The Scotsman Book Club: Genre proves a bit of a Culture shock

Published on Saturday 30 October 2010 17:52

THIS month, the Book Group discussed the new "Culture" novel by Iain M Banks. Fife-born Banks is the author of 24 novels, 11 of which are in the science fiction genre. Surface Detail is the eighth novel to feature the Culture, a post-scarcity society absolutely committed to anarchism and libertarianism.

In the new novel, Lededje, the plaything of a rich and amoral businessman, Veppers, is resurrected after her murder by him and seeks revenge. At the same time, the Culture investigates virtual "hells"– constructed environments where societies are torturing the dead.

THE CLUB:

STUART KELLY (SK) Literary editor of Scotland on Sunday and author of The Book of Lost Books and Scott-land: The Man Who Invented A Nation.

MARC LAMBERT (ML) is CEO of Scottish Book Trust, the organisation devoted to promoting reading and writing in Scotland.

HANNA MCGILL (HM) is a writer, critic and former director of the Edinburgh Film Festival.

DAVID BISHOP (DB), is a former editor of 2000 AD, an award-winning screen-writer and lecturer on the Edinburgh Napier MA in creative writing.

JOE HALLIWELL (JH) is an associate of Winterwell, an artificial intelligence company.

SK: Who had read one of Iain M Banks's Culture novels beforehand?

HM: I hadn't.

JH: All of them.

ML: Me too.

DB: No, and I doubt I'll be reading another.

SK: Hannah, David – did you feel disadvantaged plunging into this universe?

DB: I don't think that got in the way of my enjoyment. It might have been an invisible thing, but that wasn't an issue for me – you could pick it up as you went along. Enough material was handed to the Culture virgin that they could figure out what this society was, and people's attitudes to the Culture as a species.

HM: I don't think I felt any more disadvantaged than I did by the genre generally – it was completely alien to me. This is not the kind of novel I'd normally read and I'd never read any of his "middle initial" novels before.

SK: As someone who'd read his non-sci-fi novels though, did this strike you as similar to an Iain Banks novel?

HM: Yes, definitely. In fact, I feel he's enjoying himself slightly more doing this. He can really let his imagination go, he really enjoys creating these worlds. It's really rather lovely. There's a major difference between science-fiction in cinema and novels – in film, if someone's got a special suit you just show it once, here you can spend 20 pages describing all the cool stuff the suit does. I quite liked that. I found his enthusiasm infectious.

JH: I must confess I'm a fan. The Culture strikes me as a wonderful place to live and I'd like to get there as soon as possible, to put my political cards on the table. Surface Detail is a rip-roaring adventure story. It slipped down – however, I was alive to the flaws in the plot along the way. But the virtual hells that are the engine of the over-plot: I found that whole idea quite implausible. I couldn't believe such a technologically advanced civilisation would construct a realm of eternal torment. Surely they'd have outgrown that?

SK: I'd say it's very much a novel about torture – the most sufficiently advanced technology we have on earth seems quite happy to indulge in torture – that was the moral locus of the novel.

HM: That was the point for me that it was something cancerous that had begun to multiply and become pointlessly evil – it had a point once but had spiralled and self-replicated and become something monstrous.

ML: This is another development of the Culture world – you learn things about the Culture that you'd suspected before but were made much more explicit this time round. The overwhelming dilemma of the Culture is they're so liberal they'll shoot anyone who isn't. The Culture reveals itself to be quite perverse and morally ambiguous. It is ambivalent, there are conflicts of interest and morality. I had to concentrate very hard on this book actually, particularly in respect of following all the virtualities and the descriptions of hell, which were fantastically convoluted, realised, detailed – and the central love story was very affecting. Yet at the end, you think I'm being moved by a love story between two elephant thing characters here.

HM: I felt I had to concentrate so hard on this novel too – far more than with a conventional literary novel. I was reading Jonathan Franzen at the same time, where you can let your concentration slide during another interminable debate about marriage; but with this, if you miss a paragraph, you're on a whole other world and everyone's turning into scorpions.

DB: My difficulties are many. For a start, the moment he opened the box of virtual reality and the moment he decided that this character can die in chapter one and be revived in chapter four – death is off the table, there is no jeopardy – why should we care? It's a series of vast dei ex machina.

SK: Was this a convincing hell?

JH: The familiarity of it made it less scary and allowed him to slot it into an adventure story. If it were genuinely distressing it wouldn't work. The things he describes are horrible but I didn't lie awake worrying about them.

HM: It's just fun gore, it's like why 15-year-old boys doodle skulls and people with their arms hanging off.

ML: Although there are hints about Iraq, the torture of prisoners. We should be grateful to Banks for having all the adolescent enthusiasm and "boys with toys" fun while offering something deeper as well.

JH: It's actually quite light in tone. I was very struck that hope was intrinsic to suffering which is completely at odds with the popular conception of hope as the only relief. Hope is normally the consolation for suffering and here's it's the culmination of it.

DB: If you don't have hope they can't do anything more to you in hell – it's the hope that kills you.

SK: At first I thought this hell was derivative; all Hieronymus Bosch and John Milton. But all hells are derivative because they're the product of limited, tawdry imaginations.

ML: As big a fan as I am, I felt there was more that could be developed in this book. I had a problem with the ending, where you get the credits rolling and we're told "and he did this", "and she did that".

DB: Yes, the National Lampoon's Animal House ending.

HM: Franzen did the same thing!

ML: I felt it was a bit of a cop-out. The bad guy was one of his least good baddies – if there's one thing I like in a book like this, it's a great villain.

