The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) dir, Nick Roeg

[This is a review of the Special Edition DVD (2-Discs, OPTD0732) release of Roeg's The Man Who Fell to Earth I wrote a while back for an academic venue. I thought it might be an idea to blog it. And so, here we are.]

Roeg’s reputation as a major director rests chiefly on three of his 1970s films: Walkabout (1971), in which an ordinary young girl encounters the radical strangeness of the Australian outback; Don’t Look Now (1973), another strange, but strangely affecting, movie that combines psychological portraiture, erotic drama and ghost story to striking effect; and the science fictional The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).  This last is perhaps the strangest of the three, a work in which humanity as a whole is defamiliarised by being seen through the eyes of David Bowie’s visiting humanoid alien.  In all three films Roeg develops a visual grammar to express the encounter with weirdness that is at the core of his directorial praxis.  Indeed, one way of assessing the DVD release of this title is to try and gauge the extent to which this visual grammar is still capable of creatively estranging its viewer.

It’s a question raised by DVD releases in general, actually, since the commercial habit the format has engendered of re-releasing classic movies with a large amount of extra material will inevitably tend towards the ironing-out of any mysteries or uncertainties pertaining to the films themselves.  Interviews with film-makers, directors commentaries and the like strive to explain everything about a given film; and owning a film in such a convenient form enables multiple repeat viewings in a way largely alien to the 1970s film viewer, who tended to see a film once, or (at most) a couple of times in the cinema.  Certainly, such complete explanation would be salt to the slug of The Man Who Fell to Earth, which depends for its hefty emotional and imaginative punch on a dreamlike unclarity, a lucid impression of deeper mysteries that disintegrate on too rigorous an analysis.  To this end, this DVD release of Roeg’s film does its job.  Despite running to two discs the DVD release contains no commentary from its director, or anybody else, on the main feature.  The extras, such as they are, are confined to the second disc, and they are scanty.  There’s a short making-of documentary largely based upon interviews with Roeg, producer Michael Deeley, screenwriter Paul Mayersberg and actor Candy Clark (evidently neither Bowie himself nor Rip Torn could be persuaded into the studio to face questions) as well as some of the technical staff—costume designer, cinematographer, editor.  There are in addition two separate interviews, with Roeg and Mayersberg, in which much of the material from the making-of is reiterated . And then there are trailers, TV-spots and other advertising material.  Compared with many DVD re-releases this is thin fare.

More, Roeg (in particular) is endearingly unforthcoming about the deeper meanings of his own project.  In interview he tends, in his patrician mumble, towards either vatic incomprehensibilities (‘it’s … like a butterfly being friendly with a dormouse’) or else he gives voice to various rather disconnected trains of thought.  ‘It had,’ he says of the script, ‘a human ethos to it—it was not just sci-fi … mere sci-fi … not sci-fi … I mean, I like sci-fi … but it … um … the character of Mr Newton interested me.’

The Mr Newton whose character so intrigued Roeg is the alien whose fall is alluded to in the movie’s title.  The film begins with his spaceship literally falling out of the sky into a New Mexico lake; and the plot marks out the title character’s metaphorical rise and fall.  To begin with we see Newton marketing advanced alien photographic technology to earthlings in order to accrue a fortune.  He also begins a relationship with Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), a sweetly innocent girl working in a small New Mexico hotel.  Newton’s plan, it seems, is to make enough money to build a spaceship and return to his dying planet—scenes are intercut of Newton’s alien wife and two children that show a desiccated desert world.  He leaves his business affairs in the hands of Oliver Farnsworth (Buck Henry) and retreats to New Mexico to live, more or less, as a Howard Hughes-style recluse, employing university lecturer Nathan Bryce (Rip Torn) to help him build the space ship. In a striking sequence Newton reveals his alienness to Mary-Lou by removing his humanising wig and contact lenses—to her initial and urinous fright, although she subsequently accepts and even continues having sex with the alien. Bryce also has his suspicions that Newton is an extraterrestrial, and eventually betrays him to the authorities—government agents, presumably from the CIA, lurk in the margins of many scenes. Newton’s attempt to return to his home world is thwarted, and he is imprisoned in a bizarre luxury apartment built inside a warehouse, where ‘they’ (we assume, government agents) experiment upon him. By the end of the film Mary-Lou and Bryce, visibly older, have become a couple. Newton on the other hand looks as young as ever, despite years of alcohol abuse—one Earthly vice to which he has succumbed. Newton has given up hope of returning to his home, and instead has recorded an album of pop music in the hope that, being played on the radio, its message will eventually reach his wife. Both Mary-Lou and Bryce meet Newton again, separately, and the film ends abruptly, during the second of these meetings. Newton’s minder interrupts Bryce’s conversation: ‘don’t you think Mr Newton has had enough now?’ ‘Yes,’ says Bryce, ‘I think he probably has’. Newton makes a sort of high-pitched ‘mm’ noise and lowers his head so that the wide brim of his hat obscures his face.

The strangeness of the film in part has to do with a deliberate reticence about tying up the plot neatly, and is partly a function of Roeg’s characteristically oblique and fractured editing and intercutting. We never learn exactly what the government agents are up to, or even who they are. We don’t even learn, exactly, what Newton was doing on earth—his own world is parched, and he initially shows great reverence for Earthly water, but there’s no indication that he makes any plans to (for instance) ship water from planet to planet. The early scenes imply that Newton’s new technology is revolutionary, but in later scenes it seems to have had no impact on the world. In place of exposition, Roeg gives us a particular sort of visual layer-cake; fairly rapidly, occasionally disjointed montages alternate with a number of lengthy set-piece sequences that appear, on the surface, to have only glancing relevant to the main storyline. So for instance, by way of the latter, we get a lot of sexually explicit detail of the midlife crisis Bryce undergoes before he even meets Newton. There is a lengthy scene in which Mary-Lou inadvertently debilitates Newton by taking him up in a lift to his hotel room; and later in the film there is a drawn-out sex scene between the old Mary-Lou and the unaged Newton in which they shoot one another with blanks from a pistol.

