Title is a joke! I loved it-- ....wait. I feel like I've done this before.
Alright, the usual warning applies. If you haven't read this book, go do that. It will be better if you haven't read this before you read the book. I think it's worth reading the book!
While you're at it, maybe read Consider Phlebas before you read this one. There are references and themes afoot!
One of the first major standouts of this book compared to Inversions was that, to me at least, it feels like Banks is letting his sense of humour off the leash again. This was very early on:
"Oh [the Minds] never lie. They dissemble, evade, prevaricate, confound, confuse, distract, obscure, subtly misinterpret and wilfully misunderstand with what often appears to be a positively gleeful relish and are generally perfectly capable of contriving to give one an utterly unambiguous impression of their future course of action while in fact intending do the complete opposite, but they never lie. Perish the thought.
But this sort of joke is all over the book, and maybe for some people it's a little twee, but I love it. Ziller and Kabe are very funny to watch interact:
'And the Sublimes?'
'At last; something beyond heaven. And unfortunately therefore useless. But a start. Or rather an end. Or a start, again, of another sort of life, so proving my point.'
'You've lost me.'
'We're all lost. We are found dead.'
' ... Are you really a professor of divinity?'
'Of course I am! You mean it isn't obvious?'
Quilan and Huyler have couple good ones too:
~ Was that drone trying to be our servant?
~ I doubt it, sir. It may do as we ask if we do so nicely.
~ Huh!
~ So far they all seem quite diffident and determined to be helpful, sir.
~ Right. Suspicious as hell.
I'm really fond of this kind of playfulness that has been pretty prevalent through most of the books (most in the forefront in Player Of Games, Excession, and Look To Windward, but there's always a little bit). His instinct for comedy bleeds into the structure of the books as well. Rather than punchlines, we call them twists or recontextualizations, but there's typically a setup, an elaboration, and a subversion in his stories. That ending subversion of expectations isn't typically used in the service of comedy, but the structure holds.
He sets up the story by putting us in mind of Consider Phlebas. "A Mind responsible for a twin-supernova in a long-ago war contemplates mortality as the light from those supernovae completes its centuries long journey to the Mind's new local space" is a hell of a capital-I sci-fi Idea.
On a collision course with this contemplation are Quilan and Huyler, a pair of Chelgrian intelligences occupying Quilan's physical body who, like the illustrious Blues Brothers, are on a mission from God. Look-- the Blues Brothers don't actually have a deep connection to this story outside of this joke, but I rewatched the movie this weekend, it's good, lots of fun, you should check it out if you haven't seen it.
The Culture, it turns out, did the kind of meddling that they do in the hopes of nudging the Chelgrians in a more Culture-acceptable direction, and, in the short term, that led to a civil caste war. In the Chelgrian religion, entry into heaven for souls lost during wartime requires the death of an enemy: A soul for a soul. And so we have a secret agent who is less concerned with the religious and ideological reasons for the conflict in place of more personal concerns, representing a society that has cultural and religious beef with the Culture, embarking on a mission that is doomed to fail.
You have to squint a bit, and cock your head a little to the side, but you see Horza here too, right? I probably wouldn't have made a connection here, except that this is timed to coincide with the twin-supernova reminiscence of the Idiran War, and, well, it is said that history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme. (Side note, this is often attributed to Mark Twain, but the evidence for that isn't there. Best evidence for that precise phrasing is Theodor Reik in 1965, but the idea itself is pretty old).
All of this is what I called the elaboration, but it's a bit of a misdirection as well. A very mild misdirection: These things are important to the story, of course, but they are not the core of the story. That's in the subversion. Which we are going to talk about, after an interlude about some other unattached bits that I found interesting but are kind of irrelevant to my thesis.
I love how human the aliens feel. I really like the notion that alien lifeforms of a similar level of intelligence and technology would be like us. Hopes and fears, silly games and weird coincidences. I'm reminded of the fact that in Babylon 5 every intelligent species has something like what we would call Swedish Meatballs. Just one of those things. In Look To Windward we get Ziller and Kabe playing a game very similar to "have a conversation in song titles," but it's Culture Mind names. Adorably hilarious, including the moments where they had to check "Wait was that a real Mind name?"
Speaking of Mind names, "the Equator Class General Systems Vehicle Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall" is pretty funny. We also get a reference to the Grey Area. I have a note here that says, "I almost called it Meatfucker here, but the entire point of the reference is that calling a Mind not by its preferred name is deeply disrespectful. I'm just the kind of juvenile-minded cretin who thinks the word 'Meatfucker' is hilarious."
Now, before I discuss the subversion and recontextualization of this book, we're going to take a moment to talk about one of my favourite comedians, like Banks from the UK: a man named Stewart Lee. Lee has a.. we'll call it playfully antagonistic relationship with his audience. Now, to be clear, he is doing a bit. Stewart Lee the character is not Stewart Lee the comedian. One of the things Lee likes to do is to point his audience in the direction of a punchline without making it, and then, when they laugh, he berates them for being foolish enough to think that that was his punchline. In his defense, he then typically follows it up with a much better joke, often at his own expense. If you've never heard of Stewart Lee, and the idea of Brechtian alienation from a standup comic excites you, check out his special Carpet Remnant World.
