Culture in the Culture

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CULTURE IN THE CULTURE

Just how much culture is there in author Iain Banks' greatest SF creation, the Culture? Chris Gilmore asks the hard questions.

Ian Banks divides his literary output between mainstream novels and SF. You can even tell which is which by looking for the 'M' in his name - only the SF has it, by way of acknowledging his kinship with the famous romantic novelist Rosie M. Banks.

Banks The SF takes places against a backdrop that looks very like a variant on one of the standard set-ups, with mutated humans spread across the galaxy interacting with alien species, Earth but a fading memory etc.

It is the universe of the hyper-liberal, hyper-rationalist Culture, a loose association of intelligent species and machines interpenetrating rather than dominating much of the galaxy, which contains other cultures both less and more advanced.

So rich is the Culture that no one who desires any degree of physical luxury need work for it; consequently the competition for existential rewards can combine unheard-of levels of tedium as well as great ferocity.

But Banky's non-SF work came first, so it's worth taking a look at his mainstream efforts. Bank's first published novel, The Wasp Factory, achieved a genuine success de scandale. This was not done by hype, pornography, blasphemy, or the detailed recounting of gruesome events, though there's plenty of the last.

Instead Banks explored the psychology of a family where madness had been actively sought and cultivated. The conviction he brought to this distasteful and highly artificial theme, no less than the wit, ingenuity and relish with which he developed its logic, won him the rarest sort of acclaim: that ground out through the critic's gritted teeth.

Two more books, Walking on Glass and The Bridge pursued themes of madness and hallucination, after which he turned to something more conventional. Consider this: You are a divorced women with a young daughter, middleclass baggage and very little money, but before your marriage you knew a big, ugly, talented musician who had considerable affection for you. During your marriage he hits the big time becoming a rock star, earning far more than it's possible to squander, before retiring, heath intact, on a cushion of many millions.

To your pleasure you meet again, and the old flame leaps up again (it's amazing how it does that when you become loaded, isn't it? Ed). He moves in with you, only then do you discover that since he's met you again, he's divested himself of his entire fortune - investments, cash, property, copyrights, the lot - dividing it among a number of recipients. A drunken, violent old anarchist, a glue sniffing delinquent and an expensive prostitute are typical (he's also got a debt of $57,500 due in six weeks).

It sounds a strong (if contrived) way to open a novel. But this is not the start of anything: it's the ending of Espedair Street, and Banks obviously regards it as a happy finale. Barbara Cartland eat your heart out!

Considering Phlebas

Turning to the SF, Banky began with Consider Phlebas, his story of one man's involvement in an interstellar war, waged between the religious alien Idirans and the Culture.

There's plenty of fast action, cat-and-mouse pursuits through deadly environments, setpiece battles in space and so forth. Books of this kind typically glorify warriors, if not war itself, but our Banks is a hard-left pacifist, with political opinions much like those of Billy Connolly (whom he strongly resembles). Banky therefore subverts the tradition whenever he applies the conventions, making Phlebas into a specialised form of literary satire.

Horza, the protagonist, is a shapeshifting bigot who joins the wrong (Idiran) side out of superstition; poor Horza's also a mechanophobe, and the Culture revels in its machines.

With no regard for the Idiran religion, he lies to his girlfriend about everything, including his own subspecies, he kills his commander in cold blood; and the enterprise for which he puts his life in jeopardy comes to grief through friendly fire - not in the fog of war, but because the two allied races are too paranoid even to parley, let alone combine forces.

In a typical early passage Horza, rescued by a pirate ship, is told he must fight one of the crew for the right to life and passage. The encounter is described in traditionally gory detail, and a victorious Horza makes the traditional magnanimous plea for the life of his fallen freebooter adversary.

"I don't want to kill him."

"Then you'll die," Kraiklyn told him, in a flat, even voice. "I've no place on this ship for somebody who hasn't the taste for a little murder now and again."

All scruples fled, Horza breaks the loser's neck.

By the end of the book Banks discloses that his heroes are not technically human at all. Terrans are a species of primitive and uncontacted alien race, with the action taking place in the 14th century AD - our time. Naughty, because in retrospect there are no hidden clues to indicate anything of the kind.

Too often, when Banks moves away from his favourite subject of psychopathology, its manifestations and effects, his sentence structure goes down the drain. There's a storm of adverbs ending in -ly, sudden lurches into the passive voice and fits of elegant variation. These can only be attached to carelessness, as when he repeats himself without seeming to realise it.

In Phlebas we have this from a scene on a gigantic liner which has just ploughed into an iceberg:

A line of windows set in the wall ahead of him went white, then exploded towards him, throwing particles at his suit in a series of small hard clouds.

Less than one page later,

The line of windows ahead went white, cracking like ice then bursting out; he dived through space, to skid over the fragments on the deck beyond.

Satirists can't get away with this sort of thing, because satirist's adopt positions of superiority to what is satirised (in this case the writing of tough US professionals like Poul Anderson, Gordon R. Dickson and Larry Niven).