Those interested in the question of what this is all about will find few insights in the DVD extras of this most recent re-release. All the participants accede to the rather obvious point that the film is in some sense about alienness. But what manner of alienness, exactly? Deeley describes the film as saturated with Englishness, as if Englishness and alienness are somehow cognate (‘the English in America,’ he says, ‘are very alien-like’). Roeg himself is English, of course; as is Bowie; and in the film the character Newton passes himself off as British. Moreover we learn that New Mexico was chosen as the movie’s primary location (Walter Trevis’s novel, upon which the film is based, is mostly set in Kentucky) because that state had recently passed labour laws that allowed the filmmakers to import an English crew wholesale from the UK. On the other hand, in the making-of documentary, Roeg opines that ‘nobody wants to be an outsider … it’s rather annoying’, and it’s difficult to pin-down any particularly English quality to The Man Who Fell to Earth itself—indeed, the way the film captures a specifically American set of landscapes and cultural mannerisms is one of its strengths. Elsewhere Roeg talks about actors as aliens, on the (not very eloquently expressed) grounds that ‘actors play alien people from themselves’, a point rather undercut by the decision—about which Roeg and Deeley talk at some length—to cast the rock-star celebrity Bowie in the title role rather than a trained actor. There’s no question but that Bowie is well-cast, but the strange quality he possesses has less to do with his Englishness, or to the rather mannered and untutored ‘acting’ he undertakes in this role, but simply reflects the uniquely spaced-out and peculiar status of Bowie himself qua star.

So: does the film still have the capacity to startle and estrange? This question does not admit of a straightforward answer. Certainly, there are some respects in which the film’s attempt to estrange has lost force. This might be a function of the fact that western culture has moved on from the world into which the film was originally released. The representations of sexual activity, which were counted as very explicit in 1976, now seem, if anything, rather tame. The Oliver Farnsworth character is presented as gay, and in a stable relationship with a younger man; and one of the CIA agents, a black man, is shown having sex with his white wife. But these things do not startle us today as they perhaps did audiences in the 1970s, a decade when homophobia and horror at miscegenation were more conspicuous blots upon Western society than they are, generally speaking, now. Then there is Roeg’s deliberately defamiliarising directorial style, which certainly hasn’t aged badly. If his choppy, nonlinear approach to editing doesn’t seem so strange today it is in part because it has become largely absorbed into the mainstream, a testament to his success as a visual stylist. But at the heart of the film is Bowie’s performance, and Bowie himself; and there’s something in those two things that still possess this quality, or ability, to estrange.

Watching The Man Who Fell to Earth again, I found it hard to avoid the sense that its apprehension of strangeness works most powerfully as a commentary upon the strange cultural explosion of pop music and the status of pop stars of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is to say that, in fact, the film is most powerfully about Bowie himself—or more particularly about the celebrity persona, or perception, of Bowie. The sequences of wealthy reclusive eccentricity at the heart of the movie, although premised in terms of plot on the life of a businessman, actually play visually and semiotically on our expectations of pop star indulgence. Sex, drugs (in this case alcohol) and music (Newton’s final venture into recording) constellate the whole movie, and watching Newton rolling around on a bed with Mary-Lou in a weirdly and expensively cluttered flat reminded me of similar sequences from Ken Russell’s Tommy (1975), or Michael Apted’s Stardust (1974). It is not about ‘pop stardom’ in a modern sense, since such stardom nowadays is merely an emptied out and business-driven matter of wealth and media exposure. By the same token, the sort of ‘pop stardom’ I’m talking about wasn’t something that really existed before the mid-1960s. So, in that sense The Man Who Fell to Earth is very strongly about its decade: a period when the really big music stars, like Bowie, still possessed a strange and totemic aura, still the locus not only of weirdness and excess but of a strange sexualised innocence. It’s a notion of pop stardom that still has, I think, genuine cultural currency; and few films have found as powerful and evocative a visual correlative for expressing it than this one.

This may seem like a roundabout way of saying that The Man Who Fell to Earth is Bowie’s best film; but that would be to say very little—the competition, after all (Hemmings’s 1979 Just a Gigolo? Damski’s 1983 Yellowbeard?) is not strong. The point is that this film not only stars Bowie, it construes Bowie, or a version of Bowie that remains potent and recognisable—recognisably estranging, if that doesn’t sound too paradoxical. It is that imagistic and iconic articulation that is the core of the film’s enduring power. That’s why it is a film that spilled out of the purely cinematic idiom to determine Bowie’s next two music releases—Station to Station (1976) and Low (1977), two of his best. That’s why I can see that it made sense for Optimum Releasing (the company who have put this DVD special edition together) to use as a cover image not the original film poster, but rather a black-and-white head-shot of Bowie, hair-brushed back, looking straight at the camera; and looking, too, quite astonishingly beautiful.

Anthony Powell, A Dance To The Music Of Time. 1: A Question of Upbringing (1951)

Twelve-volume Epic Fantasy series are common enough, in our saturated-market 21st-century; but I’ve decided to embark on an old classic of the genre: Anthony Powell’s A Dance To The Wheel of Time, starting with the first instalment, A Question of Upbringing (1951). Though published only a few years before Lord of the Rings, Powell’s fantasy is much more Peake-like in tone than Tolkienian—this may be why Moorcock, known for his hostility to Tolkien, reworked Powell into his Fantasy sequence, the like-titled A Nomad of the Time-Streams.

Like the best Fantasy, the novel describes a world that is in some respects familiar to ours, and in other respects bizarrely estranging and alien. Like Peake’s novels, this Fantasy realm is post-medieval, yet ineluctably old-fashioned and unmodern. And, actually, ‘Peake-like’ isn’t the right description for this beguiling, oblique narrative. Though it deals with Gormenghast-like structures (schools, mansions, universities) and Titus-Groan-y social rigid social hierarchies of great antiquity and baffling complexity, A Question of Upbringing treats this material with surprising deftness, subtlety and above all with a saving sense-of-humour. It is not that Peake wholly lacked humour, I suppose (although most commercial Fantasy treats its worldbuilding with deadening Epic Seriousness) but his sensibility was grotesque, Dickensian, exaggerated, and his comedy followed this form. Powell takes a fundamentally Peake-like raw-material but finds in it a stately ridiculousness that enables him to deploy wit and charm in his storytelling. Levity is altogether a better Fantasy stallion than Ponderousness.

