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DEAD_HARE
April 30, 2006
Finished with:
Iain Banks -- "Dead Air"
and immediately moved on to
Iain M. Banks -- "Consider Phlebas"
Both Banks are the same fellow, of course.
He adopted a strategy of "branding" his
science fiction efforts with his middle
initial.
And somehow I'd though that that Banks was
using his uninitialized name to do Serious
Fiction, but instead I found "Dead Air" to be
a very trashy book, full of lots of low grade
sex and drugs.
The main character seems only barely
sympathetic to my eye, though I guess that's
the idea: this babbiling, cowardly fellow is
plunged into a "thriller" plot of sorts... but
this "thriller" takes a hell of a lot of pages
to get out the door. Far from a roller-coaster,
it's more like being trapped on a long bus
ride with someone who is no where near as funny
as he thinks he is.
Oh, and there's lots of political editorials,
overblown ranting that seems no where near as
shocking as it's meant to be... a better
title might be "Hot Air".
There isn't really much of
a tie-in to the "Dead Air"
phrase. There's a little
dialog that explains what it
is (radio jargon for silence).
The main character,
is supposed to
be a shock jock
(liberal variety),
and *he* never shuts up.
The one thing the book has going You could do some intellectual
for it is a strange female lead, gyrations to support the
a woman with a pseudo-quantum meaning of the title --
mechanical theory that she's maybe there's more than one
half-dead and half-alive, all due type of "dead air", and
to a lightening strike when she empty babble about uses for
was a teenager-- it's left her vibrating cell phones doesn't
scarred on one side, but unmarked count as the living breath.
enough on the other to work as a
fashion model. This woman is But overall it seems
calm, intelligent, insightful, like a very forced
controlled, classy... she's a title.
total contrast to the babbling
low-voltage shock jock narrator
who becomes her lover, and that
contrast is one thing that really
works in the novel.
On to "Consider Phlebas": this is the first of Banks
novels of "The Culture", copyright 1988. Somehow I
expected this book would be more intelligent than it
is... it's essentially a standard-issue space opera
with only a few real ideas going for it, and they're
just not all that heavy ideas. It also seems like
an excessively lengthy book, with more than a little
touch of trashiness about it, though this time it's
attempts at cheap suspense rather than lots of
chatter about sex and drugs.
Charles Platt says that when he was working on his first
novel, he had the odd idea that he was supposed to hit
the contracted word count precisely, and so he decided
that a good gimmick would be to write the beginning and
end of the novel first: then somewhere in the middle he
has the main character fall down a hole and go blundering
around underground tunnels for awhile, only emerging
after expending the right number of words.
I had that feeling about this Banks novel...
the plot seems to fall down a hole for a long time.
There are a few things you can say in
praise of this book:
o He's writing about a utopian culture that
the author personally believes in, but
from the point of view of someone who is
fanatically opposed to it.
o There are no cardboard characters. The
lowliest spear-carrier has their own
attitudes and motivations. You
understand why everyone is doing what
they're doing, and so you have trouble UNDERSTAND_JUSTICE
hating them for it, however much you
loath their actions.
This is, or at least used to be,
something of an article of
faith among liberal humanists:
There is no evil,
only misunderstandings.
But that rabbit
won't hunt. (Speaking of forced titles.)
Really: there
is evil. It is not always a result of
ignorance or insanity...
And perhaps
a bigger (And what of willful ignorance?
problem: What of indulgence in insanity?)
There are often
irreconcilably opposed
forces that understand
each other perfectly,
and they may not be
easily classifiable as
"good" or "evil"... And that is exactly what
Banks is writing about.
"The frothy bubbles had frozen in the cold air
and almost freezing water, making what looked
like a tiny model of a galaxy; a fairly common
sprial galaxy, like this one, like hers.
She held the light confection of air and water
and suspended chemicals and turned it over in
her hands, sniffing it, sticking her tongue
out and licking it, looking at the dim winter
sun through it, flicking her finger to see if
it would ring.
"She watched her little rime galaxy start to melt,
very slowly, and saw her own breath blow across it,
a brief image of her warmth in the air."
-- p. 277, "Consider Phelbas",
in "State of play: two"
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