's world weary themes. Really, this is the standard critique of liberalism, so it's not even as though the ideas are all that powerful on their own. Banks creates something poetic out of them by pairing them with Elethiomel's horrifying history and harnessing the resonance between the personal and the political to drive its story home. As much as I think his vision of the Culture improved with age, he probably never topped Use of Weapons for tying the grand space opera scale to puny human failings.

The Hydrogen Sonata is the final Culture novel by Iain Banks, and it ends up being an oddly appropriate finale. This one is all about Sublimation, which is the process by which certain advanced civilizations remove themselves from physical reality into some kind of mysterious non-physical dimension, perhaps akin to hyperspace. This is described as a completely natural (not supernatural) process, but it has a lot of resonance with ideas of the afterlife or heaven or the Faerie otherworld. It is effectively a way to move beyond the mortality that Banks finally succumbed to this year.

There are ways in which the final three Culture novels (Matter and Surface Detail are the previous two) felt very similar structurally. They have multiple viewpoint characters, some that we follow all the way through the story and some that only occupy a small part. There's a villainous type who is Machiavellian and a sexual predator. Tension ramps up slowly until there's a sudden burst of violent action at the end. Throughout all this are witty essays about all manner of miracles and marvels in the far flung future. I found Surface Detail disappointing in the end because I felt Banks failed to satisfactorily resolve all the storylines he was following. Matt Hilliard seems to feel the problem with all the later Culture novels is that the humanoid characters are basically irrelevant, because the Culture Minds (the artificial intelligences that actually run things) are so much more powerful. But for me Matter and The Hydrogen Sonata are pretty much completely successful, even though it's true that especially in the case of The Hydrogen Sonata the humanoid actors are largely irrelevant. One might say that humanoid irrelevance is in fact driving the Gzilt civilization to Sublimation. Sublimation may be the final answer to the question hovering over all these novels: What do do when you've done it all and have everything? What is the point of life?

The other interesting thing that The Hydrogen Sonata does that's related to this question is take us back to the origins of the Culture. I can't remember that Banks has dealt much with the origin of the Culture in previous novels, although I think he's written about it in essays about the Culture. In any event, we discover that there's at least one humanoid who has been alive since the founding of the Culture, which was ten thousand years in the past of this novel. Nobody can quite believe it's true, because it's assumed that all humanoids choose to die after about four hundred years or so. Nobody can quite believe that any humanoid could find something to keep themselves occupied and entertained for ten thousand years. Banks' portrait of the man who has done so is quite fascinating in itself, even though he is basically a secondary character. There's also a tangent about a woman who exists as a dormant recording of herself that is only activated when she's needed for something -- in this case, to track down the ten-thousand-year-old, with whom she was friends a couple of hundred years previously. Here is another solution to the problem of what to do with yourself when you are effectively immortal: hibernate.

The title of the novel is a reference to another type of solution to what might be called The Problem of Boredom. "The Hydrogen Sonata" is a piece of music composed as a sort of joke or test or enigma. It is composed for an instrument that was designed especially for the composition and that's impossible to play without body modifications. It's nearly impossible to play even if you have the body modifications, and the resulting "music" is something that no audience really wants to listen to. The only reason to play it is to demonstrate that you can. It's something to do -- a challenge to surmount -- and it's something you do for yourself, as a form of discipline and focus and engagement. It advances no other cause, aesthetic or otherwise. That's the ultimate dark truth of the Culture series: There is no reason to live other than the reasons we give ourselves. Other than that it's all sound and fury signifying nothing.

In this novel, everybody has their reasons, but the reasons don't ultimately mean anything. Yet Banks still finds room for the sublime -- the wondrous, the awesome -- in this universe (or at least within reach of this universe). There is still that which surpasseth understanding, even for the fantastically intelligent Minds, one of whom we meet who has Sublimed and then returned to the physical universe, unable to describe what it's like on the other side or why it returned. In that sense of something beyond the edge of the world we know -- beyond reason and reasons -- Banks perhaps finally locates a mystery to keep wonder alive.

