Iain M. Banks, Excession (1996)

Or the one about the Outside Context Event. Which is to say: a big black sphere appears from nowhere, baffling the greatest minds in the culture because it cannot be penetrated or scanned. Is this a Culture-ending incursion from some unimaginable ultradimension? Or the opportunity to step-up knowledge and power galaxy-wide? Or what is it? The weakness here is that anybody who has read Abbott’s Flatland will clock what the ‘excession’ is right at the beginning (Banks spells it out on p.269 of this 400-page text), which may take the wind out of the sails of the ‘OMG what is it?’ narrative-tension sloop.

Anyhow. My cumbersome reversing (beep! beep! beep!) through the Culture novels brings me to Excession. This in turn means I travel back, in my personal Memory palace, to the time when I read every Banks novel, skiffy or litffy, as soon as it came out: back into the 1990s. Actually Excession is the last Culture novel I read with more-or-less uncomplicated pleasure; although my memory is of some vague dissatisfactions here and there—I think the last M. Banks I read with perfectly unclouded delight was Feersum Endjinn. But re-reading this one was a joy. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Some of that has to do with the fact that a lack of ‘OMG what is it?’ tension is, of course, less of an issue second time round. Some of it has to do with the fact that, thank Dame Jesus Providench, I’m not living in 1996 any more. God, I was miserable back then. But much of it has to do with the fluidly confident manner in which Banks tells this particular story. It reads as work by a writer completely at ease with his instrument; charming and witty and clever. Really, read the right way (that is, after the manner of the exit groove on Sergeant Pepper) Banks just gets better and better.

Dame Jesus Pro—wait, who?

*Clears throat*. Anyway.

That I enjoyed my re-read so much does not blind me to the various places Excession falls away from its own What-It-Could-Have-Been. One main problem, I think, is the Abbot’s-Flatland obviousness about the excession itself; but maybe that’s just me. Harder to shake is the overall lack of menace about the big dark sphere. The appearance of an Outside Context Problem causes all the Culture Minds who become aware of it in pages 1-to-200 to scurry around in a headless-chicken panic. Why? Because 'an OUtside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop'[71].

The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

This is pleasantly wittily put; but at no point in the novel does the reader ever really feel like the Culture is under threat from the giant eight-ball in space. It plays as inscrutable, but not worryingly so (the 'Aggressive Hegemonising Swarm Objects, mentioned but not actually included in the story, sound a lot scarier). ‘Look,’ says a ship at one point, ‘the damned Excession hasn’t done anything yet. All this nuisance is caused by everybody’s reaction to it’ [212]. Quite. The Superman that is The Culture lacks his kryptonite in this tale, and without it the story will tend to dawdle. In its place Banks gives us the Affront, a heartily sadistic species of (unless I misread) tentacle gasbags with a beak at each end, who treat other species with jolly-seeming contempt, and are happiest exploiting, oppressing, killing and generally trampling on others. Banks handles the Affront as, basically, huntin-fishin-shootin English aristocrats—many of whom of course, historically, were also gasbags with a beak at each end. I was put in mind of Matthew Arnold, who in Culture and Anarchy dubs the upper classes ‘Barbarians’ (as opposed to the middle class 'Philistines' and the working class 'Populace') because of their preference for savage amusements like running foxes to death over cultured pursuits like reading Sophocles and contemplating a Raphael canvas. The Affront are like that. But they are not what the Idirans are in Consider Phlebas, namely antagonists that you believe could destroy the Culture, if things went their way. Instead we, as readers, rather look down on the Affront as boisterous and cruel in a petty way; and we never doubt that the Culture could swat them very easily if they chose to. The strength of the Phlebas narrative was not just the the Idirans were a genuinely formidable foe, of course; it was that Banks took the trouble to give them an ethos and a ground for their antagonism to Culture life with which the reader could sympathise. He helped himself by focalising the story through a Culturephobic main character. There’s nothing like that here, though.

When Orson Welles died I remember a (God I'm old) Not The Nine O’Clock News skit in which a news reporter broke the story that Welles had actually lived his career backwards, dabbling with various projects, TV trivia and gathering funds via sherry commercials, before making his flawed Shakesperian movies, honing his craft on noir like Touch of Evil and finally bringing a lifetime’s expertise together to make The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane. I’m getting a whiff of that in my Banks re-read. Maybe when I get to it Consider Phlebas won’t be as good as I remember it; but it will at least have a proper antagonist.

Still, to repeat myself: Excession is great fun, a good Culture novel, and I’m very glad I revisited it. There are a few false steps. For complicated plotty reasons the Culture recruit a spoilt Miley Cyrus-type young girl; and her scenes strike me tonally and otherwise, well, lame. (to the drone who escorts her away from a dance at which ‘a lovely young man’ had been admiring her legs, we get a lot of ‘he was utterly, utterly gorgeous, how could you just drag me away like that … he was gorgeous …. and he liked my legs … gorgeous’ [102]). But there are lots of nifty bits too: a Tier-world that looks forward to Matter, a clever drone who, faced with inevitable extinction at the hands of an Affront warship, manages to blow itself up in such a way as to leave a message on the big ship’s hull in shrapnel. And above all it has lots of Minds chatting to one another.