A Question of Upbringing introduces the main characters and covers their early years and education: four young lords of an imperial kingdom not entirely unlike England. The main figure and narrator tells us about his three friends, Lord Widmerpool, Lord Stringham and Lord Templar. This last name, given what I assume will increasingly be revealed as a time-travelling theme, is surely significant. Other names are similarly significant. In the novel’s first chapter these young aristocrats are being educated at a superbly archaic, creaky scholarly establishment, presided over by a lower mortal whose name (‘The Low One’, ‘La Bas’) signifies his relative status. In chapter two, the narrator spends time at the manses of Stringham and Templar. In the third, he travels to a neighbouring kingdom, learning the language and local mores with Widmerpool. In the final chapter the narrator has enrolled in some kind of higher college of arcane knowledge, where he is taught by (amongst others) a wizard called Sillery. This latter figure’s magic is not of the Gandalf sort. Rather he devotes himself--and Powell cleverly implies the dubiety of his moral being-in-the-world--to cultivating alliances, influences at court and in larger society. This is a deeper understanding of 'magic' than potions, grimoires or wands that shoot-out sparkly ectoplasm. When Stringham decides he wants to leave the College of Magic, his Lady Mother—a person of considerable importance in this stratified world—pays him, and Sillery, a call to dissuade him. Facing her, ‘Sillery himself, more than ever, took the shape of a wizard or shaman, equipped to resist either man or woman from a bisexual vantage’ [214-15]. This hermaphroditic quality is, in some mysterious Powell does not spell out, the heart of his magical power; and he keeps his abilities close to his chest.  The youngsters are less circumspect. Templar does take his friends for a ride in a magic chariot, possibly powered by Sillery’s magical force—it’s not clear. The chariot crashes into a ditch.

The world Powell describes, and in particular the Jack-Vance like minutiae of its (wholly hierarchy-governed) interpersonal interactions, are extraordinarily absorbing. What is said and implied. The way characters are continually—but tacitly, in a never-spoken manner—jockeying for position. Instead of the Fantasy clichés of continent-spanning wars or fierce dragons, this novel is content simply to trace the ‘upbringing’ of its young noblemen, from childhood to young adulthood. Doing so it paints-in its fantastic, bizarre yet somehow compelling world much more effectively than other Fantasy tomes.

Another one of the clichés of Fantasy Powell overturns is the ‘goatherd boy grows, undertakes many adventures and ends up King’ narrative; and he does so by concentrating on characters who have nowhere higher to go, who are already at the top of the social tree. The concentration on 'schooling' has range and nuance that Harry Potter (for all its excellences) lacks: chapter 1 gives us an effective portrait of a 'Hogwarts'-ish establishment; but chapters two and three show that education is something that happens as effectively and importantly outside the ancient walls of the school.

The whole imaginary realm is beautifully, wittily rendered; although—like Westeros—I really wouldn’t want to live there.

Reversing Through The Culture

I set out to read Iain M. Banks 'Culture' novels in reverse order of publication. This, I did. Here are links to the posts I wrote as I was going along:

The Hydrogen Sonata (2012)

Surface Detail (2010)

Matter (2008)

Look to Windward (2000)

Inversions (1998)

Excession (1996)

Use of Weapons (1990)

The Player of Games (1987)

Consider Phlebas (1987)

I finish with an even higher sense of the series' merit than, perhaps, I had going in. This is a marvellous body of work; and we (for various values of 'we') have tended to under-value Banks' huge, imaginative contribution to genre. That said, I think it is the case, particularly with the later novels, that Banks's imaginative duracell shows signs of running low, not because his mind is any less ingenious than it was last century, but only because the idea of the Culture is one that dissolves away Dramatic Tension and Story Momentum by its very nature, as salt does a slug. This is the old, old problem of Utopia: if everybody's happy and everything in the garden is rosy, what is there to write about? Unhappiness and vulnerability are what make stories happen, after all.

I say so both to name the technical necessities of constructing a story (no unhappiness or vulnerability, no conflict; no conflict, no drama; no drama, no story) but also to make a larger point. We may think we read stories to feed our fantasies of power and competence. If 'we' are SFF fans, we may believe this more than most. But it's not true. What's interesting about Iron Man is not that his suit gives him superhuman powers, but that his suit fails. Failure grounds art in a way success never can.

The crude way of articulating this, narratively, is to throw a cackling Loki in the path of your Thor; to make sure to write-in an adversary (his/her motivation for wickedness hardly matters!) who has enough of a supply of kryptonite to render your Superman vulnerable. In the early Culture novels, Banks is far from crude; and that's good. Because writing about the unhappiness or vulnerability of your main characters makes for much more interesting storytelling than artificially inducing temporary vulnerability in your wish-fulfilment perfect protag., or in substituting cartoon villainy for actual unhappiness.

Consider Phlebas cannily puts the Culture into the background, positing in the Idiran a collective adversary not only strong enough (effectively immortal, technically advanced, highly motivated warrior giants) but appealing enough to suggest that the Culture could be beaten -- and that there might be reasons a reasonable person (like Horza) might hope for such a defeat. Player of Games flips this about, and we see things from the Culture perspective. It's early in the series, but the idea of the Culture's vulnerability has already fallen away; so Banks finds a story instead in the unhappiness of his protagonist, a kind of existential anomie in which the very expertise at game-playing that defines Gurgeh (and which symbolically represents the Very Extremely Clever Minds that Play The Game of Life So Well) is also thing that seems to leach deeper satisfaction from life. As Blake put it: Eternity is in love with the productions of time. Eternity is the idiom of paradise (for our purposes here, that's the Culture). Of course it has a hard-on for not only mortality, but more broadly: failure. The early Culture novels are very good on that.

As the series proceeds, though, Vulnerability and Unhappiness retreat into the novels' shadowy background. There is an increased focus on Cool Kit and Stuff, on Huge Structures (Banks really likes his Huge Structures--Castles in which individual rooms turn humans into mouse-sized figures; Vast Bridges; Worlds of Huge Tiers and so on) and on the godlike Minds themselves. This results in an increasing fall-back on the Comic Book Crude I mentioned above. Use of Weapons is about a main character whose existential unhappiness is slowly revealed (via a rich array of incidental episodes and inventive worldbuildings) to be about Guilt. That's fine, although less interesting aesthetically I think than Gurgeh's anomie, not least because the occasion for the guilt is so bizarrely grand guignol.  Excession seems to want to position the Culture as vulnerable again, but if so the conception lacks force. The reader never really thinks this might be the Full Stop at the end of the Culture sentence, because Banks has got too much of a crush on his clever creation. They are invulnerable. This is one of the reasons Inversions, which I didn't much like the first time around, stood out for me on re-read as one of the strongest Culture novels, because it actually dramatised the sort of shape the love of Eternity might take for the productions of time.

