By way of a personal challenge, I’ve set myself the task of re-reading all of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels in publication order. While there are a couple of non-Culture Banks books I’ve re-read multiple times, most – if not all – Culture novels have been one-time affairs. I enjoyed them all, but never felt compelled to go back to them– until now.
I might post some background/rationale another time – particularly if others pass by and express an interest. For now, be warned: these reviews will 1/ assume prior knowledge of Iain (M) Banks’ Culture series of novels, and perhaps his work more generally 2/ are primarily functioning as personal notes/reference, and may be hopelessly subjective and opinionated, and 3/ related to the above, will almost certainly be spoiler-y.
Let’s start at the beginning: Consider Phlebas, published in 1987.
Consider Phlebas is the first in the series, and it shows. Yet all the important elements of a Culture novel are here.
Ingenious and jaw-dropping settings– yes.
Subtle humour and intricate wordplay– tick.
Minds, drones and smart-talking Special Circumstances operatives– for sure.
Flawed protagonist– oh yes, very much so.
Megastructures, giant spacecraft containing millions of hedonistic pan-humans, underground tunnels, swinging face kicks, savagery, games, cool technology– yes yes and yes.
Also: moral choices, clash of philosophies, and a hefty sliver of but-what-does-it-all-mean melancholy.
The plot is simpler than many of its successors. It’s really just a sequence of linked set pieces; a quest with a motley crew of spacefarers led by a sympathetic bad-guy protagonist, searching for a Mind-macguffin, with laser battles and godlike entities and people running down tunnels screaming at each other. So far, so conventional.
“Conventional” is a criticism that’s often levelled at Consider Phlebas, and I think there’s some truth to it. In many ways, it does rely on established science fictional tropes and plot devices. Unusually, and superficially at least, it does feel like something very like this novel could just about have been written by an author other than Iain Banks (not something that can usually be said of his work). Of course, it was his first science fiction novel, so maybe he felt more limited by genre constraints– by the need to give readers some familiar touchstones to help them into the world(s) of the Culture.
But I don’t think this is the whole story. Writing off Consider Phlebas as an early flaky, half-formed, and overly-conventional effort undersells much of what this book is about and what it does. Coming back to it twenty five years-plus from my first reading, what really strikes me about it is how complete it is as an encapsulation of what the Culture is about— how thoroughly it covers all the themes and preoccupations that are repeated and elaborated on in later Culture novels. Not just the slightly tongue-in-cheek elements described above, but the moral and philosophical foundations too. Early on, we come across a proxy war being fought between a brutal theocratic state and socialist rebel underdogs. (This features a battle taking place in a crystalline temple-pyramid, a wonderfully imaginative and chaotic piece of writing which is basically Iain Banks working through a thought experiment about how a laser gunfight would pan out within a complex multilevel structure formed of various differently-angled transparent surfaces and prisms. The answer: not pretty. There’s another, shorter thought experiment later on: what would happen if someone stepped off a building wearing an anti-gravity device, within a spinning megastructure whose rotation provides only simulated gravity? Answer: also not pretty). Of course, it’s a reflection of the larger Idiran-Culture war that forms the backdrop to the novel, and it’s arguably the same war being fought by different civilisations across multiple settings through all the subsequent novels in the series. And despite the battles and the technology and the fun thought experiments, the novel is shot through with desperate melancholy– a deep sadness and a meditation on the futility of war, which reappears repeatedly throughout the later novels too.
It’s all here, in the very first book. I wonder if this was deliberate. I don’t suppose Banks knew in advance whether his foray into science fiction would be successful. He had already published three literary novels, but there was no guarantee this first dive into the Culture would be followed by more. And at this point he had three draft, unpublished science fiction novels to draw on as source material. If this was going to be his first and last Culture novel, then of course he would try to get as much cool stuff in there as possible, and also say the big things he wanted to say with his science fiction – but he would also try to make it appealing and easy to read, perhaps a bit superficially conventional, in the hope that it would attract readers and allow him to continue to explore these settings and ideas in later books.
If this was his aim in writing Consider Phlebas, it was completely successful. It might not be the best of all the Culture novels, or the most archetypally Culture novel-like of all the Culture novels, but I disagree with those who say it’s somehow lacking or unrepresentative compared to the rest of the series. If anything, the opposite is true. And for this reason I think it also makes a very good entry point to readers new to the Culture.
A final note. In my view, Consider Phlebas has something lacking from many of its successor Culture novels: equipoise. There is genuine uncertainty of outcome; a real sense in much of the book that the Culture faces an existential threat, and that either side could win, even if by the end it becomes apparent that the odds were always stacked in the Culture’s favour. In many of the subsequent books, the Culture’s power and pervasiveness undermine much of the inherent potential drama of the stories being told: there might be a sense of individual peril, or even of societal peril – of populations being threatened by brutal and controlling elites. But as a reader, we’re always aware of the huge civilising power of the Culture lurking just off stage, an enormously capable and resourceful saviour figure that may or may not choose to actually save our characters or our worlds (often for obscure reasons, known only to the Minds) – but is still there, all-powerful in potential if not in practice. In subsequent novels, the Culture can feel a bit like Aslan from the Narnia books, or the Greek girl’s dad from the Pulp song Common People – if you could call them, and they came, they could stop it all in an instant – but in Consider Phlebas, there’s still a suggestion that they could come, try to stop it, and fail. The socialist rebel underdog still has a bit of rebel underdog about it.