This chapbook was given to members of Novacon 40, which I attended in November 2010. I didn't know this, but apparently Novacon has been publishing chapbooks by its Guests of Honor since 1979. Banks had previously received this treatment in 1987, in fact.

This chapbook consists of excerpts from drafts of two of Banks' novels that were cut as part of the editing process. "The Spheres" is from the novel Transition and had previously been published, according to Banks' note, as some kind of iPhone extra or special feature. Not sure what that means, exactly, but I presume it was for an iPhone edition of the novel. Thus the Novacon publication is a second usage, and Banks quips, "Shame this has prevented me presenting you with my extensive early works of what is basically Vogon poetry, but there you go. Something for Novacon 50, perhaps." A funny joke now rich with bitter irony.

I found "The Spheres" quite intriguing, and it makes me curious about Transition. Has anybody read it? Any thoughts? I've been focused on his Culture novels, but as there's only one left that I haven't read, my thoughts are now turning to his other novels. (Of which I've previously read only The Bridge, Against a Dark Background, and Espedair Street.) "The Spheres" was apparently the first chapter of the novel in the first draft, and it introduces the mysterious Spheres and a character who has figured out a way to read the signals they send. There are some strange shifts in point of view that only whetted my curiosity further. Banks implies in his note that this was the result of some kind of memory of past lives.

"The Secret Courtyard" is from the Culture novel Matter, which I have read fairly recently. I can see why he cut it. It's about some exotic prostitutes who the young prince's murdered father kept in a courtyard unknown to anyone but his most loyal retainers. One of the prostitutes is horribly disfigured, and the prince finds himself strangely attracted to her. This feels a little trite in the excerpt as it stands, although it probably could've been developed into something more interesting. There's an unspoken sexual perversity underlying it that seems a bit unusual for Banks.

I found this novel mildly disappointing in the end, but up until the climax I found it completely riveting. This is another in the Culture series, and Banks delves into a couple of aspects of the Culture that I don't recall his going into so deeply before: virtual realities and self-backup and "reventing," which is the Culture term for re-embodying a backed-up (or recorded) self. My sense is that Surface Detail also increases the complexity of points-of-view that are interweaved into the narrative -- something he'd already amped up at least one level in the previous Culture novel, Matter. Unfortunately, as amazing as some of the interweaving is, I think this complexity is part of what undermines the resolution, as he has too many balls in the air and doesn't seem to know what to do with them all.

The story revolves around two nodes. In one, a non-Culture pan-human woman named Lededje Y'breq, who is a sex slave, is murdered by her owner and then revented by a Culture ship. Her ambition is to return to her home planet and wreak revenge on her owner. In the other node, a virtual war (called, ironically, the War in Heaven) is being waged over whether civilizations will be allowed to continue to create virtual hells where virtual souls are subjected to extreme torture for religious reasons. Eventually these two strands of the narrative coincide, although not in the most compelling way. Which is perhaps to say that I didn't feel a dramatic connection between the two threads, despite the fact that they end up connecting to the same character.

Still, as a travelogue through the Culture and through various interesting scientific, philosophical, and religious questions, the book is entirely engaging. Banks was a master of exposition, and I could read his background histories of various aspects of the Culture (and other civilizations) all day long. I feel as though as the Culture series progressed, he got more and more interested in the religious aspects of things, including Sublimation (in which civilizations move beyond a physical substrate into something like virtual reality, except, well, not physical) and the correspondence between the idea of the recorded self and the idea of the soul and between the idea of reventing and the idea of reincarnation, not to mention questions about the purpose of pain and suffering. On some level Surface Detail can be read as a long meditation about how the Culture deals with pain, and I think the emotional high point of the story for me was a sequence in which a Culture ship with one of the human protagonists on board it is attacked by a superior technology, the punishing nature of which is conveyed along one axis by the extreme (and extremely effective) measures the ship takes to detach the human from the pain of severe injuries.

