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Consider Phlebas
Thu Feb 4 17:03:49 GMT 2010
Consider Phlebas is the first in the Culture sci-fi series which now spans some eleven books and has enjoyed wide critical acclaim. As the book that started the series, Consider Phlebas is notably lacking in many of the motifs of the later novels: there are no amusingly-named Culture ships, there is a distinct lack of Banks' trademark dark humour, and the focus of the novel feels curiously narrow, confining itself entirely to the exploits of a single protagonist, Horza, caught up in an intergalactic war between two ideologies. And although Horza's exploits take him across several worlds and various space battles the novel somehow fails to feel like the space opera that the Culture series is usually billed as: if anything it reads more like an anti-war novel as the narrative stumbles from skirmish to skirmish, each more squalid and meaningless than the last. As the core characters die, one by one, we're drawn inevitably to reflect on their lack of legacy, the complete indifference with which their passing is marked. Their lives disappear instantly and anonymously, their compadres move into their bunks and quarters and sequester their belongings. Each death becomes a metaphor for the losses and waste of the larger war, of all wars, and the reader's rapid desensitisation to the destruction on the page becomes a comment on the callousness of conflict.
At the same time that Consider Phlebas is an anti-war novel, it is also a political commentary on the nature of ideology. The central struggle is not one of good versus evil, but rather one between two competing views. One one side, the Idirans pursue an aggressive expansionist policy driven by a religious doctrine justifying their supremacy; on the other, the Culture is driven by a what it sees as a moral obligation to protect less advanced civilisations from the ravages of the Idiran advance. Yet the conflict goes deeper than that: the Idirans are committed to the strength of the individual, whilst being religious fanatics; the Culture are committed to twin virtues of free will and permissiveness, whilst depending heavily on the symbiotic relationship they share with the hyper-intelligent AIs that control their ships and cater to their needs. In considering the ground between the Idirans and the Culture, two entirely fictional races, the reader's prejudices are challenged: neither side is demonstrably right or wrong, and the little motifs of the central theme that appear throughout the novel serve to inform and progress the argument by degrees.
Although Consider Phlebas is the seminal work of the Culture series it is not emblematic of the later works, and it is almost far enough removed from the others as to be best considered as a lone novel. Taken in that context, it is an interesting, if not hugely enjoyable read. If the central premise of the book is that war is bad and that no ideology is perfect, it delivers those messages succinctly, and yet the result is a grindingly bleak slog of a novel: the characters are largely unlikable, the endless fighting becomes increasingly wearing, the set-pieces at times almost unreadably grisly. As a start to the Culture series, Consider Phlebas is worth reading if only to catch the later references and for the satisfaction of completing the set. For everyone else, there are other sci-fi novels, and other anti-war novels for that matter, which will better reward your attention.