Looking over the whole run, though, I wonder if Inversions isn't actually the last fully accomplished Culture novel. The problem with Matter is not that it is too long and too slack (it is, really; but it also generates some actual momentum towards the end). The problem, I think, is that all the unhappiness has been syphoned off into the straw-man old-fashioned society of the Sarl. In later books this tendency becomes more pronounced. All the non-Happy in Banks imagined cosmos (and thus all his story motivation) is transferred onto the barbaric non-Culture civilisations; the motor for drama becomes a should-we-shouldn't-we Interventionist dilemma, which reads as awkwardly Blairite. The problem is that, in the later books, life in the Culture just is so much better than extracultural life: in Look to Windward the die-hard traditionalist Chelgrian general Sholan Hadesh Huyler, who has spent the novel egging Quilan in his hatred of Culture decadence, is twist-ending revealed to have been working for the Culture all along. 'They showed me all there was to be shown about my society and theirs and, in the end, I preferred theirs' [356] he says, deflatingly. In Surface Detail the extracultural types are systematic horrible sadists who have invented virtual hells in which to torment people. The Hells are presented as so ghastly and disproportionate nobody could possibly endorse them, which denatures the moral drama and replaces actual narrative momentum with a series of grisly-ingenious set-pieces. The Gzilt in Hydrogen Sonata are not so horrid as this, but they are extracultural, and so they have to carry the being-shame of nastiness and violent-tendencies and so on, even though they're supposed to be on the very edge of Subliming into transcendental perfection.  So it goes.

***

Banks published his 'A Few Notes on the Culture' essay as early as 1994. It's an interesting piece in many ways, although it also embodies one of the problematics of late 20th-/early 21st-century fantasy and SF. It's all content and detail. It feeds that appetite that believes, on some level, that the Appendices to Lord of the Rings actually trump The Lord of the Rings. Story is open-ended and unsettling (on a first reading, at any rate). The appeal of overviews, fan-guides, encyclopedias, Complete Handbook to the Star Wars Universe, Inside Westeros, all these sorts of books -- the appeal is Control, of certainty and settlement, of disposing the particularity of an imagined world into various pigeonholes marked 'types of weapons', 'aliens species', 'names of Ships' and so on. There is, of course, a Culture Wiki; and the internet is littered with 'Top Ten Gadgets From Iain M. Banks' Culture!' lists. That's fine; except that this kind of text has the tendency, phagocytically, to swallow up the original mode of text. The later Culture novels are as much in the business of fleshing-out aspects of the Culture itself -- in effect, adding more notes to the Few Notes On The Culture work -- as they are anything else. Perhaps they are predominantly about that. I worry that this speaks to a loss of faith in the ability actually to tell stories about The Culture.  Because, really, what's to tell? Everyone's happy. The Culture is invulnerable, all watched over by nearly-infallible godlike machines of loving grace. (Imagine a Culture novel in which the Minds en masse decide that humanoid species are vermin and are to be exterminated! Imagine a Culture novel in which the all Minds go mad. Ah, but you can't ...). There is no story here. So the story migrates to the margins, not to highlight the in-the-grain difficulty of existence, or the beautiful intensities attendent on mortality and suffering, but only to condescend to the clumsily violent ways of the unenlightened.

Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas (1987)

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.

‘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]

‘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.

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.

Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games (1988)

Ironically The Player of Games plays fewer games with its reader than some other Banks Culture novels I could mention. It does what it says on the space-tin, and what it says on this particular space-tin is: ‘a linear story about a Culture citizen unusually skilled at playing all manner of games, who grows bored with the lack of real stakes entailed by post-scarcity wagering, and agrees to go to an extracultural Empire of Azad, a backward, cruel society where a complicated game, also called Azad, is played to determine social rank and political status, with the ultimate winner becoming Emperor'. Gurgeh goes because, unlike Culture-play, losing this game can mean losing your life; so he gets to pit himself against lifelong players of a intricate 3D tactical game (the specifics aren’t spelled out) for proper stakes. But that’s it: the story moves along from a to b to c.

The novel is 300 pages long, and we don’t get to the Planet of Ea (part of the Empire) until a hundred pages in, which enables Banks to putter around pleasantly in Cultureland for a while. Then we explore the Empire, with its restrictive social hierarchies, three genders and ingenious cruelties. The revelation of the latter is presented as a kind of coup-de-théâtre, but it’s hardly a surprise.  Gurgeh and his drone-pal tour the streets, and see executions and nastinesses. A TV feed from the police-barracks basements ‘for the ruling elite only’ shows live torture (‘the screams echoed through the lounge … sometimes they were silenced quickly, but usually not. Each instrument, and each part of the tortured people, made its own noise; blood, knives, bones, lasers, flesh, ripsaws, chemicals, leeches, fleshworms, vibraguns, even phalluses, fingers and claws’ [209]—Banks uses a semi-colon there where he should use a colon. But I’ll forgive him that). The other plot-revelation (that Gurgeh has been unwittingly doing the bidding of the Culture’s Special Circumstances, defeating the emperor at the game of Azad in order to precipitate the collapse of this wicked society) is even less of a surprise—not least because the novel’s narrator keeps dropping clunkety-clicking hints of the

Points To Ponder:

Does Gurgeh really understand what he’s done, and what might happen to him? Has it even begun to occur to him that he might have been tricked? And does he know what he’s let himself in for?

Of course not!

That’s part of the fun! [100]

variety.  Nonetheless, there’s something very satisfying about The Player of Games as a novel. Reading the corpus as I am in reverse order, it adds to the sense that Banks is stripping away the excrescences and diversions of his writing, honing his craft very nicely.