Banks has always been fascinated by violence, and there's another thread to this novel that's about the pleasure of violence in a civilization that theoretically abhors it. This thread runs through all the Culture books, in fact. It's one I have mixed feelings about, partly because I'm so terrified of the atavistic side of human nature (a fear which finds the instinct toward violence as depicted by Banks all-too-real), and partly because there's a gleeful side to it that I just don't get. So the blood-thirsty Culture ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints who is such a source of humor and good cheer in this novel was a challenge, shall we say, for me. I'm never quite sure that the conflicted feelings about violence in Culture novels make sense on a philosophical or world-building level or whether they are more an expression of Banks' own personal obsessions.

Somewhere in the middle of this novel I was thinking about what kind of writer Banks was, and what kind of books the Culture novels were. They are adventure novels -- romances -- for the most part, but with serious ideas presented and explored. They are wildly exciting, and yet they raise complex moral questions. I was thinking Banks was like Alexandre Dumas, but maybe Victor Hugo is a better point of comparison. I don't really know who to compare him to, honestly. Rollicking adventures and Big Ideas. It's amazing, heady stuff, but I still think his aliens are basically humans with odd appendages tacked on.

'Even galaxy-spanning anarchist utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.'

Well, gosh wow. What a book! When I started reading Matter it seemed to me an interesting melding of the previous two Culture novels, Inversions and Look to Windward. The intertwining story threads combine a low tech feudal society as in Inversions with an outsider's view of life in the high tech utopia of the Culture as in Look to Windward. Banks uses these two strands to create an amazing sense of vast scale. His universe is teaming with layer upon layer of different technologies, intelligent beings, civilizations, and worlds. The locus of the action is something called a Shellworld, which is an artificial world with a number of different levels, supporting a number of different life forms and civilizations. It is a fitting metaphor for the whole book.

The plot begins with the assassination of a king on one level of the Shellworld Sursamen. We then follow two of the king's sons -- one who knows about the murder and one who thinks his father died in battle -- and the king's daughter, who left Sursamen years previously to live in the Culture and to become an agent of Special Circumstances, which is one of the Culture's "unacknowledged militaries". Gradually these three threads come together, as the one son flees Sursamen looking for allies, the other begins to suspect that his life is in danger, and the daughter makes her way back to her homeworld to pay her dead father final respects.

Banks is masterful here in building tension very slowly over the course of what is quite a long novel. As always he doles out information carefully, and our understanding of what the Shellworld is and what history surrounds it grows and deepens along with the narrative tension. Eventually the feudal story and the space opera merge with another story element that might be categorized as Lovecraftian. With this the tension suddenly spikes and Banks slams the story into full throttle, exploding into an action finale as breath-taking as anything he's written in a career full of breath-taking action sequences. I could hardly sit still as I read the final two chapters.

At the time of the book's release Banks joked to The Guardian, "It's so complicated that even in its complexity it's complex." It feels like a summation of all his thematic concerns up to that point. It feels like a pinnacle work. The matter of Iain M. Banks. The question of the Culture novels is always, If people are freed from want, what will they want? This book undermines the whole question (as Banks is wont to do) by exploring how the material world -- matter -- means that there is no freedom from want. No matter how many resources are made available, no matter how much power is available, no matter how much of life we are able to control, the hard matter of fact is that we don't have it all, and we are left wanting. We are left with special circumstances. Near the end there is a passage in which one character from the feudal society reflects on what it means to have and have not and perfectly captures Banks' complicated point of view:

He was starting to change his mind about the old Warrior Code stuff knights and princes invoked, usually when they were drunk and in need of spilling their words, or trying to justify their poor behaviour in some other field.

Behave honourably and wish for a good death. He'd always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit, frankly; most of the people he'd been told were his betters were quite venally dishonourable, and the more they got the more the greedy bastards wanted, while those that weren't like that were better behaved at least partly because they could afford to be.

Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, though rarely those who'd actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable's job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he'd dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse.

But once you weren't living hand-to-mouth, and had some ease, you had the leisure to contemplate what life was really all about and who you really were. And given that you had to die, it made sense to seek a good death.

Even these Culture people, bafflingly, mostly chose to die, when they didn't have to.

