Idolatry is worse than carnage (Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks)

Member Name: Xamis

Product:	Consider Phlebas - Iain M. Banks
Date:	05/10/01 (108 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Long, Defines the Culture, Character driven

Disadvantages: Long, Obviously a first novel, (Sci-fi novel, I mean)

"Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."

So starts the very first of Iain M Banks' Culture series, an ambitious project to create, describe and justify a materialist utopia. The story is that of Bora Horza Gobuchal, a changer, one of a race of shape-shifters that now live within a sphere of space controlled by a race called the Idirans. The Idirans are at war with the Culture, the aforementioned 'perfect' society, on which most of Iain Banks' sci-fi is based. The Culture is initially introduced through the way it deals with the war it fights, both technologically and ideologically. It is also viewed largely through the eyes of its enemies, an excellent tool for learning the merits and pitfalls of the system they have created. Horza violently hates the Culture, and works for the Idirans only because they fight the Culture. He is scared by their hedonistic, computer 'controlled' existence, and fear that they will eventually inflict their society on everyone across the galaxy, something he would hate. His mission, for most of the book, is to rescue a Mind, the epitome of what the Culture is and how it works. This mind is a sentient computer so developed that it takes up only a small sphere of space (not much more than the size of a person) whilst weighing as much as a sun. These Minds are infinitely more intelligent than almost all the humanoid species that make up the Culture, but live alongside them regardless. The fate of this mind will alter the course of the war dramatically, although both sides remain sure that they will win no matter what the outcome.

Horza is initially rescued from an earlier mission where he was imitating a senior minister in a government in order to try and lead the government into supporting the Idirans. It is during this failed mission that we meet his arch nemesis, Perosteck Balveda. She is key t
o the novel as she provides the counterpoint to Horza's anti-Culture views. Throughout the novel they spend more time warring with words than with weapons, although both are adept with such weapons. When he is being transferred to his next mission to capture the Mind, his ship is attacked and he is forced into an escape pod. He is eventually rescued by the Clear Air Turbulence, a ship of mercenaries who initially thought he was dead. When he manages to prove his worth, he is taken on by them and survives many dubious missions. These missions are dealt with in detail, from the attack on a monastery built out of crystal - not the best thing to fire a laser at - to the looting of a giant abandoned ship about to hit an iceberg. These events give us insight into Horza and his life, as well as developing the relationships between himself and other members of the crew, and explaining in more detail the background to the galaxy as Banks sees it. His overall mission, though, is always to get to the trapped Mind and capture it for the Idiran military to study.

The Mind itself is, as you would expect of a sentient machine, a character in the novel, although not one of the main ones. We follow it through it's initial escape from an ambush as it destroyed a fleet of Idiran ships and it's own ship, escaping only through an insane piece of flying that even the most daring Minds would not try and imitate. It was this act of bravery and control of itself and the 'warp' that makes the Mind so valuable to both sides. The Mind is one of a new class especially geared towards the war, a prototype destroyer, if you will. The Idirans feel that capturing this Mind will give them valuable insight into the Culture's plans, as well as learning about how to manipulate it's own ships better in times of emergency. The Culture want to know how the hell it did what it did, and of course rescue one of it's own citizens, and stop the Idirans from gaining an
y knowledge from it. The Mind itself was only interested in surviving, and so hid itself within the Quiet Barrier of a Planet of the Dead. The Planets of the Dead are a series of worlds protected by powerful and mysterious creatures called the Dra' Azon. These creatures keep the worlds largely uninhabited as a memorial to the stupidity of the indigenous society of that world. They have all destroyed themselves through nuclear or biological war, and the planets act as a reminder of the stupidity of such wars. The irony of the fact that the final battle is fought on one of these worlds is not lost on anyone reading the novel. The Quiet Barrier is the way that the Dra' Azon keep the planets uninhabited, by stopping any ships not part of the official observation team away. They do however allow ships in distress through, which is how the Mind found itself in an abandoned Command System on the planet.

One, perhaps cynical reason why the Culture Minds keep humans around is because of a small group of people, represented in the novel by Fal 'Ngreestra. The Referrers, thirty or forty people out of the population of millions of worlds and Orbitals (artificially constructed worlds), have an ability to process facts and determine solutions with an accuracy higher than even the best Minds. Fal is one of these people, and she directs the operation to stop Horza from way behind the lines, over two years travel away from the Planet of the Dead. Her life, without any of the action or threat to life that Balveda faces, is as much representative of the Culture as Balveda's. This comparison helps us understand further the nature of the Culture and the grand scale it all works on. In the passage where we learn of Fal as a Referrer, we also learn that most of the humans in the Culture dedicate their lives to the things viewed as really important - art, games, sport, romance and study. Those bored of this lifestyle, however, tend to join Contact, who are view
ed during the war as the Culture's military division, although they would claim that they are just interested in exploration. When the war started, they had to adapt in order to protect the Culture's interests and ideologies. This is the organisation we follow in most of the Culture novels, as obviously there is only so much you can write about people studying.

What is the Culture? It is a society built on the ability for every human to enjoy his or her life to the fullest. There are enough resources for everyone to survive in relative luxury, and so the idea of personal property has been all but wiped out. With the necessity to earn a living removed, people are free to dedicate themselves to things in life they really enjoy. Some of the best artists and craftsmen this fictional universe has ever known have come out of the Culture, as they have had the time and resources to dedicate themselves to their work. Many people have the time to study too, and the unimaginably large libraries of information amassed and analysed by members of the Culture are one of their proudest works. They are also explorers, and the Contact division studies yet unexplored worlds, and often takes the time to interfere with these worlds in an attempt to bring them to the level of 'enlightenment' the Culture currently possesses. The Culture is many people's idea of a perfect society, and yet, like all groups, it makes mistakes. Some novels look at these mistakes, others consider what could be called success in a gruesome way, and this one looks at the most unfortunate mistake a society can make - waging war. The Culture felt its identity and moral right to exist was threatened by the Idirans, a race expanding to create more subjects for their God. The Idirans felt that the Culture were a race of hedonist, blasphemers who ignored the Gods in favour of their own personal pleasure. The war was not fought over specific territories, although obviously control of are
as did change hands, rather it was fought over who had the right organisation and philosophy.

Many of Banks' sci-fi novels have a rather obvious tie to modern society. With Consider Phlebas, however, Banks explores two different avenues. The creation and description of the Culture is obviously very important to the novel, equal in importance to the plot itself. This is the book all his other Culture novels were based on, and it defines the Culture in the best way possible, through comparison. The Idirans, who are fiercely religious, are perhaps the perfect opposite to the atheist, non-hierarchical Culture. The sentimentality and respect for opposition that is common in the Culture is wonderfully represented in the naming of the last ship our Mind occupies. The book is also an allegory about the futility of war, one perhaps important to remember in these tumultuous days. Billions of lives were lost, and in the end very little changed. At the end of the day though, that is the nature of the Culture - nothing really changes.

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