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Iain Banks

For reasons I can’t go into right now I’ll be rereading most of Iain Banks’s novels over the next few weeks. His mainstream novels that is, those of Iain M Banks can wait for another time.

His books will be popping up on the Currently Reading part of my side-bar then (before disappearing later) but while I’ll still be writing my usual reviews of what I’ve read I won’t be posting them on here – at least not for some time.

The Quarry by Iain Banks

Little, Brown, 2013, 326 p.

Due to the unusual circumstances surrounding its completion I was a bit reluctant to start reading this book. What if I didn’t like it? What if Banks’s illness made the subject matter just too uncomfortable? What if it had led him to rush things and take his eye understandably off the ball? Happily, none of these fears was realised.

Kit is in his late teens and a compulsive-obsessive with more than a touch of Asperger’s syndrome encapsulated by rituals. To dissolve sugar in his tea he stirs alternately clockwise and anti-clockwise in diminishing numbers of turns; he takes a walk round the garden using a fixed (prime) number of steps, 457 to be precise, up to the wall separating the property from the quarry behind, where there is a convenient step to allow it to be viewed, then back round again.

Kit has been brought up by his father Guy and does not know who his mother is. Guy, though only in his forties, is suffering from cancer and all but bed-ridden. He calls his growths “‘Rupert’, an idea he says he got from the dead playwright Harold Pinter.”* The pair live penuriously in a decaying house and Kit is now effectively in charge of the housekeeping – and Guy.

In the early 90s Guy was one of a group of friends on the local University Media Studies course. While studying they made a series of films trying out or parodying various styles. These friends have all gone their various ways in the intervening years but kept in touch. Now they are gathering together again for the weekend as it may be the last time they can do so before Guy’s cancer kills him.

The other focus of the meeting is to seek a tape, lost somewhere in the house, of one of their films. A tape which contains scenes potentially embarrassing to their adult selves or their employers. This quest gives the title of the book its pun.

Having Kit suffer from Asperger’s is a clever move on Banks’s part as it allows examination of the various ways in which conversations, communication and manipulative behaviours are used in social situations. His closeness to Holly, one of Guy’s circle, gives us a close-up of another of Banks’s strong female characters: yet no-one in this novel is without flaw.

Guy is certainly not going “gentle into that good night.” He has acerbity aplenty, more than enough to prevent him becoming an object of sentimentality.

When Kit reflects that, “Cancer isn’t contagious. You can’t catch it even from your father. It is personalised, your own. Cancer feels like betrayal,” it is tempting to wonder if this is Banks speaking directly to us. But of course everyone’s body betrays them in the end.

This may not be vintage Banks, there is not much of a plot to be sure, but it is a fitting farewell. There is humanity here: if not all of it, enough to be going on with.

(*A pedant believes the playwright who did this was actually Dennis Potter – and also thinks the road named in the book as the M1(M) might be meant to be the A1(M).)

Iain M Banks

It was with great sadness that I heard today of the death of Iain M Banks.

A great hole has been torn in the fabric both of British SF and of Scottish literature.

We can only mourn for the novels he will now be unable to write.

Iain Menzies Banks, 15/02/1954 -€“ 9/06/2013. So it goes.

Bedlam by Christopher Brookmyre

Orbit, 2013, 378p.

Brookmyre’s oeuvre has up to now been the crime/thriller novel, albeit tinged with humour. Bedlam is his first foray into Science Fiction. I came across an as yet unlent copy in my local library so thought, why not?

Medical technology company Neurosphere’s employee Ross Baker, shortly after discovering by chance his girl-friend is pregnant and without talking to her about it, has a new type of brain-scan and wakes up inside a computer game which he quickly recognises as he was an avid gamer in his past. Not long after this he is killed there but immediately “respawns” to start all over again. He soon finds a way out into a series of virtual worlds which are in the process of takeover by an organisation dubbed the Integrity which is citing a phenomenon known as “corruption” to seek by force to keep these worlds forever separate one from another. In these digital adventures Baker adopts his former multiple game-player name of Bedlam. There are, though, occasional chapters set in the “real” world where Baker is/was in conflict with his boss over the rights of digital consciousnesses.

