Nam Sibyllantae Fricativus quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in blogga pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλαντα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: θέλω Ἰαίν M. Bανκς να συνεχίσουν να γράφουν αυτά τα είδη των μυθιστορημάτων.
1
April brought the cruellest news: Iain Banks is not only suffering from cancer, but terminally so. I had been thinking of re-reading his SF for a while. These horrible tidings spurred me on. Accordingly I've been working backwards through the Culture novels, and marking my passage upon this blog. And at last I arrive at the beginning. What is gained, and what lost? Consider this.
Phlebas is not a flawless novel. It is more digressive—and the digressions seem less integral to the story—than I remembered it as being. Still, I re-read the whole thing with great pleasure. It gains something by having the Culture in, as it were, the background; and concentrating on a character actively hostile to the smug, Western, permissive libertarian communists is a canny way of structuring the whole. And the novel gains more than I recalled from its tone: unfussily written, inventive, cool. I’m a heterosexual middle-aged white man; the last person in the world to be able to talk with any conviction on the subject of ‘cool’. But if I cast my mind back to 1987, I’d say that’s what made the novel stand out. It is old-fashioned space opera; it deploys a series of clichés; it mixes-up its linear narrative only with digressions of various stripes of random. And yet: it is tonally, and thematically, something really quite striking. I think this has something to do with its unsentimental, yet oddly warm-hearted apprehension of failure and futility as at the core of the space-operatic dream. Not a lantern-jawed space hero overcoming all odds, as in the American pulp tradition; not the million-to-one shot that somehow comes off anyway; but a character struggling with a much less tractable narrative idiom. A cosmos in which things tend not to work out; in which things keep going wrong. In which our best efforts lead not to Captain-Kirk-style success, but to failure. This is, it seems to me, a better way of imagining the universe. It is to do with what is, on the largest scale, our insignificance; our fragility; our dispensability. Banks is never angst-y or teenage about this; and never self-pitying; but it is an integral part of his larger vision. The best way of apprehending this state of affairs, he says, is with humour; with a touch of wit, with grace. We’re doomed; make the best of it. You! hyperspace lecteur!—mon simulacrum,—mon frère!
2.
Plot. The Idiran Empire consider the Culture, and especially their artificial Minds, to be abominations in the eyes of their exacting God. Accordingly they are making war upon them. This has forced the Culture to turn themselves from hippies to hawks. So far, so standard space opera: hyperspatial warships battering one another across the Galactic Somme. Phlebas tells one story in this larger narrative (the Culture-Idiran war has its own Wikipedia page, if you want to check up on the broad shape of it).
The premise for this novel is, as it were, ‘what if Han Solo signed up for the Empire?’ It’s not quite as pat as that, because Banks has a lot more sympathy for his religious fundamentalist Idirans than Lucas has for his evil English-accents-wearing-Nazi-chic imagined opponents. Banks’s protagonist Borscht-y Horza Gorbuchov has his principles; and indeed, his distrust of machines and preference for living beings, means that whilst he’s prepared to be a mercenary for the Idirans he would never work for the Culture. Beyond that he flown all over the Galaxy and seen a lot of crazy things, but he’s never seen anything that would lead him to believe etc etc.
’Don’t you have a religion?’ Dorolow [an Idiran] asked Horza.‘Changer’ because Horza is a shape-changer, although this changing turns out to be a laborious and infrequent process. He’s is hired by the Idirans to locate and destroy a new-born Culture Mind, hidden somewhere on Schar's World, a Planet of the Dead (a tomb-world left untouched as a warning by its now-Sublimed former inhabitants, the Dra’Azon). The Idirans hire Horza because, as a Changer, he is (for plotty-enably reasons) allowed on the planet. Horza assembles a crew to which the adjective ‘motley’ is just sitting around begging to be used, and they fly off in a spacecraft named (as David Moles reminds me) after an Ian Gillan Band album from 1977. Good to have an image of what the ship looks like, though.
‘Yes,’ he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the main mess-room table. ‘My survival.’
‘So … your religion dies with you. How sad,’ Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass. [99]
The plot approaches this straightforward quest/chase story via a couple of digressions. We start with Horza about to be executed (for murdering and impersonating a member of a non-Culture gerontocracy) in characteristically Banksy Ingeniously Cruel manner—chained in small cell into which all the piss and shit from a large banquet is funnelled, such that the prisoner drowns in this unpleasant matter. He is rescued by the Idirans. The Idiran ship that flies him off is intercepted by the Culture; floating in space Horza is picked up by the Clear Air Turbulence, where asserts his worth by killing one of the mercenary crew. As you do. The crew has a variety of pulpy adventures—attacking a space temple, raiding an abandoned Culture orbital (in a nice touch, a key character dies during this latter outing because they’re too foolish to realise that their anti-gravity harness won’t work in the centrifugally ersatz gravity of the orbital). There’s a nicely grisly run-in with a cannibal cult called the Eaters, who do ingeniously-cruel things with human bones. Eventually, as we know it must, the Clear Air Turbulence makes its way to Schar’s World. They’ve picked up a couple of Culture prisoners, including a female spy called Perosteck Balveda and a snarky drone called Unaha-Closp. That’s Unaha-Closp. One more time: this character’s name is Unaha-Closp.
