Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail (2010)

Or: The One About the Hells. Well, I reviewed this once before (in, as they say in the House of Commons, Another Place); so re-reading it, perhaps a little too rapidly, was in part a process of seeing whether my earlier reaction still held water.  On balance I'd say the book is a little better than my initial reaction prompted. I'll draw out two points from my earlier review, and then go to GENERAL THOUGHTS ON THE CULTURE 2; but before I do I'll pause to say that, sensitised to the rubbishness of Banks's SFnal naming by reading The Hydrogen Sonata, I was more struck this time through Surface Detail by said rubbishry. One main character, initially a chattel slave, is called Y'breq. It occurred to me that, should she join a Revolutionary Socialist Party (as all should who seek to struggle against slavery in its manifold forms) she would be Red Y'breq. After I had that thought I found it harder to take her seriously as a character.

Anyhoo: here's what we're dealing with.

The novel's main premise is that with the invention both of completely immersive virtual realities and the uploading thereunto of the consciousnesses of the recently dead, some societies have taken to uploading their dead into virtual heavens and—more to the point—hells. These latter are the occasion of humanitarian outrage in some quarters; and indeed a war is being fought (virtually) between the pro- and anti-Hell camps. The anti-Hell camp is losing, and feels so strong a moral repugnance concerning these hells that it is ready to bring the war into the Real, aiming to destroy the ‘substrates’—the hard drives, in effect, upon which the virtualities are being run. The Culture is notionally neutral in this war, but it’s obvious where its sympathies lie ... The Boschian hell that Banks describes has its cruel ingenuities, both practical (waterwheels powered by the blood of the flayed) and moral (an anti-Hell soul is incarnated as a demon and allowed to kill—which is to say, delete, remove from their suffering—one soul per day, out of hell’s billions; although each time she does she takes on a fraction of her victim’s pain).

Re-reading this, I found myself more impressed than I was first-time round, both by the coolness of this conceit, and by the horrible ingenuity Banks brings to the creation of his hells. It is limited to somatic horrors, which hobbles it somewhat (what I mean is: there's nothing existential about the sufferings in these hells--the medieval theologians used to insist that the greatest punishment endured by condemned Christian souls was the knowledge of the withdrawal of the love of God; and there's nothing like that here). But it draws the reader in; we can't help feeling the Culture's outrage.

In my 2011 review I said two main things. One had to do with the texture of the novel.

Surface Detail struck me as a novel that is lengthily intricate without being in any sense complex. It is necessarily 'about' the largest questions—life and death, punishment and atonement, cruelty and kindness—but churns through a great deal of business without ever saying anything particularly worthwhile about any of that.

This, I think, still holds; and speaks to something about later Banks more generally. There are levels of intricacy I missed on a first reading (it seems that Vatueil, a soldier fighting in the Hell/Antihell wars, is actually the character Zakalwe from Use of Weapons; although I'm not sure I see what this adds to the larger picture); but there is no greater depth to the picture. Banks can't put himself in the position of somebody who would approve of souls going to Hell, and that skews the moral dynamic of the novel. Veppers, the villain, is a 21st-century superwealthy investment-quadtrilliobillionaire without any human depth or resonance at all: he might as well have worn a black cape, twiddled his tache and cackled maniacally for all I believed in him.

My second point, in that original review, had to do with the book's rapiness; and on this a re-read makes me think I over-reacted.

If I had to pick one word to describe Surface Detail it would be: rapey. To be a little more exact, it isn’t wholly rapey, but it’s a bit rapey, and that’s not a good thing. A main narrative strand concerns the can-do action-heroine Lededje, enslaved and repeatedly raped by a smooth-talking villainous Steve Jobs called Veppers. At the beginning of the novel Lededje, trying to escape Veppers, is captured by his staff. As he taunts her, she breaks free and bites the end of his nose off, enraging him so much that he stabs her to death. But she is resurrected by a bit of Culture-tech handwaving, and returns to wreak her revenge. Veppers' rape and murder of Lededje is the way Banks focalises his more systematic, corporate, super-wealthy Evil. Rape, you see, is wrong; and Banks underlines this point by building his Hell around it. This is what happens to a key character, Chay by name:

They took turns raping her while they discussed what to do to make her really suffer. In Hell, the seed of demons burned like acid and generally brought with it parasites, worms, gangrene and tumours, as well as the possibility of the conception of something that would eat its way out when the time came to be born. That conception could equally well take place in a male; a womb was not required and the demons were not fussy. [280]

Because, evidently, vanilla rape is not nasty enough for our purposes. There’s a narrative offhandedness to this which doesn’t sit well (“I’ll make sure they tell her it’s all your fault when they’re fucking her to death, a hundred at a time...” [446])