The central conceit is a good one. Partly it’s calculated to appeal to SF nerds—to quote Abigail Nussbaum: ‘The Player of Games can therefore be read as geek wish-fulfilment: imagine if all your years of playing D&D somehow endowed you with the necessary skills to rule a fantasy kingdom.’ The real question is whether Banks’ treatment opens his novel to deeper, pardon-my-pretentiousness philosophical resonances, of the ‘life what is it but a game?’ sort. I don’t know if it does; but I also don’t know if that’s a bad thing. Compare this book with other classics of the ludic genre, and it doesn't come out of the comparison badly.

Two titles in particular that stand out, in my mind at any rate. One is Hesse’s ponderous, tortoisome Das Glasperlenspiel (1943). It’s poor form to knock this novel, since it (and its author) were bravely anti-Nazi at a time and place when that was more than mere posturing. But it’s a dull novel for all that, vitiated in large part by the very un-playful nature of the titular game—the Glass Bead Game is actually a metaphor for All Art And Culture, and the point of the game is not to do anything so vulgar as ‘win’ as to make profound connections between disparate aesthetic and conceptual qualia. The result is a very, very long novel almost entirely lacking in drama or narrative impulse. Much better, I think, is Nabokov’s The Luzhin Defence (Защита Лужина, 1930)—a novel about chess, a game Nabokov knew intimately, but actually about the way that the way the concentration and dedication required for any individual to become really exceptional at any game places their subjectivity under alarming and distorting pressure. The force of Nabokov’s novel is to do with this psychological portraiture, as Luzhin's mind collapses, rendered brilliantly in a mode of poetic externalisation. There’s little of this in Banks's book. His Gurgeh does feel like a real character, although in part this is because he is so very non-Culture-ish. He wants to win; he wants the winning to mean something. That is, he's like us; he's relatable. But the intense psychological pressure actually playing these brain-mashing games doesn’t seem to touch him, except to fill him with exhilaration when he wins. Banks point has to do with possession, I think. Some of the most charming moments of the novel are Gurgeh’s interactions with Eachic natives who can’t believe the Culture is post-scarcity (‘but what if I wanted to own planet?’ one asks) because they can’t move mentally past the notion of ownership. Property, like a game, is an arbitrary construct, Banks is saying. And so it is! Needs saying more often, that. Bravo to Banks.

And since we're on the subject of 'bravo', I shouldn’t care to underestimate the impact simple statements of the following kind could have on impressionable young SF readers, some of whom may never before have come across the idea that sex is not (straight sex missionary position) ‘natural’ or (gay sex) ‘unnnatural’, but rather (if you'll pardon the semantic overlap) cultural:

Hamin was at once delighted and outraged that the Culture regarded homosexuality, incest, sex-changing, hermaphoridicy and sexual characteristic alteration as just something else people did, like going on a cruise or changing their hair style. [225]

This notion (that sex is something we do, not something we are) can hardly be said loudly or often enough; and if it hasn’t occurred to you before it’s as worthwhile learnt from Iain M Banks as Michel Foucault.

The names, I’m delighted to report, are awful. There’s 'Gurgeh', the water-going-down-a-plughole surname of the main character (presumably Banks named him that in tribute to Chas-n-Dave's famous song). There’s Lo Wescekibold Ram, which sounds like a breed of Dorset sheep. There’s Yay Meristinoux, which is presumably what people shout when they’re really pleased to see some meristinoux. There’s the nasty emperor himself, Nicosar (he’s, like, a Tsar! But like an Irish Tsar called Nicholas!). And there’s Shohobohaum Za, who, to quote the mighty John Clute, must be an absolutely enormous bottle of Za. Plus the first edition front cover was naff to the max.



Good-show-sir-worthy stuff. Banks’s covers have improved markedly since then, I’m pleased to say.



GENERAL THOUGHTS ABOUT THE -- WELL, JUST GENERAL THOUGHTS, REALLY.

Recently I happened to pick up, from a Charity Shop, The Orbit Science Fiction Yearbook Two (1988), edited by David S. Garnett. This book, in fact:



In addition to stories by J G Ballard, Paul Di Filippo, Ian McDonald, a strange piece written entirely in California surfer argot by Rudy Rucker and one of my favourite Ian Watson shorts (‘The Flies of Memory’)—in addition, I say, to all that, we get a John Clute penned ‘Review: SF Novels of the Year’. This latter makes very interesting reading. Clute picks out Player of Games as one of the year’s highlights, and rightly so:

In Player of Games Iain (M) Banks provides a Lean-Cuisine prequel to the polysaturated Consider Phlebas (1987), and through the standard-issue folds of a galaxy-spanning plot that involves a game to end of all games whose winner ends an empire (etc) images of the multi-world Culture at the heart of Bank’s [sic] inspiration begin to take shape, almost subliminally. Bounteous with post-scarcity liberality, non-hierarchical, unowned, optional and humorous, it is, for at least one reader, a description of Jerusalem with a Garden. [312]

That’s not quite right as far as a plot-summary of Player of Games goes (unlike other Culture novels, this one spans no galaxies; and that parenthetical 'etc' is a touch unfair’); but ‘Jerusalem with a Garden’ is a neat phrase. But more interesting, to me, was the context of Clute’s comments. People still read and discuss Player of Games, as they still read and discuss Banks more generally. How far is that true of the other ‘notable’ examples of novel-length fantastika of 1988?

To be clear: I’m not saying the novels Clute discusses are bad novels, or did not deserve their ‘novel of the year’ praise. The question is: how many are still alive? (Also: according to Clute ‘the walls of the ghetto were razed in 1988, the ghetto remains’. Really? I must have missed that).

