Iain M. Banks - Consider Phlebas

(read over three months, ensuring many mistakes)

Generally, the novel is very attractive, specifically as space opera. There is history, backstory, to the world invented, and its two central cultures are worthy of antagonism. By which I mean that the division is not black and white or not too straightforward a caricature of 'real' stereotypes, at least initially. The end result and image one forms of the Culture-Idiran divide is not very original, however, at least approached in the 2010s, with over a decade long context of discourse about democracy and religious extremism.

The part I am, shamefully, the least capable of analysing, the writing itself, is well-handled. The imagery and exposition is comely in both style and imagination: I don't recall encountering any cringeworthy phrases, and the world-building is up to all standards of operatic science fiction.

There are memorable characters and descriptions of invented cultures. Banks's machines are especially distinctive, although the science fictionally prosaic or material explanation for their 'human' erring is conspicuously missing. Nonetheless, the friction between the anti-machine and the machine intelligences can be delightfully well-handled, as it does not seem to revert to stereotype and expected stances in the dialogue.

But there is something very unappealing in the novel. The structure of the narrative is at least in the very end somehow naturalistic in its spiral into catastrophe for the main protagonist. His position, his attitude and ideology, drives him into the conflict with all parties in a way that allows no suitable escape, and it seems that there whereas the events continually take turns for the worse, they do so by first allowing contrived hope or lulls in the narrative. Warning signs are ignored, cameras are inactive, and threats misinterpreted, only for these to spring more and ever more dangerous dangers.

There are also great pleasures to be had in Banks's narrative style, however. I recognise the pacing of the narrative of Consider Phlebas from his later novel The Algebraist, which I liked very much, and which in turn suggests the strengths of Banks's writing here as well. One can well criticise Banks's overuse of exposition (not my own observation, however), and Phlebas does feel somewhat too long for best effect, but the way he constantly diminishes heroism and the pattern of epic characters, very much misused in genre fiction and simple storytelling, is remarkably distinctive and pleasing. Whereas in Hollywood, and in the amnesic storytelling traditions of (let's face it) genre fiction at its most unimaginative for example, traumatised characters do not in Banks's fiction overcome their flaws and rise as positive heroes for their contexts. Mostly, they end up destructive and suicidal, which never bodes well for however follows them, willingly or not. Banks has a very good grasp of flaws, ideologies, and the contradictions they create.

Consequently, Phlebas spends much time building its narrative and its world, and very little time to spring the finale it is working towards. It might seem tedious at times, and it did for me, but the prize of diminishing the healing powers (in the sense of healing the contradictions and wounds of the societies they are depicted in) of the characters were are watching so intently naming and revealing their traumas, not to mention creating new ones, is cathartic, yet not in a pedagogical or preaching fashion. These fictions take the material of heroic action and adventure to their logical conclusions, which is very much laudable. Furthermore, it is done in a way that steers clear of the worst romantic clichés about tragic protagonists.

I do have further issues with Banks's fiction, for example his sometime very awkward dialogue, but the tone of his work mostly overcomes the minor problems in the writing. At least if one approaches the work specifically as science fiction, for at least in Consider Phlebas, the weight of depicting such different cultures and heavy narrative turns seems to bend the representation of character, of inward cognition, and cultural details and features together with the narrative elements themselves, like starlight coming from behind an anomaly of mass (if this image is at all functional): the intricacies and highlights of the latter are lost in the thicker lines of the former, of war, action, juxtaposition of radical aliens.