With freedom from fear and wondering where your next meal was coming from or how many mouths you'd have to feed next year and whether you'd get sacked by your employer or thrown into jail for some minor indiscretion -- with freedom from all that came choice, and you could choose a nice quiet, calm, peaceful, ordinary life and die with your nightshirt on and impatient relatives making lots of noise around you ... Or you could end up doing something like this, and -- however scared your body might feel -- your brain rather appreciated the experience.

He thought of his wife and children, and felt a twinge of guilt that they had been so absent from his thoughts for so long recently. He'd had a lot to think about and so many new and utterly bizarre things to learn, but the truth was they seemed like beings from another world now, and while he wished them only well, and could imagine -- if, by some miracle, they survived all this -- going back to them and taking up his old duties again, somehow that felt like it was never going to happen, and he'd long since seen them for the final time.

A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?

And of course one of the many little and large ironies of the book is that this is a character who possibly does survive "all this".

Matter is hard. There are some hard deaths in this book. "Unexpectedly savage," says the blurb from The Times (London) on the front cover. Except that for those who have read Banks, it really isn't unexpected. In his books, when the shit hits the fan, it's unpleasant. Even in an anarchist utopia, matter bites. Banks finds heroism in the way his characters face this reality. He's an old-fashioned romantic and romancer that way. This is an old-fashioned story of princes and a princess seeking a restoration, but in Banks' hands it becomes something much darker and more noble than that. It becomes something far more complicated and humane than that.

As I may have indicated in my review of Inversions, I have undertaken to read all the Culture novels that I haven't read yet. I had previously read the first four (excluding the collection, State of the Art), and my favorite of those by far was Use of Weapons. The last one I read of those four, Excessions, was a bit of a disappointment for reasons I don't remember, but I have to say that both Inversions and Look to Windward strike me as the equal of Use of Weapons, which I plan to reread once I get through the rest of the series.

It was actually only just now, as I was rereading the quote from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land that serves as the epigraph and source of the title for Look to Windward that I caught on to the fact that it's also the source of the title for the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas. ('Gentile or Jew/O you who turn the wheel and look to windward/Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.') Look to Windward is to some extent a sequel to that novel, or at least builds on the aftermath of the war with the Idirans that was the subject of Consider Phlebas. But Look to Windward is also, and primarily, about the aftermath of another war that the Culture was only involved in indirectly -- a civil war amongst an alien species called the Chelgrians. The novel has two main threads: one concerning a Chelgrian composer living in exile on a Culture Orbital (basically a ringworld à la Niven), and the other about a Chelgrian survivor of the civil war who is acting as an emissary to try to persuade the exile to return to his home world.

One thing that strikes me as I read Banks now is that his science fictional ideas are mostly inherited from the field. Take Niven's ringworld and cobble it together with Varley's personality backups restored to clones (and humongous organisms that support a whole ecology inside and around themselves) and virtual realities from cyberpunk, etc etc. His interest isn't in inventing new stefnal concepts but in interrogating Utopia and Western (European-derived) culture. Look to Windward, like Consider Phlebas, is largely from the point of view of aliens looking at the Culture from the outside and mostly from a more conservative and disapproving viewpoint. At times this is too obviously a modern conservative critique of modern liberalism, but the thing that gives these novels such force is that Banks is able to simultaneously apply a serious conservative critique of liberalism (and hedonism) while gleefully depicting the steely brutality hiding behind liberalism's smiling, tolerant face. You could say that that's what this novel is up to in a nutshell, and it certainly delivers the goods. The concluding chapters are breathtaking in their studied revelation of a cold-blooded, if not logical, savagery that has been hiding in plain sight all along.

The one weakness of the novel is the aliens who are the main characters. They are alien only in physical characteristics. Emotionally they feel far too human, and it was in fact easy for me to forget that they were alien until I was reminded by a physical description. I had the same problem with the Tines in Vernor Vinge's A Fire upon the Deep. They were a fine concept, but they felt human in very uninteresting ways. My touchstone for how to depict truly alien aliens remains Donald Kingsbury's novella "The Survivor", which manages to give us at least three different and distinct alien races who don't feel at all human. Banks can't even manage one, and he's trying to depict at least two in detail.

