Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebas is the first book in his Culture series, a classic of space opera that I have — until now — never read. I found it slow going, but in the same way that I found Delany’s Dhalgren slow going when I first read it in 2015: while I was reading it I was absorbed and engaged; as soon as I put it down, the idea of picking it up again was daunting and I went sometimes days at a time without reading more than a page or two (or anything at all). also like Dhalgren, and in spite of a long chapter built around some really ugly fatphobia, I really enjoyed it.
we begin with Bora Horza Gobuchul (Horza, for short), a “Changer” with the ability to rearrange his humanoid body to resemble someone else, or simply to change his appearance. Horza is employed as a spy for the military of the Idirans, a militaristic and extremely religious species-polity currently at war with the titular Culture, a fully-automated luxury space communist polity that is proving more difficult to subdue than the Idirans originally anticipated.
you may notice that this is the Culture series, not the Idirans series. I am fascinated by the choice to introduce the Culture — and the series — through the eyes of someone who is so thoroughly ideologically opposed to it. Horza objects in particular to the Culture’s reliance on intelligent machines (he categorically rejects the idea of machine intelligence, or at least the idea that a machine being intelligent and self-willed makes it equivalent to a living being) and what he perceives as its evolutionary stagnation. this means that our introduction to the Culture, a polity where self-improvement is the preeminent goal, encompassing education and metaphysical self-improvement but also, and crucially for Horza, genetic engineering (or “genofixing”) and the free modification of an individual’s body, is through the eyes of someone who despises it and everything it stands for. Horza’s conservative perspective — which extends from body modification to gender — is a really striking introduction, given that we seem intended to sympathize or side with the Culture, and the ideological conflicts at the heart of the Culture-Idiran War have a continued resonance in our current political context, particularly in the Idiran side’s disgust at the Culture’s enthusiasm for altering their bodies, which the Idirans regard as blasphemous. (you might note a certain irony re Horza’s ability to reshape his own body; the book is not unaware of this, even if Horza doesn’t perceive it.)
Anndra Dunn described the novel to me as a series of cinematic setpieces, and that’s apt, I think: Horza is tasked with retrieving a particularly experimental “Mind” (one of the Culture’s most advanced intelligent machines) from a “Planet of the Dead” whose native species destroyed itself millennia ago, which is now guarded by an alien intelligence that rarely permits strangers to visit. the first two-thirds of the book are about the involved process of getting to Schar’s World: forced to flee the Idiran ship during a battle, Horza is picked up by a group of dubiously competent mercenaries and has to tag along on a series of their adventures. this leads him/them to a doomed space habitat, where Horza is briefly captured by an apocalyptic cult whose leader intends to eat him alive. this is the really ugly fatphobia, and unfortunately it’s clearly coming from the narration and not — as with some other aspects of the novel — just from Horza’s personally regressive views; Fwi-Song’s fatness marks him for the reader as grotesque and horrifying, especially in contrast to his emaciated followers and especially once his cannibalism is revealed. I think it was worth powering through this chapter, but it was deeply off-putting, and I hope there won’t be a repeat in future books.
the final third of the novel takes place on Schar’s World, as Horza and the team of mercenaries descend into the ancient government nuclear bunker — effectively — in search of the Mind.
this is, first and foremost, a book about how war is, on a day-to-day level and also perhaps overall, profoundly stupid. the difference between a soldier and a mercenary is that a mercenary knows they’re fighting and dying for nothing. ultimately, despite its socialist leanings, it’s rather immaterialist, insofar as it presents the Culture-Idiran War as purely ideological. it also, though, crucially, grasps the scale and scope of a galactic conflict: after more than four hundred pages of misadventures, Horza has achieved nothing that matters. it would, in fact, be impossible for him to achieve anything that matters, being one person — or even one person plus a handful of mercenaries — in a war that involves trillions of people. I have been thinking about a poem by the Northern Irish poet Gearóid Mac Lochlainn:
Suím anseo. Mionfhile mionchogaidh ag teachtaireacht
ó thrinse cistine sa líne tosaigh.
Suím os comhair an leathanaigh loim.
Dó a chlog. Deargaim toitín.
Cuirim an raidió ar siúl.
Fanaim leis an teachtaireacht is déanaí.[I sit here. A minor poet of a minor war reporting
from a kitchen trench on the front line.
I sit before the blank page.
Two o’clock. I light a cigarette.
I turn on the radio.
I wait for the latest report.](from “Trioblóidí”, my translation)
the context is, of course, very different, and Horza is an active combatant, not a civilian in a warzone. the sense of powerlessness, of waiting, however, runs through all of Consider Phlebas. even during its action setpieces I would say “waiting, powerless” is its predominant mood.
I was very negative about Horza earlier, but actually I think one of this book’s greatest strengths is creating really engaging, if not necessarily strictly likable, characters: by the end the reader is (or at least I was) drawn into the position of the Culture spy Horza has taken prisoner, realizing with some dismay that she has come to like Horza’s band of mercenaries, that she is, in spite of herself, almost rooting for them to succeed, or at least to make it out of all this alive. certainly I found many of the mercenaries to be likable — and at the same time I really appreciated the contrast between the contemporary embrace of The Single Ship as a location for a Found Family (who are coworkers) and Banks’s handling of the mercenaries on the Clear Air Turbulence, who are, really and truly, just coworkers. sometimes coworkers who are friends, sometimes coworkers who fuck, sometimes even coworkers who are lovers — but coworkers.
not unrelated to the characterization is Banks’s attention to the scope and diversity of a galactic society. conceptually, nothing will ever really compare to Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (though it seems likely to me that Banks had certain elements of Stars in mind), but while this is less thoroughgoing in its exploration of difference and diversity I do nonetheless think it’s good on this front, which is to say that it is actively interested in difference at both macro and micro scales, including reminding readers that the Culture and the Idirans are not the sum of galactic politics (indeed, we’re ultimately told that the Culture-Idiran War only really spanned a fraction of a percent of the galaxy; mionfhile mionchogaidh indeed). it’s also difficult for anything to compare to Delany’s writing on an aesthetic level, but there is some very tasty prose here, particularly some of the stream of consciousness passages at the end of the novel, which do an incredible job ramping up the tension and setting the tone. that Delany was the person I most frequently found myself comparing this book to speaks very well of it.
all of which is to say that I would highly recommend this book, and I’m excited to keep digging into the Culture series going forward.
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