On a first read I found the use of rape as an easy correlative for 'Horribleness' ('the world's a horrible place...') underexamined and facile. And I still think that, to a certain extent. But on a re-read I found more nuance to it that I previously had. Demeisen (avatar of the Culture Ship Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints) more obviously dubious, and his sadism less endorsed. And the way the novel trips over the John Stuart Mill-ish foundation of Culture ethics (freedom means the freedom to do whatever you like except interfere with another's freedom) struck me as deliberate rather than unintentional. That is to say: the perfect Utopia, lacking conflict and therefore dramatic tension, is a storyless place; so Banks is typically drawn to non-Culture locales, where there are still Villains, and horribleness, and the story of striving against villains and horribleness can be formulated. Hence his focus is so often his own CIA:

Banks is less interested in definitions of rape predicated upon consent. Indeed, the whole drift of this, as of other Culture novels, is that the John Stuart Mill liberalism as socially consensual of the Culture’s official ethos just doesn’t cut it in the nasty, nasty place the galaxy truly is. Hence we need the Culture black-ops, the heroised Special Circumstances, who, having identified bad guys to their own satisfation, treat their ‘consent’ with gung-ho contempt. No, rape in this novel isn't about consent; it's about something sexually nasty happening to somebody you like. When something sexually nasty happens to somebody you don’t care about it's funny. And when you’ve established that somebody is a bad guy, then he's fair game for any number of horridnesses, as the nasty Veppers finds out at the end of the book, physically paralysed by a Culture ship, kneeling before his victim and tortured to death (‘he had never known such pain, never guessed that anything could hurt so much’).

On a first read I thought this jejune. Now I'm ready to give Banks more of the doubt-benefit. This, I think, is what Surface Detail is about: finding test cases that push the Federationesque Prime Directive supposedly governing Culture foreign policy to the limit.

The good thing about having previously published my review is that it enables me to quote from the, often, really insightful things people said in comments. Chris D makes an important point:

My main problem with the book was one of believability; specifically, the rubbish characterisation of the aliens. Banks can do really good aliens sometimes – like the Affront, or the Idirans or the Dwellers – but often does a really half-arsed job. The Pavuleans (sp?) in Surface Details reminded me of the Chelgrians from Look to Windward, in that they speak, act, and think like humans, and have cultures that socially, spiritually, and culturally resemble humans (and specifically, 21st century Western European humans), but look like double-trunked elephants or five-legged fucking dogs or something, and that never really sat easily with me. I mean, the Pavuleans appear to have TV shows, and railways, and a media that seems uncannily like ours, and they have a suspiciously Judaeo-Christian-seeming hell. The way they interact with each other made me picture them as being human, which gets thrown out of kilter every so often by jarring references to trunks or hind legs. I just couldn’t picture them as aliens; Banks should have made them pan-human (like a lot of the species in the Culture books), rather than weird elephant things.

This is quite right, I think; and leads to a larger point, which I start to discuss below. I also can't pass up the chance to quote from the estimable, 'Where's Her Hugo?' Abigail Nussbaum, who notes

the way Banks uses crimes like rape as buzzwords to justify his characters' own immoral behavior in response. If Surface Detail were in any meaningful way about rape, you'd expect a victim of it like Lededje to react very strongly - much more strongly than she does in the book - to Demeisen's performance. That she doesn't - and that her driving trauma is rooted more in having been murdered than raped - is a strong indication that rape is being used as little more than an intensifier of the bad guys' badness.

True, I think. It's as if Banks is, on some level, thinking: 'yes, I'm a feminist, I'm on the side of women, I write strong women; and so the rules of dramatic conception require that I structure my novels around the most horrible thing that can happen to a woman ... and the most horrible thing that can happen to a woman is clearly: being raped by a man.' But this (to state the obvious) is still to position 'women' primarily in relation to male sexual desire in the first instance. It fails a kind of grisly, more violent version of the Bechdel test. (I should add: 'DC' disagrees with my assessment here -- 'While a pretty fair statement of a genuine and re-occuring problem in genre fiction, and possibly also a legitimate criticism of Banks in some instances, this is evidently false when applied straightforwardly to SD. The most horrible thing that can happen to a woman in SD is that she’s murdered (as Abigail says above: ‘her driving trauma is rooted more in having been murdered than raped’ Which seems reasonable enough to me). Lededje is, as it happens, murdered by a man who has raped her repeatedly, but he has also violated her in pretty much every other conceivable way, right down to engraving his name in her DNA, and the thing that drives her, that drives the plot and that drives any thematic concerns the book has is loss of life, not sexual violation (and yes, I agree that the narrative necessity of making death impermanent complicates the thematic intent, but that’s a different issue). Moreover, I think it is pretty clear throughout that Banks intends rape as one more example of the abuse of power - which is to say that one of the ways that baddy Banks’ characters abuse other Banks’ characters over whom they have - often culturally sanctioned - power is by raping them. This is as true of the warship raping the volunteer avatar as it is of Veppers raping Lededje or the demons raping lost souls.' Fair points.)