Indeed Culture Minds and Ships chatting amongst themselves fill a large portion of the pageage here (‘pageage’? Is that even a word?). I think I’m tuning into what makes these exchanges so readable. They’re rarely Oscar Wilde sharp or witty; and they rarely articulate profundities, or even move the plot along. But somehow Banks makes the in-group jibber-jabber involving; I suppose because the In Plain View is that we are Minds. We zip about the galaxy (in our imaginations, of course; but still!); we bestride the bottle-cosmos of SF paperbacks like colossi; we’re smart and like to look down on the non-initiates, particularly if they’re ignorant or bigoted or both. There’s a reason Excession is such a fan favourite: it’s the first Culture novel really to indulge this fanwish. And it works surprisingly well.

I was, I suppose, struck by the tone of the Mind’s interactions. It’s hardly an original observation to note that they read like a series of geek messageboard conversations; but they also read as male. Minds are not gendered in the universe of the Culture, of course; but nonetheless.

Slip off the academic gown and on with the antic pants!
∞
I thank you for your advice …
And I still think you should let it in with us. It almost certainly now suspects you are part of the conspiracy.
∞
I have an image to maintain! And I would point out that we are very much in the dark; we are not yet sure there is a conspiracy beyond the kind of normal outsmarting, outcliqueing nonsense in which all of us indulge form time to time. [161]

It’s not the cliqueing as such (for that describes girls as well as boys) as the competitive cliqueing that makes me visualise clever boys here rather than asexual Minds (‘I’m going for a record!’ one of them says at one point). Maybe that’s my failing. Lots of little cues (‘tee hee!’; ‘how are things in the realm of our three-legged friends?’; ‘Gulp!’) remind me of the sort of office wag who prefers ‘hail fellow well met!’ to ‘hello’ because he thinks it makes him more colourful. It doesn’t, of course; it just makes him sound like a berk. But people are entitled to be berks if they want to. The problem is that berks feel lonely inside, they feel marginalised, and there is (I say this without snark of any kind) a deep human satisfaction, related to the universal needs of social animals such as homo sapiens, to find a group that accepts them for who they are, colourful bow-ties, neckbeards, fondness for real ale and detailed knowledge of all the names of both GCU and GSV Culture ships and all. As the man once said: I am human and I need to be loved, just like everybody else does.

The novel even acknowledges one of the problems in the way the Minds are configured, imaginatively speaking. They are staggering, godlike intelligences for whom second pass like months do to us. How would they not be driven to literal insanity by the boredom of contemplating human and quasi-human politicking? ‘Actually’ they would, of course; but here Banks has the courtesy to wave his hands in the direction of an explanation why they don't: a virtual space where ships like to hang out called ‘The Land of Infinite Fun’ (‘when they weren’t running ships, meddling with alien civilisations or planning the future course of the Culture itself, the Minds existed those fantastic virtual realities, sojourning beyondwards into the multi-dimensioned geographies of their unleashed imaginations’, 140). Which sounds nice.

And talking of sojourning beyondwards, and suchlike uneuphonious collections of vowels and consonants: the names. The names in Excession are, I’m pleased to report, reliably awful. Whole sentences here are written in Galacto-gibberish ('SPADASSINS DIGLADIATE! ZIFFIDAE AND XEBECS CONTEND!' 257). There’s a species called the Elench, only two letters on the Alphabet Fruit Machine away from Clench, a word it’s not possible to utter without thinking ‘buttocks’. No. I’m being unfair. Their full name is ‘the Zetetic Elench’ (‘Whet ore you heving for elench?’ ‘Me? I’m heving a zetetic elench’). One ship is called Yawning Angel, which is a whole new soporific Doctor Who episode waiting to be made. A main character is called Byr Genar-Hofoen, which struck me as a bit Alien Tesco (‘Byr Genar Hofoen, Get Ganother Hofoen ABSOLUTELY FREE!). He has Troubled Emotional History with a woman called Dajeil Gelian. I’m torn between making two separate jokes about that name and so, like the donkey standing between two equally enticing carrots, I will probably starve to death.



THOUGHTS ABOUT THE CULTURE 5, 6 is it I’VE LOST COUNT

Excession reminds us that the Culture does not torture. It does this by including a scene involving an old Nazi—or, you know, alien equivalent—who in his youth had overseen genocidal slaughter (millions of corpses offered ‘to the insatiable sky-gods of Race and Purity’, 48). A GCU called Grey Area probes his mind to get at the truth of this (such probing is a big no-no in Culture circles) and then spends all night—and many days of subjective time—torturing the old man to death. Because, you know, the Culture does not torture.

He fell through the bed, the single ice-white sheet tore beneath him and tumbled him into a bottomless tank of blood … he died in the cattle truck, after an infinity of agony … he awoke entombed inside a glacier dying of cold. He had been shot through the head but it had only paralysed him. Another endless agony. … he was in the hold of a ship, crammed in with thousands of other people in darkness, surrounded by filth and screams and pain. He was already half dead two days later when the sea valves opened and those still left alive began to drown.