And before I go on, I’ll note that one of the novels Clute discusses is still very much a live issue: Rusdhie’s Satanic Verses (‘a book,’ according to Clute, ‘which needs little said about it these days, thanks to the efforts of the religious creatures it exposed to the light of the sun’). What else? Moorcock’s Mother London, maybe; Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars , which Clute doesn’t much like. I remember there was a brief window when this was the go-to text for pretentious posing-in-coffee-shops trying-to-impress-intellectual-girls and the like. But I suppose it has dropped off the radar latterly. C J Cherryh’s massive but diffuse Cyteen is still in print, I think. Paul McAuley’s Four Hundred Billion Stars may still have some currency. What else? Well, what else is a list of books that shows the extent to which Banks’s briskly ludic Culture novel possesses a staying power that sets it apart from equally-well-written genre companions: Louise Erdrich’s Tracks; William Kennedy’s Quinn’s Book; E P Thompson’s The Skyaos Papers (I bought that when it came out in paperback; started it; never finished it); Peter Dickinson, Eva; Philip K Dick The Broken Bubble of Thisbe Holt; Kate Wilhelm, The Dark Door; Michael Bishop Unicorn Mountain; Carol Emshwiller Carmen Dog; Thomas Disch The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars; Brian Stableford The Empire of Fear; Terry Bisson Fire on the Mountain; Neil Ferguson Putting Out; Christopher Fowler Roofworld; Paul Preus Starfire; Hilbert Schenk Chronosequence; Lewis Shiner Deserted Cities of the Heart and Jack Womack’s Terraplane (which, according to Clute, ‘judders through its capsizing plot-turns like a rhino in the funhouse’). How many of these novels have you read? How many have you even heard of? OK, now everybody over 45 put your hands down. The rest of you, be honest—how well acquainted are you with this particular body of work?

There’s something doleful in the mere fact of it. Good novels, I don’t doubt; well crafted and imaginative, condemned, like Spinal Tap, to the Where Are They Now? File by nothing more iniquitous than sheer weight of numbers and the restless churning of the larger Market. Victims, perhaps, of their own competence. The 1988 Hugo went to David Brin’s workmanlike, borderline-mediocre The Uplift War; the Nebula to Pat Murphy’s The Falling Woman which, I’m ashamed to say, I haven’t read.

But the relevant question here, is: what is it about The Player of Games that means, of all this swarm of good novels, it is the one still alive, still available to buy in a bookshop near you (buy! buy!), still being read and discussed? The Player of Games is a good, solid SF novel; but I’m not sure I see what it has that lifts it head, shoulders and tentacle-midriff above those others.

Thinking about it for a while, I've come to the conclusion not only that it has to do with the Jerusalem-with-a-garden appeal of The Culture itself, but the way this novel in particular establishes that this is a utopia predicated upon play. It made me fetch down from the shelf my old paperback copy of Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens (1935; English transl. 1955). Huizinga understands that play is important, not only for a healthy psyche but for the establishment of culture itself.

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. [4]

Huizanga stresses that one of the most significant human and cultural figures of play is that it is fun. 'Play is free, is in fact freedom.[7] Banks, I think, groks this; and something along these lines is at the heart of his enduring appeal.

I can't resist quoting some more stuff from Homo Ludens, which seems to me to relate to the larger appeal of SF/Fantasy as a whole (the whole book is available online at Google Books, but only in the original Dutch, which is fine if you speak Dutch I guess):

Play is not “ordinary” or “real” life.[7]

Play is distinct from “ordinary” life both as to locality and duration.[8]

Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme.[9]

SF is play. Game on.

Dan Brown, Inferno (2013)

:1:

Midway through reading Dan Brown’s latest tome
I found me in a gloomy state of mind:
All Brown roads lead to bestbookselling Rome

(Or Florence, in this case). Being unkind
Is evidently a doomed exercise.
Dan Brown fans know exactly what they’ll find

And good luck to them. So the hardback flies
Off bookshop shelves, a fillip to the trade;
So who cares if one pseudish blogger sighs?

I crack the spine. Down into hell we wade.
Rob Langdon, with amnesia, in the buff.
Facilis descensus Averno said

Some writer guy, and this is facile stuff:
The very opposite of rich or stately
And yet I still press onwards, running rough-

-shod through: till pausing (p.280)
I ask myself: whither this onward slog?
This crumb-trail—what's Dan done for me lately?

And so I skip straight to the epilogue,
And find the answer to the mystery,
And close the book, and open up my blog.


:2:

I read it in a coffee shop, for free.
Two tenners is too costly for what passes
As a novel despite lacking novelty.

The plot is quick, the prose slow as molasses
Mysterious Villain’s called ‘The Shade’ which sounds
Like half a pair of plastic cheap sunglasses.

A chaff of Dante quotes are thrown around
Mixed with two tons of dumped-in explanation
And Hell is somehow Florence, underground.

Seems Dan is scared by overpopulation
But doesn’t think mass-murder is the key.
The answer’s somehow thriller-code notation

With charts and maps and weak-beer 'mystery'
Magic plague-stuff cached inside a vial.
AGES to solve one clue (hint: ‘Vasari’).

The famous poo-on-a-stick Brown prosey style
(I know reviews routinely make this point,
But still: Dan Brown’s prose—really, it is vile).

Dumb clues and QI-factlets pack the joint:
One time the clue-text’s printed spiral-curled
Another ‘clue’ hoofs Reader in the groin: it

is “In this place and on this date, the world
Was changed for ever” —and that date is—what?
TOMORROW! Wow. With this we’re hurled

(By ‘hurled’ I mean ‘sicked-up’) into a fraught
Race-contra-time that time can never win.
I'm glad my copy's borrowed and not bought.

You’ll never get the hours back again
That you spent reading this. Mind you, my job,
Is reading books—I really can’t complain:

It’ll fob off only those who value fob.
Maybe the coming film will cast Will Farrell
Instead of dough-faced Hanks as hero, Rob.

From Langdon’s bloodstained tweed apparel
At the beginning, to p.461,
Reviewing this is shooting fish-in-barrel.

Isaac Asimov, The Martian Way (1952)

Martian settlers have their water supply cut off by a nasty Earth demagogue whipping up anti-Martian feeling. But they get one over on Earth by organising a ramshackle expedition to Saturn, lassoing some massy chunks of ice from the rings, and bringing them back to the red planet. The story ends with a ner-ner-n'NER-ner moment, when the Martian President (I think he is) Sankov offers to sell some of the Saturnian water back to Earth. 'Write this down,' he tells the assembled reporters ('there was no doubt they were getting it'). 'Earth is worried about its water supply. It only has one and a half quintillion tons. It can't spare us a single ton of it. Write down that we folks on Mars are worried about Earth and don't want anything to happen to Earth people. Write down that we'll sell water to Earth. Write down that we'll let them have million-ton lots for a reasonable fee.' Yeah! Take THAT Earth! We're sticking it to the Man! I like to picture the assembled reporters all at once rushing for a bank of wooden booths, each booth containing a coin-operated public telephone, like that scene in Airplane!, and the whole bank of booths falling over. But Asimov didn't write that scene.