Interest in character isn't a feature of conventional satire either, but Banky obviously feels for and lives through Horza. Your sympathies are engaged because Horza has a conscience, to which he's too intelligent not to listen, but which the demands of his situation prevent him from heeding very often. This tension becomes the primary interest: what begins as satire ends as tragedy - placing Horza in the same boat as Creon and Macbeth.

It might not have been Bank's intention that conscience should make Horza the tragic hero; but that old devil conscience was at work again in The Player of Games.

Jernau Morat Gurgeh - Culture citizen - finds Utopia unsatisfactory to the spirit. Gurgeh desires the admiration of his peers, and achieves it by becoming perhaps the greatest all-round player of skill gams in the Culture's trillions.

Once you're at the top, the only way is down, and Gurgeh babes finds his supremacy threatened by an adolescent genius. An embittered AI offers our hero an unfair advantage and in a moment of angst, he accepts.

But the machine's not tempted him from charity. Its price - exacted by blackmail - is that Gurgeh must travel to Azad, an interdicted alien civilisation where life is dominated by a game of immense complexity.

All the top jobs go to top players, and the supreme champion is Emperor. When he understands the game, Gurgeh understands the race.

Our hero plays the Great Tournament, with predictable consequences and maximum scope to parade the author's black humour.

Banky gives the alien race hyperbolical exaggerations of all the qualities he most dislikes, including exploitative sexual relationships, unequal justice, brutalisation of the lower classes, formalised philistine xenophobia, and a hypocritical willingness among the leaders of society to engage in sado-masochistic scopophilia - while also proclaiming a civilizing mission. (There goes the next chairman of the conservative party. Ed)

This works well in reinforcing the passion of Bank's writing, but undermines the plot's credibility. The political system is a meritocracy, where careers are determined by ability at the Game although the Game itself is not part of any career.

How many people could hold down posts as admiral, cabinet minister, archbishop or whatever, head a family of two husbands and five wives, and pursue an active social life and sustain rank in the game and still have time for the enjoyment of hard porn?

Player of Games invites comparison with the Urras chapters in Ursula Leguin's The Dispossessed. He stands the comparison, and praise doesn't come a lot higher than that.

In the later stages of Player, Gurgeh begins to be seduced by the arrogant glamour of Azad's cruel, confident society, the more so as he has taken to thinking in the local language, and in terms of the all-pervasive game which has shaped it.

But he remains a Cultural citizen, and when he is confronted with the rottenness at Azad's heart, he decides to attack it through its own fundamental principles - the rules of the Game. Not only must he give the Emperor a good kicking, he must do so in a manner which denies the imperial axioms and asserts those of the Culture.

How he does this, and what happens when he succeeds, brings the book to a nail-biting and highly satisfactory climax.

Wheel on the big guns

Except for his Walking on Glass, which tells several stories in parallel, Banks always focuses on a single character trying to make sense of a world where half the rules are hidden and the rest incomprehensible, as are the motives of everyone he meets. This makes for a monolithic structure, and a tendency for critics to compare him to Kafka, whose influence is strong in The Bridge but hardly noticeable elsewhere.

Possibly because he perceived his single character stories as a defect, Banks placed two protagonists of opposite sexes in Use of Weapons.

This has been done before, but others have managed to do it without Bank's contents page. His chapters alternate between one through fourteen, then XIII all the way back through I. Flashback is all very well - even if it does tell you which secondary characters are going to be the important bods later, taking away some of the surprise. On this occasion it's justified, as his climax wouldn't work so well with a more conventional structure.

Use of Weapon's roman-numbered chapters are scenes from the life of one Cheradenine Zakalwe, agent of Special Circumstances - the cutting edge of the Culture's ambition to, well, not exactly impose its values on the rest of the galaxy, but certainly make them just a little too attractive for anyone to reject - a CIA with all the hard edges filed away.

Predictably, Zakalwe has done and suffered much, all lovingly recounted in baroque detail.

Here cut off in a disorganised battle, Zakalwe's found in a hut with a captive female soldier by his staff officer.

"General; allow me!" Then he looked into the centre of the room. "And how about your friend?"

"Oh." He looked back at the women who had turned herself around and was staring, horrified, at them. "Yes, my captive audience." He shrugged.

"I've seen stranger mascots; let's take her too."

"Never question the high command," Bar said. He handed over the umbrella. "You take this. I'll take her." He looked reassuringly at the women, tipped his cap. "Only literally, ma'am."

The women let out a piercing shriek.

Rogtam-Bar winced. "Does she do that a lot?" he asked.

"Yes; and watch her head when you pick her up; near busted my nose."

"When it's such an attractive shape already. See you in the Amph, sir."

All jolly fun, though it makes one wonder a tinsy bit about Bank's feminist credentials.

Meanwhile the female lead, Diziet Sma, is busy reactivating Zakalwe for another mission.