GENERAL THOUGHTS ON THE CULTURE 2

Veppers, the villain here, is super-super-wealthy. This makes him evil, because it is the Super Super Wealthy (the bankers and corporate financiers) who are responsible for all out current woes, it seems. And I'm not about to use this blog to stand up for the super-rich. Mr Burns and his friends can look out for himself. But! But ...

The Culture is a post-Scarcity society. This fact is an essential part of its utopia-ocity. But one observation we can make about the novels is that they trope ‘post-scarcity’ in terms of ‘affluence’. This is a—thing. Affluence means having a lot more money than the median. Post-Scarcity means living beyond money altogether. Now, I can posit two explanations for the way Banks consistently figures the latter in terms of the former. One is that this is part-and-parcel of the overall textual strategy of the Culture novels: these (as per Chris D's comment, above) are books that write about almost unimaginably different alien species and technologies by tacitly translating them into the sorts of terms ‘we’ can understand. It could be argued that all SF does this, to one degree or another: Banks’s aliens sound like late-20th-century Caledonian lefty intellectuals, hipsters and geeks not because aliens would ‘actually’ talk like that (what would ‘actually’ even mean, in this context?), but because this is the literary convention into which we buy. If the lion could speak we would not be able to understand him; and this goes double for the insectoid Zxach’pblm. Accordingly, only a party-pooper would niggle and kvetch—Banks is doing the necessary in making his stories readable. Let’s call this Hypothesis A.

Niggle and Kvetch. A pair of Jewish crime fighters, battling wrongdoing in the city, already!

Not to get distracted.

Hypothesis B would go something like this: Banks has enjoyed prolonged commercial success with his writing—many bestsellers, movies and TV made from his books and so on. He was a regular guy; then he became a wealthy one (and, I should add: good luck to him). He can write affluence from first hand. What is it that the inhabitants of the Culture do in their post-Scarcity utopia? Well: they do a lot of travelling, seeing the sights. They go to a lot of elegant parties—like the one at the beginning of Look to Windward. They do arty and cultural stuff: learning to play monstrously complex musical instruments and so on. They play with high-tech toys and gadgets. They go sailing (in space). They eat and drink fine fare. Here, from The Hydrogen Sonata, Culture special ops are tracking an individual called ‘Yutten Turse’.

“Get some screen of him.” … The first item was a still image of a man in late middle-age, wearing a big silly grin, a loud shirt and a grass hat … On the sub-screen, some moving footage followed: the man seemed to get slightly lost in the transit lounge, apparently unsure which way to go, until he left, led by a modest amount of luggage on a helpful float-trolley. [HS, 217]

The luggage trolley can float; and the screen Security are observing is 3D, but otherwise this could be a description of any well-travelled 21st-century wealthy individual—say, a successful author, whose many invitations to cons and festivals necessitate him spending many hours in departure and arrival lounges. The danger, here, is that the novels tacitly position ‘utopia’ as ‘having lots of money in a scarcity-based economy’, rather than actually thinking through what transvaluing all the values of scarcity might entail.

On the other hand ‘having more money than I presently do’ is more easily imagined by the average reader (hey, I’m an average reader; and I’d like to have a bit more money, please) than asking him/her to transvaluate all her/his values. It brings us back to Hypothesis A.

One problem I have with Hypothesis A is that it isn’t very consistently applied. In an earlier review I suggested, with a tentativeness indicative of my extraordinary critical delicacy, that Banks’s names are a bit crap. Some people (well; one person) suggested this was unfair: upset-scrabble-board names are part of the fun of SF. Maybe so. But there’s something partial in the logic: ‘you can’t expect these characters to be called Gavin and Harriet! They’re aliens for heavens sake!’ Having your characters perform their narrative functions exactly like Gavin and Harriet but calling them Laksjd-Bubblzap and N’Hhgbtmyuji only takes us so far into the territory of estrangement. It’s like the gag about our current fascination with Grimdark Fantasy—‘I’ve created a world where green unicorns fly through the sky and Potato Waffles can speak! Also women are raped and oppressed—I’M SORRY, THAT’S JUST THE WAY THINGS WERE, BACK THEN.’ The selectivity says more about authors and readers individual states of mind than it does about the ostensible imagined world.