Sunday, March 7, 2010

The Matter with Banks

TITLE: Matter
AUTHOR: Iain M Banks
PUBLISHER: Orbit

RATING
5/5 “Oxygen”; 4/5 “Dysprosium”; 3/5 “Neon”; 2/5 “Krypton”; 1/5 “Berkelium”
SCORE: 3/5

There’s a popular anecdote about an old woman (or Hindu mystic in some versions) who proclaims the world is a disc supported on the back of a turtle. When challenged on what the turtle is standing on, she famously replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

A similar metaphor plays out in Iain M Banks’ 2008 science fiction novel “Matter”, the seventh in his series set in the “Culture” universe. The central setting and model for Mr Banks’ cosmology is the “shellworld” of Sursamen, an artificial planet made up of a series of increasingly larger, concentric hollow spheres, so that the inhabitants of one level live on the “sky” of the one below. Galactic society, too, operates on the same principle: the inhabitants of Sursamen at the bottom, with progressively more advanced races above them, up to the hyper-tech level of the Culture and their equals. The question, as the title indicates, is whether the universe works the same way—is it turtles all the way, are there levels of existence above us, or is this all there is?

Prince Ferbin, formerly from the eighth level of Sursamen, is certainly hoping there’s a higher power than can help him. Though in his case, he’s thinking something a little more concrete than divine intervention. His father, the king, has been murdered, his younger brother is a hostage, and he is forced to flee his homeworld. He has reason for hope though; his father’s old mentor is a general for Sursamen’s rulers, while his sister Djan is now an agent for the Culture’s dirty-tricks department, known as Special Circumstances. There’s an old-fashioned race against the clock, as he tries to find help and return home before his brother gets bumped off by the usurper.

I’ve long seen Mr Banks as a successor to the literary tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, with a seamless blend of science fiction, humor and a philosophy best summed up in the words of Isaac Asimov: “We’re here to help each other get through this thing—whatever it is”. Those elements are all present and accounted for, but the balance is off. While Mr Banks is normally a dab hand at infusing broad-brush, cartoon-color space opera adventure with his own unsentimental, hard-edged worldview, he muddies the colors a bit on this one.

Much of the novel is taken up with characters moving from place to place without doing very much of anything except ruminating on the nature of the universe. Go-nowhere subplots overload the front end, while the ending feels rushed and compressed almost to the point of unintelligibility. The end result feels hurried and uneven, with little payoff for your efforts to wade through the earlier chapters. The ending is pure Banks, an Othello mix of Shakespearean tragedy and upbeat hopefulness familiar to anyone who had read his earlier Culture novels: “They all died and lived happily ever after”.

That's the bad news. The good news is that this is indeed some of the most inventive fiction out there, and the scope of Mr. Banks' universe-building remains awesome. Every setting is entirely fresh, fascinating in concept and thoughtful in delivery, populated with truly *alien* aliens, and powered by technology of almost giddy inventiveness.

Still, it is hard to recommend Matter to anyone new to Mr. Banks' works. Consider Phlebas also explores our insignificance in the universe, but does so with far more wit and dash and far less navel-gazing, while Use of Weapons is both more inventively structured and more entertainingly written. Both are highly recommended.

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