The thing that sticks out from this fairly meh Asimov yarn, though, is the name of the Earther demagogue who is whipping up irrational fears about 'outsiders' stealing our water. He's called 'Hilder'. I'm assuming Asimov considered 'Satlin', 'Mussonili' and 'Moe Tse-Tung' as names, but decided they weren't subtle enough.

The image at the top is the Panther edition I owned as a kid, long since lost, and beautiful in a 'look up Chris Foss in the Dictionary and it says nothing to do with the story whatsoever' sort of way. I re-read it recently because I picked up a job-lot of SF paperbacks -- including this edition of The Martian Way:

That bell-bottom lower-case 'a', granting views onto an (I think) walnut whip, is certainly striking. And by 'striking' I mean: 'obese looking'.

Iain M. Banks, Use of Weapons (1990)

Or the one about the Chair. If you’ve read it, you’ll know what I mean. If you haven’t, I am loth to spell it out, for fear of spoilers. It’s very good: some consider it his masterpiece. Certainly it has all the merits of his best writing—the characters draw you in, the narrative (divided between one set of chapters advancing chronologically 1, 2, 3 … and one reversing, like a balding middle-aged reviewer, through the salient, XIII, XII, XI …) is cleverly structured without being clever-clever. Throughout it is inventive, spacious, violent, varied and arresting without ever being saggy or loose. And it has the chair.

Still, can we talk about the science-fiction-ness of a chair? Is not this diremption between vastly intelligent spaceships and galactic scales and sense of wonder on the one hand, and chairs on the other—is not this exactly the point? We must, in other words, refer to our copies of Heinleindegger's Seince und Zfiction (1927) and read what he has to say about the chairness of chairs—the existential and ontological constitution of the chair’s Banksein, grounded as it must be in temporality and textuality. How is this mode of temporalizing of temporality to be interpreted? Is there a way leading from primordially somatic chair to the meaning of reading? Some might say the chair is a silly device in a novel of this sort; that it mismatches the Vast-y Galactic-operatic of his idiom; that as a result Banks's ingenious grand guignol veers daft rather than unsettling. (a chair? Seriously?) But is not this the essence of equipment? No single equipment element or piece, for all ‘equipment’ is relational to the totality of equipment. Heinleindegger argues that enjoyment of the work consists in participation in the creative state of the artist; and that 'things' go from whole to parts: and what else does this Chair embody, but the disembodying of the somatic whole into the parts of, first, a material fragmentation (and lesser recombination) and then, as the narrative surprise is invoked, we realise of a psychological process that exactly mirrors this. Dasein understands being in a pre-predicative way. In this manner we are asked to Dasein on the dotted line; for all whole lines are revealed as a furniture of linear dots.

Is not this novel playful, and Banks at his best himself a playful writer? And it is one of his strengths he evades the po-faced earnestness of so much SF, and especially of ideologically- or politically-impelled science fiction. His is the Geschick of being: a child that plays... Why does it play, the great child of the world-play Heraclitus brought into view in the aiôn? It plays, because it plays. The "because" withers away in the play. The play is without "why." It plays since it plays. It simply remains a play: the most elevated and the most profound. But this "simply" is everything, the one, the only... The question remains whether and how we, hearing the movements of this play, play along and accommodate ourselves to the play. The possible ranks higher than the actual: and in Banks, as in the best SF, it is precisely the possible to which we are treated

Still we must return to the chairness of the chair. Chairs have a limited or non-present role in most science fiction and fantasy—the Captain’s chair; the throne made of a thousand (or many fewer) swords, and so on. In these cases the chair discloses status, and has no innate interest qua chair. How often does a mundane chair appear? An actual chair, a chair defined not by status and symbolic performance but by function—a chair which disappears from under us (in a manner of speaking) as we sit upon it, in the same way spectacles vanish from the bridges of our noses in use, or any tool ‘in use’ ceases to be anything other than the use to which it is put?

Particular acts such as sitting upon a chair, going to war, etc. can be viewed as occurring on an as-it-were 'ontic level'; whereas it is the nature of Human Freedom (and is not the great theme of sf not this?—its freedom not only from quotidian concerns, but shaking off the surly bonds of Earth and kissing the face of … I forget how the rest of this goes) to underpin such actions, real or textual, on the 'ontological level'. Thus the ontological structure of ‘imaginative projection’ becomes the ground for the possibility of all particular (ontic) manifestations of imagination. The Dasein Analytic wishes to uncover the existential structures of this chair. Dasein is in every compossible case my Dasein (which is to say nothing more than that: each one of us is a human being)—but my chair may become somebody else’s chair—it may be borrowed, or sold at a boot sale, or stolen, or in the simplest mode somebody else may come by my house and sit upon it. The iteration ‘my chair’ is in this sense very different to, and yet oddly the same as the iteration ‘my girlfriend’—or, let us not be sexist (although it is hard to shake the sense that Use of Weapons would have been a very different novel if Darckense had been male, and Zakalwe-Elethiomel female) ‘my boyfriend’. They too may be stolen away, ‘sat’ upon (in jest, or erotic play), broken and so on. From this adolescent point of view the crucial thing about a chair, or a girl/boyfriend, has to do precisely with this instrumentality. Were we talking about a pencil we might invoke the kind of Being which such equipment possesses and the way in which it manifests itself: 'Readiness-to-Hand.' But since we are talking about a chair we must instead invoke ‘Readiness-to-Arse.’ For the paradoxical nature of equipment is such that, no matter how long and attentively we regard its outward appearance, we will never be able to discover anything ready-to-arse about a chair unless we actually take it up and place an arse upon it.