My reservations about stories set within virtual worlds were set out in the third paragraph of my comments on Iain Banks’s Surface Detail. Briefly, if there is no real jeopardy, if there is no danger of death, what threat is there? Beyond tedium of course.

Unfortunately most of Bedlam is set within the virtual worlds and as such is seriously unbalanced. I could not suspend my disbelief and found myself longing for the “real” world. In this regard the pregnancy element is a rather transparent way to try to enlist our sympathies with the digitally trapped Baker. Moreover Brookmyre’s style at times jars badly with the scenario. SF and humour are notoriously ill-matched bedfellows. A successful amalgam of the two is very difficult to achieve. Brookmyre has made little or no concession to the peculiar demands of writing SF and has adopted a similar tone to that in his thrillers. There were also signs of the book being pitched towards the US market (tic-tac-toe, medieval, asshole.)

Brookmyre’s typical readers may enjoy the virtual scenes – or not – but as SF Bedlam is perfunctory at best. Perhaps gamers will take to it.

Banks and Israel

Also in Saturday’s Guardian was an article by Iain Banks in which he laid out his reasons for not having his books published in Israel.

His argument boils down to the fact the point that any mistreatment of anyone, anywhere, diminishes us all. Not an argument with which a right-winger is likely to have much truck.

Iain (M) Banks

I’ve been out and about all day and was shocked and saddened to hear on the car radio that Iain Banks is suffering from terminal cancer.

I’ve only met Iain a few times but he was always unfailingly polite and good company, not to mention supportive.

Though it seems there is one more novel to come he will be much missed in the UK SF community and the wider literary world.

Long time readers may remember my post where I said it was Iain’s first SF novel Consider Phlebas that demonstrated that being Scottish was no longer a barrier to having SF published and as a result he represented something of a role model for me.

My thoughts are with him and his loved ones.

The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M Banks

Orbit, 2012, 519p.

The Gzilt are of an age with the Culture, were part of the negotiations involved with its founding but declined to join and went their own way. Now they are set to Sublime from the Real – to become Enfolded into a disembodied sort of afterlife from which it is possible to return but few (except an odd AI) do. Gzilt citizens carry, not a watch, but a time-to, counting down the days to this event. Each chapter of The Hydrogen Sonata is subheaded by a letter S followed by a minus sign and number indicating the time left to the Subliming.

The Gzilt religion is based on The Book of Truth, left behind by a previous civilization, the Zihdren, who themselves Sublimed before the Gzilt even made it into space. This was reckoned to be the only holy book to be demonstrably true as it had successfully predicted events in the Gzilt’s development. The (extremely thin) plot of The Hydrogen Sonata revolves around doubts as to the Book’s genuineness and the knowledge of it that an extremely long-lived and reclusive individual may or may not have. This is carried out against a backdrop of petty but lethal squabbling over the material legacy the Gzilt will leave and immature political manœuvring.

Despite the high body count and mayhem Banks is mostly playing this for laughs, as is evidenced by the verbal exchanges between the Culture ships.

I was predisposed to disliking this novel from page one when gases appeared spelled as “gasses” (this also occurred twice more in the following two pages.) Later there was a “miniscule,” a “euthenise”) and instead of piggybacks (or pick-a-backs) “pickup-backs.”
I did read on, as Banks does have a facility for telling story. But this is wispy stuff.

And The Hydrogen Sonata of the title?

It’s a piece of music written for “an instrument yet to be invented” – which of course by the time of the book’s setting has been – the Antagonistic Undecagonstring; a device which not only requires its player to have four arms but also to sit inside it. The word undecagonstring is a spectacularly ugly construction. Since the device is also of a certain shape I suppose eleven-string – as in six-string, twelve-string – would be too limited, though.

Stonemouth by Iain Banks

Little, Brown, 2012, 357 p.

Stonemouth cover

Stewart Gilmour returns to his hometown, Stonemouth, somewhere in North East Scotland, to attend a funeral after a five year absence occasioned by two-timing his fiancé, Ellie, the daughter of a prominent local crime boss. The tone is set from the first as he awaits a hard man on the parapet of the suspension bridge that looms large over the town to check his reappearance will not be too unwelcome. The subsequent resumption of old friendships and acquaintances reads true – especially with Gilmour’s once best friend Ferg – as does the evocation of the claustrophobia of life in small to medium sized towns but perhaps less convincing are the threads where Gilmour seeks to unravel the circumstances surrounding the revelation of his dalliance with the “delightful Anjelica” which caused him to flee to London five years before and the fall from the bridge of Ellie’s brother which took place in the interim.