Anyhoo. After all this faffing around, the last quarter of the novel starts to built real momentum, and actual tension. Our mercenaries run into a team of Idiran warriors, also hunting the Mind. There’s a deal of running around and shooting in corridors, and Banks manages to work in a big train (trains are cool!) to his denouement. Having read Phlebas before I knew that (spoiler) Horza is doomed. I can’t remember if I was aware of this first time round—I think so, since it’s telegraphed in various ways. Foreknowledge adds actual pathos to the whole, however. The novel ends with a series of appendices that fill-us in on the larger war, by way of stressing how almost irrelevant the individual input of the characters of this novel was in the long run. The last line of the novel (before the half-page epilogue, that is) informs us that ‘the Changers were wiped out as a species during the final stages of the war in space’ [467]. So, yes: it doesn’t end well for Horza.
3
The novel opens with two epigraphs, and before we get to the one (from T. S. Eliot) that gives the novel its name, we get a line from the second sura of The Qu’ran: ‘Idolatry is worse than carnage’. This sentiment is, it seems to me, nonsense; but Banks takes the idea seriously. I mean, he rejects it—in this, and especially in the later Culture novels. But he doesn’t reject it out of hand. And it has a deeper resonance. The Idirans are kind-of Muslims, and the novel as whole intervenes into the question of the ethical implications of 'representation' by showing carnage as idolatry. This, after all, is what the novel is about. And I liked the way the Idiran’s religion has a strong streak of Really Sensible about it—for example, they happen to be functionally immortal beings, in a physical sense (extremely strong and durable, although capable of dying). It makes sense from their point of view that immortal bodies would harbour immortal souls, and that the mortal bodies of other galactic species wouldn’t. Who knows: maybe they’re right about that? Unlike the later, linked Look to Windward (about the Chelgrians), Banks does not actively Orientalise the Idirans. And there is pathos in the way Horza’s inevitable fate works its way through.
Horza is a Changer partly for plotty reasons; but also, I think, for reasons of larger theme. He stands for physical biology, rendered literally mutable and adaptable—not across the generations, but embodied in one individual. He is resourceful and determined, and ultimately he is doomed. His hostility towards the Minds of the Culture articulates a suspicion of technology as the serpentine machine in the garden. In other words, Horza is Nature, and the Minds are—I’ve run up against this semantic overspill before during this series of blogposts—Culture. The opposition is developed with enough thematic sensitivity, and without Banks’s thumb being too obviously in the balance, that it works really well.
Is it pretentious, naming a pulp SF novel after a line from Eliot’s Waste Land? Eliot was writing about an exhausted post-war world; Banks about an on-going wartime cosmos. I think the key here is that Banks lights upon the shortest, most lyrically resonant section of The Waste Land, the fourth, as the source for his title. The other sections are variously discursive, jitterishly allusive, even metaphysical. The fate of Eliot’s Phlebas, though, achieves a sudden, piercing beauty. I think this is because he has actually died, where Eliot’s ‘land’ (our land too) is trapped between death and life. The magic is a moment of tone, or affect, and Banks is right to pick it out. Because his novel is not discursive, or jitterishly allusive, or metaphysical—even though it includes many words, and alludes to many of the tropes and traditions of SF, and touches on questions of fate versus free-will, of meaning and purpose. Fundamentally Consider Phlebas is about a certain mood. And it captures that mood brilliantly.
4
Phlebanks Caledonian, thankfully still alive,
Forgot the cry of blogs, and the fat books’ sales
And the profit and loss.
The current internet
Praised his books in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Trufan or not
O you who turn the page and look for sensawunda
Consider Phlebanks, whose work is handsome and tall as any.
5
There’s a fifth section to the poem, of course; ‘What The Thunder Said’. But the thunderous news that glooms over any critical apprehension of this series of SF novels remains Banks’s cancer. It will tend, naturally, to overwhelm anything, praising or critical, smart or snide, I may have to say about his writing. Banks himself has faced the news with a good grace that is both impressively brave and genuinely touching. He has done so publicly, which will help others in similar situations, and which can only demystify the business of dying for a society that still mostly treats the topic as taboo. But, Banks’s amazing good-humour and charm notwithstanding, the fact remains: this is shitty news—of course, much much more so for him and his loved ones, but for everybody else too. Quite apart from anything else, it renders waste the land of criticism of his writing.
Le Prince d'SF à la tour abolie.
Why then Ile blogge you. Horza is mad againe.
Shitty. Shitty. Shitty.
NOTES
Eliot assembled his own notes out of orts and scraps from his writing table, not because he particularly wanted to annotate his poem but because his publisher told him they had blank pages at the end of the book that needed filling. But internet pages exist only if there is text to carry them, and I have written enough 'Notes on the Culture' in these blogposts for now. In a little while I'll do a round-up post. That's enough for now, I think.
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