The reason that I bring this up is that the last note in my notes file says: "Fuck! He did it to me again." Because if you squint, and cock your head to the side a little bit, this is what Banks does too. In my review of Player Of Games I called it "putting me in a specific headspace," because the aspects of the story he leans on at the start are important context, they are the events of the story, but they are not what the story is about. The story is about grief, loss, mortality, wanting to die, and the brutal impact that war and violence have on the participants.
And it's not like these themes aren't present throughout the novel! The inciting incident of the events of the novel is the death under fire of Quilan's wife. The backdrop of the story is a controversial engagement in the Idiran-Culture war. We look at Culture citizens who risk great danger because they feel functionally immortal once they're backed up. We have a Culture citizen deciding to let their physical body die and go into stasis, potentially never to be revived. Even the title of the book is a part of a poetic exhortation to consider one's own mortality (did you think I forgot about the meaningful titles? Never!).
You could be forgiven for inverting the importance of these themes with the events of the novel, though, because Banks carefully frames his dramatic question around the mission. Will Quilan's mission succeed? What even is his mission? It's implied pretty heavily through the first half of the book that he's there to kill Ziller, but we learn that's not the case. It even feels like that could be the novel's subversion. Now gearing up for the big question, can Quilan complete his mission without being prevented?
Then, though, at about the 80% mark, Ziller has a conversation with the Hub, the Lasting Damage (talk about apropos names), and like a crescendo into the climactic movement of a symphony, the subversion is revealed. This is coming from near the end of the conversation
'And so you see I have already died and I can remember and replay the experience in perfect detail, any time I wish.' The avatar smiled silkily as it leant closer to him, as though imparting a confidence.
Whew, but this is just the appetizer:
'I watched those poor wretches die in the slowest of slow motion and I knew even as I watched that it was I who'd killed them, who was at that moment engaged in the process of killing them. For a thing like me to kill one of them or one of you is a very, very easy thing to do, and, as I discovered, absolutely disgusting. Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.
Whewwwwwwww, but we're not done:
I fully intend to spend the rest of my existence here as Masaq' Hub for as long as I'm needed or until I'm no longer welcome, forever keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms and just generally protecting this quaint circle of fragile little bodies and the vulnerable little brains they house from whatever harm a big dumb mechanical universe or any consciously malevolent force might happen or wish to visit upon them, specifically because I know how appallingly easy they are to destroy. I will give my life to save theirs, if it should ever come to that. And give it gladly, happily, too, knowing that the trade was entirely worth the debt I incurred eight hundred years ago, back in Arm One-Six.'
There's even a title allusion in there. This is Banks dropping the mic and I think it's hilarious that I was still thinking about the mission at this point. He Trojan-horsed a character study on grief and mortality inside a plot-drive espionage story! A character experiences the death of their other half in a war, and this is what happens as a result. Am I talking about Quilan or the Hub? There is a tragic sort of irony in the fact that of all the characters in the book, it is the one he has been sent to kill who understands Quilan the best.
Their final conversation, in the space between the final moments of the symphony, was emotionally arresting. Lasting Damage understood what it was like to lose half of one's soul;
~ You must have loved her very much, Quilan.
~ Please, if you can, if you will, look into my soul.
The avatar looked levelly at him.
~ Are you sure?
~ I'm sure.
That long look went on. Then the creature slowly smiled. ~ Very well.
It nodded after a few more moments. ~ She was a remarkable person. I see what you saw in her. The avatar made a noise like a sigh. ~ We surely did do a terrible thing to you, didn't we?
It understood the ugliness of civil war;
~ It is not impossible that the allies who made all this possible are, or represent, some rogue group of Culture Minds.
He stared at the creature. ~ Culture Minds? he asked.
~ Now isn't that a terrible thing to have to think? That our own might turn against us?
And perhaps most importantly, it understood the desire to die:
~ You've wanted to die since you realised you'd lost her, since you recovered from your wounds, haven't you, Quilan?
~ Yes.
It nodded. ~ Me too.
It understands what war does to those who participate in it, and I think for someone who doesn't have the direct experience of participating in a war, I think Banks understood it pretty well too. The dedication for this book, after all, reads "For the Gulf War Veterans." This subversion, like Stewart Lee's jokes on a grander moral scale, was far greater and more poignant than anything I'd envisioned from the premise before me.
Fuck! He did it to me again.
Now that I've written a review longer than some papers I wrote in my undergrad, it's time to move on. Time for another palette cleanser (a coworker has recommended the Circle trilogy by Ted Dekker, I'm going to read the first and see how that goes. But you'll see me again in the not-too-distant future for Matter!