The ongoing narrative is structured over the weekend leading up to the funeral but is interspersed with Gilmour’s memories of earlier times. At one point he reflects on the delights or otherwise of the Scottish wedding reception, with its exhausting and interminable Scottish Country Dances (though the narrative renders the exuberant vocalisation that never fails to accompany these as “yee-hoooch” when it’s actually more like “hee-yeugh.”) There is also a musing on the process by which the world came to be dominated by the values of money and big business and a critique on the sort of selfishness advocated by Ayn Rand.

Though there are moments of light-heartedness and a couple of good jokes the sense of menace is never far away and the story unrolls steadily towards the violent dénouement demanded by the set up and treatment. And it is, after all, a Banks novel: a fact of which the reader is always conscious. Echoes of The Crow Road, Complicity, Whit and The Steep Approach to Garbadale are never far away. And Banks did allow one of his characters to say, “Amn’t I?” (Hurray.)

Stonemouth is accomplished and very readable. Most of the characters (hard men and gangsters apart) are engaging, if sometimes annoying, and pleasingly complex.

Surface Detail by Iain M Banks

Orbit, 2010, 627p.

I had a horrible notion from the title that we might be treated to the adventures of a landing party in the Star Trek sense – a surface detail – but thankfully Banks eschews that angle, instead the metaphor is literalised.

As a mark of her indenture, the Sichultian, Lededje Y’Breq, is an Intagliate; tattooed – not just inked but imprinted so thoroughly that the marking carries right on down to the cellular level. On the latest of her escape bids she bites the tip of her master’s nose off and, enraged, he kills her. But without either’s knowledge she has been implanted with a Culture neural lace and her consciousness is translated thousands of light-years to a Culture ship where she is revented into a new body. One part of the novel follows Lededje as she is transported back across the galaxy to confront her erstwhile master, Joiler Veppers, who is also given a narrative strand of his own. Other viewpoint characters are Yime Nsokyi, a member of the Culture organisation known as Quietus, Vatueil, who has a series of military adventures in a virtual war between the supporters and antagonists of the afterlives known as Hells, and Prin and Chay, who enter a Hell to gain evidence to campaign against its use.

The last three of these narratives are mostly set within virtual environments – though Prin does escape his Hell and bears witness against it in the Real. I hesitate to call this business of the Hells nonsense but it makes these strands inherently problematic. At first they appear gratuitous, there merely to provide a dose of mayhem and gore. Yes, entities within virtualities may suffer – even in the case of Hells continuing beyond “death” there as the torment never ceases since they are reincarnated instantly – but if they are not real characters why should we invest our sympathy in them; why should we care? (Agreed, none of the characters in a novel are really real, but having them as explicitly virtual does stretch the bounds of suspension of disbelief and of empathy too far, to my mind. If there are no lessons for the real world – and how can there be? The environments described are not real within the narrative – why, exactly, are we reading? Consider the unsatisfactory nature of a story which is revealed to be all a dream. Isn’t a simulation only an upgraded class of dream?)

A further niggle is that there might actually be two books here. There are certainly two main plots which are linked through Joiler Veppers. Continuity suffers as a result. Neither story arc builds up enough momentum before dissipating. Either might have made a more compact 300 pager instead of this one’s 600 pages – which, though, does have lovely end papers in a fractal design.

Banks, however, ties all the threads together plus throws in the usual space battles and grand set pieces along the way. However, a certain lightness of touch at times, a casual irreverence, suggests he might actually be sending up this whole Space Opera lark.

Minor quibbles. Lead cannot be amphoteric though its oxide(s) may. The density of an element is not related to its atomic number. Contrary to what Banks states, gold will sink in mercury rather than float, whereas lead will float, not sink – this would be the case no matter what planet you are on. We also have proofreading errors such as (three times) pixilation – the act of becoming confused or drunk – for pixelation – image blurring – though the latter is employed once; and there is a miniscule.