JH: I thought that Veppers was, at times, almost pathetic. I like that he wasn't absolutely unsympathetic.

HM He's an indulged little boy. There was a weakness to him as well.

SK: Veppers was a cheap criminal, and the banality of his wickedness was offset against this huge canvas of galaxies and afterlives and metaphysics. As a villain, he's so small and mean-spirited compared to the grandeur of the background.

HM: For me, that was a major plus of the novel – no matter how vast and sophisticated all the technology gets, you've still got these nasty, small-minded, petty people – who happen to be media barons.

DB: That's where it falls down for me – in video-game narratives you have to have a final boss, the baddest of all the big bad bosses you've fought through. But here it's Jonathan Price in Tomorrow Never Dies; a nasty media baron who's just an unpleasant bloke.

SK: Is it perhaps missing the point to read books like this critically? Are genre books meant to be enjoyed rather than dissected?

HM: I wasn't looking for subtle characterisation or profound moral dilemmas in it. I'm going to come across as a complete genre snob which I admit to being because usually the writing's just atrocious. But I felt very safe in his hands; he told the story with such verve and confidence it didn't matter. Funnily, I found his voice much more persuasive here than in his more literary novels – all of that saved it for me.

DB: The whole genre vs lit fic is not just about the quality or ambition of the writing but the quality of the editing. One of my complaints about this book was being uncertain about how much editing took place. Was he challenged? The temptation is to be glib and say the title says too much about the book for me. I was overwhelmed by surface detail. I didn't care for the characters and that for me is the essence of narrative. You can have all the ideas in the world and there's no shortage of that in here; but it didn't make me care about the characters – but then I'm criticising it for things which it perhaps doesn't set out to do so that probably says more about me than it does about the book.

ML: I think that is the point of sci-fi: you're not identifying with characters, you're excited by concepts. We're so obsessed with literary fiction, 90 per cent of which is absolute rubbish. At least genre fiction does what it says on the tin. I think it's important to look at these if book pages and book groups are actually about readers.

HM: It's all about the quality of the writing. Most genre just isn't top-flight literary writing and yet this is better than some so-called literary writing. There's certainly been a move within intellectual film criticism to take genre seriously – maybe more so than in the world of books.

Book extract:

She heard one of them say this, only ten or so metres away in the darkness. Even over her fear, the sheer naked terror of being hunted, she felt a shiver of excitement, of something like triumph, when she realised they were talking about her. Yes, she thought, she would be trouble, she already was trouble. And they were worried too; the hunters experienced their own fears during the chase. Well, at least one of them did. The man who'd spoken was Jasken; Veppers' principal bodyguard and chief of security. Jasken. Of course; who else?

"You think so . . . do you?" said a second man. That was Veppers himself. It felt as though something curdled inside her when she heard his deep, perfectly modulated voice, right now attenuated to something just above a whisper. "But then . . . they're all trouble." He sounded out of breath. "Can't you see . . . anything with those?" He must be talking about Jasken's Enhancing Oculenses; a fabulously expensive piece of hardware like heavy duty sunglasses. They turned night to day, made heat visible and could see radio waves, allegedly. Jasken tended to wear them all the time, which she had always thought was just showing off, or betrayed some deep insecurity. Wonderful though they might be, they had yet to deliver her into Veppers' exquisitely manicured hands.

She was standing, flattened, against a flat scenery. In the gloom, a moment before she had spread herself against the enormous backdrop, she had been able to make out that it was just painted canvas with great sweeps of dark and light paint, but she had been too close to it to see what it actually portrayed. She angled her head out a little and risked a quick look down and to the left, to where the two men were, standing on a gantry cantilevered out from the side of the fly tower's north wall. She glimpsed a pair of shadowy figures, one holding something that might have been a rifle. She couldn't be sure. Unlike Jasken, she had only her own eyes to see with.

She brought her head back in again, quickly but smoothly, scared that she might be seen, and tried to breathe deeply, evenly, silently. She twisted her neck this way and that, clenched and unclenched her fists, flexed her already aching legs. She was standing on a narrow wooden ledge at the bottom of the flat. It was slightly narrower than her shoes; she had to keep her feet splayed, toes pointing outwards in opposite directions, to stop herself from falling. Beneath, unseen in the darkness, the wide rear stage of the opera house was twenty metres further down. If she fell, there were probably other cross-gantries or scenery towers in the way for her to hit on the way down.

Above her, unseen in the gloom, was the rest of the fly tower and the gigantic carousel that sat over the rear of the opera house's stage and stored all the multifarious sets its elaborate productions required. She started to edge very slowly along the ledge, away from where the two men stood on the wall gantry. Her left heel still hurt where she'd dug out a tracer device, days earlier.

"Sulbazghi?" she heard Veppers say, voice low. He and Jasken had been talking quietly to each other; now they were probably using a radio or something similar. She didn't hear any answer from Dr. Sulbazghi; probably Jasken was wearing an earpiece. Maybe Veppers too, though he rarely carried a phone or any other comms gear.

Veppers, Jasken and Dr. S. She wondered how many were chasing her as well as these three. Veppers had guards to command, a whole retinue of servants, aides, helpers and other employees who might be pressed into service to help in a pursuit like this. The opera house's own security would help too, if called on; the place belonged to Veppers, after all. And no doubt Veppers' good friend, the city Chief of Police, would lend any forces requested of him, in the highly unlikely event Veppers couldn't muster enough of his own. She kept on sliding her way along the ledge.

Iain M Banks. Extracted from Surface Detail, published by Orbit, priced 18.99.