The cleaner found the old retired commandant twisted into a ball a little way short of the apartment’s door the next morning. His hearts had given out. The expression on his face was such that the retirement-home warden almost fainted and had to sit down quickly, but the doctor declared the end had probably been quick. [51-2]

This is Banks in ingenious-cruelty mode, of course, which is part of the reason fans read him; and I’m only repeating myself to say that this mode often rubs uncomfortably up against his larger moral focus of the series—something from which Excession rather unconvincingly tries to distance itself by noting that other Culture Minds call Grey Area Meatfucker because of his unsavoury habits.

In fact I want to make a slightly different point. What this passage represents is a rather narrowly conceived version of ethics as empathy. The logic goes something like this: the way to stop people acting wickedly is to encourage them to empathise with the objects of their wickedness. If the Nazi Commandant really, like, felt for his Jewish and Gypsy prisoners, he wouldn’t have been so nasty to them. Which has some common-sense purchase to it, as an idea; especially where raising children are concerned (‘Dan, you wouldn’t like it if your sister pulled your hair…’ and the like). But there are problems with it, qua Larger Morality, too; and not only the obvious one that it rules out of court the very concept of cruel-to-be-kind (the surgeon cutting the patient’s skin; the harsh but fair criticism that makes the person better in the long run). The problem is the more fundamental one of vantage point. Grey Area’s tacit ethical position is: ‘you caused pain to others and therefore I shall force their pain—all of them, all of it—upon the raw endings of your own nerves and into the innermost sanctum of your own mind’, which carries with it the unspoken correlative ‘obviously, I am causing you pain, but I shall not be applying the same ethical standard to myself. Because you deserve to feel this pain and I do not. Trust me when I say that, Matthew 7:3 notwithstanding, there is no beam in my eye. I'm sure I'd notice if there were.’ This amounts to a claim to moral absolutism, which (I don’t mean to labour the point) is precisely the problem in the first place. Most of ethics really is Turtles-all-the-way-down. The GIs guarding inmates at Guantánamo genuinely don’t think of themselves as Nazi concentration-camp staff, because the people they’re depriving of liberty and putting into stress position and so on are terrorists. They deserve it. The hard thing is to understand that the Nazi Concentration Camp guard felt exactly the same way. You, dear reader, have the opportunity (even if only in your own mind) to punish George W. Bush by sticking him in prison, blasting NiN at top volume into his cell all night, making him adopt stress positions, pissing in his coffee and so on. Do you? More: do you say to yourself: ‘I’ll punish him, but I won’t go quite as far as he did himself with actual detainees…’? As if the moral high ground is a gradient measured in inches.

I dwell on this because The Novel, that mode of art of which Excession is an example, trades in empathy. This is where it comes from: in the eighteenth-century they called it ‘sensibility’ (Austen elegantly satirises the debilitating consequences of too much of this on an impressionable reader in Sense and Sensibility). That thing people criticise nineteenth-century writers like Dickens for—sentimentality—is actually just the same thing. And that’s my problem with this. This mode of (literally) torturous empathy is, precisely, sentimental—an inverted 21st-century sentimentality, but as emotionally manipulative, disingenuous and distorting as thing as plucking the reader's heart strings at Little Nell’s death. Because what’s obvious in terms of the way Excession interpellates us as readers is that we’re obviously not the genocidal ex-camp commandant. We'd never do anything so ghastly as that. Nor are we the barbarian-horrid Affront. We’re a Mind, obviously. Which is fine, and entertaining, and not a wholly ineffective way of dramatizing moral dilemmas (‘genocide is profoundly wrong’ can hardly be said too many times). But it tends to inculcate a mode of self-satisfaction.

In these posts I have, walking backwards for Christmas Culture Novels, often availed myself of the phrase ‘the Culture does not torture’. The referent, in case I need to spell it out, is America. ‘America does not torture’ is what Obama told Congress in 2009. Now, of course, the easy thing to do with such a statement is to call it on its hypocrisy. But I think there’s something more going on. ‘America does not torture’ is a statement about the idea of America; Abu Graib is an example of America interacting practically in the world. The gap between these two things is more than just an index of hypocrisy, or failure (although it is those things); it’s a mark of what Coleridge talks about in his On the Idea of Church and State book: a necessary falling-short that registers the attempt to live by ideals rather than cynical pragmatism. There is merit in doing things this way, Coleridge says—in orienting oneself, that is, by the idea rather than the grubby reality—because only then do we get better as individuals and as a society. A person’s reach, as another poet put it, should exceed their grasp, or what’s a heaven for? This, I think, starts to sidle back in the direction of an apology of Banks’s unsquared circle: authorly/readerly delight in ingenious tortures on the one hand, and genuine authorly/readerly outrage at the large-scale moral horrors of twentieth- and twentieth-century history on the other. That the latter were, and are, mostly iterations of types of the former does not actually invalidate the point.