There is more than enough in Surface Detail though, I would have thought, to satisfy the adherents of Space Opera. And apart from the virtual Hells I was entertained, in particular by the Lededje sequences.

British SF Masterworks?

Over on his blog a week or so ago Ian Sales has with some help come up with a list of fifty British SF Masterworks.

The list is below. It has only one book (or series) per author and a “completely arbitrary cut off date of 1995” I suppose on the grounds that anything younger can not yet be called a masterwork.

It’s an interesting set of choices.

The ones in bold I have read.

1 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
2 The War of the Worlds, HG Wells (1897)
3 Last And First Men, Olaf Stapledon (1930)
4 Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (1932)
5 Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell (1949)
6 The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (1951)
7 The Death of Grass, John Christopher (1956)

8 No Man Friday, Rex Gordon (1956)
9 On The Beach, Nevil Shute (1957)
10 A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (1962)
11 The Drowned World, JG Ballard (1962)
12 Memoirs of a Spacewoman, Naomi Mitchison (1962)

13 A Man of Double Deed, Leonard Daventry (1965)
14 The Time Before This, Nicholas Monsarrat (1966)
15 A Far Sunset, Edmund Cooper (1967)
16 The Revolt of Aphrodite [Tunc and Nunquam ], Lawrence Durrell (1968 – 1970)
17 Pavane, Keith Roberts (1968)
18 Stand On Zanzibar, John Brunner (1968)
19 Behold The Man, Michael Moorcock (1969)
20 Ninety-Eight Point Four, Christopher Hodder-Williams (1969)

21 Junk Day, Arthur Sellings (1970)
22 The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, DG Compton (1973)
23 Rendezvous With Rama, Arthur C Clarke (1973)
24 Collision with Chronos, Barrington Bayley (1973)
25 Inverted World, Christopher Priest (1974)
26 The Centauri Device, M John Harrison (1974)

27 The Memoirs of a Survivor, Doris Lessing (1974)
28 Hello Summer, Goodbye, Michael G Coney (1975)
29 Orbitsville [Orbitsville, Orbitsville Departure, Orbitsville Judgement], Bob Shaw (1975 – 1990)
30 The Alteration, Kingsley Amis (1976)
31 The White Bird of Kinship [The Road to Corlay, A Dream of Kinship, A Tapestry of Time], Richard Cowper (1978 – 1982)
32 SS-GB, Len Deighton (1978)
33 Where Time Winds Blow, Robert Holdstock (1981)

34 The Silver Metal Lover, Tanith Lee (1981)
35 Helliconia, Brian W Aldiss (1982 – 1985)
35 Orthe, Mary Gentle (1983 – 1987)
36 Chekhov’s Journey, Ian Watson (1983)

37 A Maggot, John Fowles (1985)
38 Queen of the States, Josephine Saxton (1986)
39 Wraeththu Chronicles [The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit, The Bewitchments of Love and Hate, The Fulfilments of Fate and Desire], Storm Constantine (1987 – 1989)
40 Kairos, Gwyneth Jones (1988)
41 The Empire of Fear, Brian Stableford (1988)
42 Desolation Road, Ian McDonald (1988)
43 Take Back Plenty, Colin Greenland (1990)

44 Wulfsyarn, Phillip Mann (1990)
47 Use of Weapons, Iain M Banks (1990)
48 Vurt, Jeff Noon (1993)

49 Ammonite, Nicola Griffith (1993)
50 The Time Ships, Stephen Baxter (1995)

I’m sure I haven’t read Frankenstein in the original. I have however read Brian Aldiss’s Frankenstein Unbound but of course he’s in the list for the Helliconia trilogy.

I read Doris Lessing’s Shikasta soon after publication and could not get to grips with it at all. It seemed to me like the classic case of a mainstream writer attempting SF and not bringing it off. Among other things it was too didactic, too preachy, totally unengaging. As a consequence I did not persevere with her SF output; nor indeed the remainder of her oeuvre.

I’m not sure of A Man of Double Deed at no 13 nor A Far Sunset (15). I may have read these out of the library when I was a young thing.

One point of interest. The only two Scottish writers in the list seem to be Naomi Mitchison, for a book published in 1962, and Iain M Banks, 1990. (See my post on the dearth of Scottish SF till extremely recently.) Mitchison was of course more renowned for her non-SF.

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