Zakalwe's gone rogue, tired of working within even the elastic constraints of Special Circumstances. To make up for the absence of support, he's acting even more gung-ho than usual, with predictable results. But Diziet Sma thinks only he will do, so he must be armed and re-indoctrinated.

The story itself is fairly slight - nor could it have withstood such treatment otherwise - and would have worked far better written continuously before the Roman numbered sequence - for despite Banky's best efforts, Sma never achieves equal prominence with her male partner (possibly because he can only concentrate on one major character at a time, but more likely because she's too normal).

Banks is most at home with hag-ridden, obsessive lonely individuals whose neurotic preoccupations are at once both solace and substitute for the more conventional satisfactions from which they fell themselves excluded.

The existence of such maniacs is a standing reproach to the Culture, and produces a riveting tension when they're on the same side. Zakalwe is no less aware of this than his creator, and at one point even trys to reform himself by becoming a nature poet.

To this end he bogs off to live in a self-consciously pastoral community with clean air, abundant cuddly wildlife and no horrid clanking machines (there are slaves for that sort of work).

He settles down to become one with nature, working at it conscientiously, ignoring boredom like a good soldier - until he sees an overseer mutilate a female slave.

With an audible sigh of relief he tortures the overseer to death and sets off on his travels again. Banks weaves together the bathos of this ambition and the pathos of its failure with a skill that anyone would find hard to defy - if only he could keep it up forever!

Use of Weapons interest grows as Zakalwe's character is explored and a single question looms ever more insistently: How did this man, who has witnessed and partaken of so many horrors, come by a terrible phobia of chairs? (mock not, chairphobia is a terrible curse. Ed)

The indications are so ominous and insistent that it seems impossible for the chair story's revelation to escape anticlimax, but escape it does. Banks takes up the challenge of his own pretensions and wins - handsomely.

He then adds one last twist, falsifying the psychology of his entire novel. Use of Weapons is less a flawed masterpiece than a masterpiece with gratuitous flaws tacked on.

Bank Collapse
To make up for her bit-role in the last novel, Diziet Sma becomes the narrator of The State of the Art. The settings are Earth, circa 1977, and Culture ship Arbitrary is observing our misbehaviour - more in sorrow than anger. One of the crew, Dervley Linter, becomes obsessed with the glamour and squalor of life on Earth and wishes to take up residence.

Understandably; the crew are without exception dreary past reason. You expect them all to put on red noses for Comic Relief and do other wacky things to convince themselves they're alive after all.

Even Diziet, the pick of the litter, seems to have swapped her brain for a sheaf of Guardian leaders. Our hero is not only a refugee, however. To serve his obsession he has his genetically enhanced body degraded to something nearer the Earth norm. Rub your hands in anticipation. Bank's madmen are always good value.

Unfortunately, Banks neglects this fine loony in favour of the drearies in the ship, and as usual his writing wilts once the violence and perversion are withheld for too long. On this occasion, his boredom with his characters leads him into the tyro's editor of forgetting who is speaking to whom in a short dialogue sequence, and the overwhelming impression is one of tiredness: only a robot 'drone' escapes the general accident, acting as Greek chorus, like all Bank's robots, in the style of Bomb 20 from the film Dark Star.

Down below, Linter decays into a Jesus freak (for no obvious psychological reason), then gets himself killed for no artistic reason at all. The story ends with nothing attempted, let alone achieved, by anyone.

Even the question of how an airhead like Linter got the job in the first place is raised but not pursued. It's a sad anticlimax after the other three books. Cultural Directions The only other Culture stories so far are also to be found in this book.

One is a variation on the theme of Fondly Fahrenheit. The other, A Gift from the Culture, is basically a character-study of a moral jellyfish who is also Bank's only important homosexual character so far. It's slight but well done, though it casts further doubt on Bank's pro-gay street cred, to say nothing of the sort of upbringing the Culture gives its children.

A much more interesting question is where, after three exceptional novels each embellished with a rococo blemish, does Banks go from here?

Maybe Banky needs a new milieu. The Culture has the overwhelming defect of all Utopias (and the one which chased Larry Niven out of Known Space); it implies the effective end of history. A perfect society cannot generate internal stresses of any significance, so any conflict must proceed from external attack.

This happens in Phlebas, but seems unlikely to happen again. The alternative - to go for aggressive cultural imperialism - would be unattractive and inconsistent, and one suspects Banks is far too much in love with the Culture to present its decadence.

His Culture could feature many more shorts, but unless Banks turns to prequals about its early life and struggles - Kulturkampf? - It's doubtful that anything else of full length will succeed as his early novels have.

Chris Gilmore - the famed Interestingzone reviewer - raises eyebrows, glasses, hackles, issues and the tone of his surroundings. A proponent of catastrophe theory, he believes that the Golden Age is about to end. His closest friend is a whale. He has recently completed a novel which involves spaceflight, mass-execution, mass-suicide, sexual abuse, mystical visions and war on a planetary scale, but is principally concerned with how a man comes to be reunited with his cat.

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