Use of Weapons, in other words, reveals the chairness of its chair not through use—for as far as I can see, re-reading this novel after many years, nobody actually sits in the chair. On the contrary, the chair is revealed to be not-chair, both functionally and ethically. Conventionally speaking the ‘ethics’ of the ordinary chair are instrumental, either in a ready-to-arse sense or perhaps (let’s say one were to lift it and bringing crashing down on the back of another fellow in a bar-room brawl, whilst the piano-player jangles Scott Joplin rapidly on the keys and everybody roars) ready-to-smash. But the ethics of the chair in this novel have to do with torture (physical), torture (psychological), murder and cruel ingenuity. This is the same as the Theme that is slowly disclosed (aletheia) as I work backwards (aiehtela) through the Culture novels (erut-luc): namely the conflict of will-to-torture the bad ones and will-to-prevent-torture of the good ones, that in turn comes sloshing up to a great height in the bathtub of the novel (Erschlossenheit)

There is also a joke about a hat in the novel, which is quite funny in context. I would explain it at greater length, but, again—spoilers deter me): but we must acknowledge that talking of ‘the hatness of hats’ is a different thing to talking of ‘the chairness of chairs’. One wears a hat; where, in a manner of speaking, a chair wears you. And this particular Use of Weapons chair wears more than its usual panoply of sitters. It ‘wears’, as it were, its plot-significance; it ‘wears’ its provenance and the significance thereof and so wears the reader’s ‘patience’ and ‘willing-suspension-of-disbelief’ (Abigail Nussbaum explains why this might be, although this discloses spoilers-in-the-blog). This Ready-to-Arse chair comes to overwhelm the otherwise lively, varied and engaging peripatetic military adventures of the characters. And the various small wars do make for entertaining reading! ‘Destruction’ sounds so much cooler when spelled with a ‘k’ (Destruktion).

The twist is that, like everyday Dasein, the main character has no 'self' of his own. His sense of self, of what he is to do, of how he is to live—this, for the most part, is given from the outside—from the they-world, or simply as the they (Das Man). The 'who' of everyday Dasein is Das Man; the ‘M’ in Iain-M-Banks is Man (Das). Only (Das)-sayin’.

Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013), dir J J Abrams

Fun, but.

Well. There are six points I want to make:

1. Like Iron Man 3: Iron Mannishly with a Vengeance (about which I have already written on this blog), Star Trek Into Darkness (or 'stid!' as we may choose to acronymise, if we don't mind an acronym that sounds like a flying toenail clipping that's just pinged off the doorframe) ... like Iron Man 3, stid! is a film more-or-less about 9/11. The difference is that stid! quarantines all its humour away from the Tragic Deaths and Giant Air(less)planes Flying Into Skyscrapers moments. Those bits are treated with po-faced seriousness, and behind these atrocities there actually is an evil genius. In this respect, Iron Man 3 is immeasurably the better and more interesting pulp-culture response to 9/11.

2. Spoilers, from here on. If such things distress you, I'd be obliged if you stopped reading now.

3. stid! is a remake of Star Trek 2: the Wrath of Khan. Now this latter movie is one of the indisputable greats not just of the Trek franchise but of Hollywood sf more generally. Such a fine film. And there are things that are commendable about the way Abrams has set about remaking it. The way he plays games with allusion and quotation, and more to the point rings large scale changes and inversions on the original picture is neat, although not as neat as Abrams perhaps thinks (Spock yelling 'Khaaan!' is feeble stuff, really). I like the verve of this film; I liked the visuals, the pacing is brisk, the set-pieces are snappy; it's all very prettily done. In these respects it is clearly superior to the original Star Trek 2. But below the surface level, there's a woeful lack of story-logic, character-logic or, you know, logic-logic. Cumberbatch looks about as much like a high-caste Sikh superman as I do myself, but let's swallow that great stone egg of a representational problem for the moment. I'm less worried about that, because there's a much bigger difficulty to swallow, if we're in a swallowing humour, and it's this: there's nothing much for the characters to get cross about. This movie needs to be Star Trek 2: the Wrath of Kumberbatch. And Benedict does his best to emote (to eMOTE!) anger throughout. In the scene where he's in the brig, and we have a right-screen close-up of BC's phizog, with Kirk and Spock blurrily in the background on the left, Khan emooootes so ferociously I was worried his eyes were going fall out. Oh, he's livid. But wait -- why is he so cross?

4. Khan as incarnated by Ricardo Montalbán (and if ever a man deserved an emphatic accent on his surname, this splendid Mexican actor did) hated Kirk because he blamed Kirk for the death of his wife. 1982's Star Trek 2 made you feel his anger, too. But Cumberbatch's Khan has no personal beef with Kirk, whom he barely knows. He hates the whole of Star Fleet—a bigger but necessarily more dilute wrath—because Star Fleet rescued Cumberbatch's people, his 'family', from cold-storage in a drifting spaceship and moved them into cold-storage in a safe Federation facility. The dirty dogs! You believed Montalbán's Khan; you don't believe Cumberbatch's. Khan-2013 is angry because the film being remade had 'wrath' in the title, and the scriptwriters think that's character-motivation enough. It's not.

5. In a move that could have been pretentious, but actually turned out rather wonderfully, Star Trek 2 was based upon Herman Melville's Moby Dick, with the round, white USS Enterprise as the whale. 'From hell's heart I stab at thee!' Khan cries, clinging to the wreckage of his ship and preparing his last harpoon throw. 'For hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee!' The moral is: if you're going to do melodrama, do it full-throatedly; and work with the best. Star Trek 2 is based upon a great American novel; stid! is only based upon Star Trek 2. The consequent diminution is fatal. There's nothing in this film as brilliantly suspenseful as Kirk remote-controlling Khan's ship, tricking it into dropping its shields; or the scenes in the Genesis-device chamber; or the final tactical battle. Or to pick one small detail: there is nothing in the whole of snid! so wonderful as the dramatic business ageing portly Shatner does with his spectacles (turning his head when talking to Khan on the screen, so his adversary doesn't see him using them). The nearest thing we get in this film is Christopher Pike's walking stick. Unlike the spectacles, this prop was like the character using it—lame.

6. Of course, we couldn't have Kirk's spectacles in this movie, because this Kirk is a young thrusting buck. It's probably because I'm getting older myself that I found all this stuff tiresome. Everybody sees 'leadership greatness' in his character, where I, to quote another fictional Captain, wouldn't trust him to sit the right way round on a toilet. Still, I had fun. There was no depth, none of the kitsch grandeur of the earlier movie, no genuineness, but there was fun. And fun is what counts, right?

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.