Despite this flaw, however, and despite the fact that the far-flung future society of the Culture frequently feels like it has been torn from yesterday's old sci-fi, Banks plays to his strengths here: vivid descriptions of landscape and action, full of playful, poetic language and wonderful wit, and a bracing view of the less pleasant aspects of civilization and its discontents. There's something a bit laddish about Banks' perspective, but it's damned sexy too, I have to say. It's bold and brash. Space opera started out as a cheerfully colonialist enterprise, and Banks is expert at finding that blood still running in the veins of his post-socialist post-scarcity Utopia. His ability to straddle the European heritage of colonialism and liberal idealism is manifest in the book's dedication, "For the Gulf War Veterans," which exudes a potent, sympathetic irony when you return to it after finishing the novel. Consider Phlebas, mixing memory and desire after the agony in stony places. It rings for thee.

In the wake of the news that Iain Banks has contracted a terminal form of cancer, I've been inspired to take up the Culture novels where I left off. Excession was the last one I read, so Inversions was next up.

I was vaguely familiar with the fact that this is the oddball in the series that doesn't seem to be about the Culture at all. It feels more like a Medieval fantasy or novel of court intrigue, and if you aren't familiar with the Culture (or haven't been told that this is a Culture novel), you probably won't notice the signs of the Culture in the deep background. In fact, Claire Brialey told me that she read this one without having read any other Culture novels and enjoyed it perfectly well as a story and world unto itself.

So it's a very clever exercise in telling a story that can be read at least two different ways depending on what you know or don't know about the other Culture books. I found it utterly fascinating both on the level of a novel of intrigue and on the level of a novel of Culture politics and philosophy. Banks' main concern throughout the series has been with the implications of a more advanced civilization intervening in the affairs of a less advanced civilization, which can also be looked at as a more powerful society intervening in (or exploiting) a less powerful one. This is a theme that is infinitely variable, and if you toss in the idea that the personal is political, it gathers even greater depth, especially novelistic depth. Inversions moves through all of this with great flair and mystery.

There are two threads to the story. One is about a monarchy where a mysterious female doctor is tending to the king with unusual methods and causing consternation amongst the corrupt, conniving nobility. Another is about a former empire that has been taken over by a revolutionary figure who is trying to overthrow the old monarchy and establish a more democratic, or at least populist, form of government. He is protected by a mysterious male bodyguard who senses that there's a plan afoot to assassinate the Protector, as the revolutionary leader is called, but can't quite pin down where it's coming from. These two threads never quite meet directly, but they do interact from afar.

For those who know that this is a Culture novel and are familiar with the post-scarcity super-scientific anarchist utopia that the Culture has achieved, it soon becomes obvious enough that the doctor and the bodyguard are both agents of the Culture working to intervene in the affairs of this backward planet from opposing philosophies of how best to do it. However, not only does Banks never come right out and say this directly, what he shows us is so, well, inverted, that it raises more questions than it answers. For example, one version of what might really be going on is a fairy tale about a man and a woman who come from a Culture-like country called Lavishia, but our initial sense that this a story about the bodyguard and the doctor seems to be misleading. For example, the fairy tale seems to invert the genders, thus playing on one of the psychological meanings of "inversion". We may also be misled by our own assumptions about gender roles and political systems.

Banks plays with our expectations like this throughout the book. Both the doctor and the bodyguard become emotionally involved with the people they are trying to manipulate, and the outcomes of their political manipulations and personal desires are ironic and ambiguous in just about every direction. The only genre story in a similar vein that I can think of that may do this novel one better is Joanna Russ' novella, "The Second Inquisition", where it seems that the intervention of the far future agent in a backward planet has autobiographical implications. Banks does not implicate himself directly in Inversions, but his meditation on the perverse, contrary play of power and desire, selfishness and progress is still a masterful continuation of the dialectic constituted by the Culture series as a whole. As ever, even interstellar utopia is humbled before the neediness of the human heart.