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Matter
Thu Oct 15 22:32:54 BST 2009
I have had an unbalanced relationship, over the years, with Iain M Banks' Culture novels. On the one hand, Banks' writing is smooth and assured, the weird and wonderful characters populating his fantastic worlds are engaging, and the serious themes at the heart of many of the books elevate them beyond the status of space-opera escapism. On the other, the Culture is frequently smug to the point of being unbearable, Banks' villains have a somewhat predicable tendency toward sadistic violence, and the sheer vastness of the imagined Universe that the Culture books describe leaves much shrouded in a sketchy, unsatisfying ambiguity.
Matter, the most recent installation in a series which now spans some eight books, shares this unbalanced quality. For the majority of the book (and it is a big old book) the narrative is concerned with the journeys that the central characters undertake in coming together for the finale of the story. This quickly gets frustrating -- as a reader it is difficult not to feel the urge to skip ahead to the action, however it is an impulse worth fighting since there isn't any action to speak of until the very end of the book. And yet, when the action does come, it serves to turn much of what went before on its head. Themes emerge from the previous narrative that weren't obvious before, and whole sections of the storyline can be considered in a new light. It's a very clever trick, and makes for a complex -- if exceedingly bleak -- novel.