What I've Been Reading: July 2013 to September 2013 (Featuring the Work of Iain M. Banks)

This covers nearly all of the books I read or at least finished in this period (in the case of the non-fiction ones, I had started reading them previously but only read a bit at a time). There was another novel that I finished at the beginning of October, but I decided to cover that in a future post. As for the reference to Iain M. Banks in the title, I read two of his novels in this period and I have talked about them at greater length than most of the other books. I also spent a couple of paragraphs talking about his work in general, for reasons explained below.

The Book of Daniel by E. L. Doctorow
This is a thought-provoking though dark and slightly disturbing book. The book centers on a graduate student named Daniel Lewin and his family. As the book progresses, it slowly becomes clear that Daniel Lewin’s birth parents, the Isaacsons, are based very closely on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, though there are some differences. One obvious one is that the Rosenbergs had two sons, while in the novel, Daniel has a sister. Also, both Daniel and his sister Susan have some serious issues that I don’t think either of the Rosenberg sons had (I once met Robert Meeropol, the younger son of the Rosenbergs, in person and as I read this book I couldn’t help wondering if he had read it and what he thought of Susan’s suicidal tendencies and Daniel’s occasionally abusive behavior to his wife and child). Regardless, the book paints a dark and probably broadly accurate picture of the 1950s anti-Communist paranoia that led to the Rosenbergs’ deaths. The story switches almost at random between first person narration by Daniel and third person. While this doesn’t do much for the book’s readability, it creates an additional parallel with the biblical book of Daniel, which also switches between first and third person, if not as frequently. The book is pretty well-written and tackles some important issues, though it is not an easy read with its occasionally jarring shifts in time and subject as well as narrative point of view.

Tailchaser’s Song by Tad Williams
This was the first published novel by fantasy author Tad Williams. It is an animal fantasy featuring cats. Inevitably it invites comparisons to Richard Adams’ Watership Down, the best known animal fantasy of this type. There are definitely some similarities, such as the tales told by the cats about their mythological figures, which bring to mind the tales of El-ahrairah in Watership Down. However, Williams has his own style, and his picture of the feral cat society is as well drawn in its way as the society of Adams’ rabbits (the cats’ story of the origin and nature of M’an – humans – is particularly clever). The plot is sufficiently engrossing and the characters are appealing. There are some twists, though a few of them are not difficult to guess at. All in all, while the book doesn’t have the depth or complexity of Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy or his standalone novel The War of the Flowers, it is a solid and enjoyable fantasy.

Matter by Iain M. Banks
On one of the flights we took during our trip in June, I picked up an International Herald Tribune in which I came across the headline “Iain Banks, 59, Scottish novelist and sci-fi writer”. So it was that I learned that one of my favorite science fiction authors (and author of several mainstream novels that I also quite liked) had died of gall bladder cancer. Apparently he had only been diagnosed with it a few months earlier, and had learned at the time that it was already too late to stop it. In his public announcement about it, he showed that he hadn’t lost his sense of humor; he also announced that he was marrying his longtime girlfriend, remarking he had asked her if she would “do me the honour of becoming my widow.” He seemed to have come to terms with his fate, though regrettably he succumbed even faster than he was expected to, so he didn’t survive until the release of his final book, which had already been moved up due to his condition.

Iain Banks wrote both mainstream, “literary” fiction and science fiction. He wrote the former under the name “Iain Banks” and the latter as “Iain M. Banks”. Both varieties were popular and critically praised, though he complained that some literary snobs seemed to regard his mainstream novels as his “real” work, even suggesting that he only wrote science fiction as a money-maker to support his mainstream novels. Banks said if anything it was the other way round, as his greatest love was science fiction, even though the mainstream novels often sold better. The science fiction work was popular as well though, and as a number of commentators (such as this one) have remarked, in the Culture, the society at the center of most of his science fiction novels, he created one of the most convincing utopias ever to appear in literature, one that most people would actually want to live in.

Matter was the only Banks novel I already had a copy of that I hadn’t read yet. Published in 2008, it was his first Culture novel in eight years. He said in an interview that he had been worried that he was running out of ideas for his science fiction (he observed that while mainstream fiction can focus on things like relationship, science fiction needs big ideas to make it worth writing), but he was able to get his creative juices flowing by writing the non-Culture science fiction novel The Algebraist, an excellent work certainly not lacking in ideas. Matter is also packed full of ideas, the most impressive being the Shellworlds, though the Nestworld of the alien Morthanveld is also incredibly imaginative. I won’t attempt to describe either here, but while they may strike a physicist as somewhat improbable – they would take astounding amounts of energy to construct, as well as plenty of “unobtainium” (Banks himself has said this is what many of the Culture’s artifacts are made of) – the same could be said of Dyson spheres, and these are at least as cool and rather more complex.

The story revolves around the three children of the king of the Sarl, a people living on one of the layers of the Shellworld Sursamen. The Sarl are at a technological level somewhere between that of the Renaissance and the early Industrial Revolution, though they are aware of more advanced civilizations, including the Culture. Much of the novel focuses on assassinations, political maneuvering, and war among the Sarl, though gradually it becomes apparent that there is a deeper, more ancient mystery at the heart of these machinations, one that draws in the more advanced civilizations, including the Culture. The novel’s final climax – and the similarly explosive (ahem) event that heralds the fast-paced ending section – may seem a little abrupt considering the long set-up, but according to Banks, this was deliberate on his part. I might have liked to have seen a few more things explained and more loose ends tied up, but I’ll also admit there is an artistic neatness to the sudden, dramatic ending, and there is a brief epilogue that provides a partial dénouement.

One word of warning for those who become overly attached to the characters in a novel (semi-spoiler alert): at some point midway through I started speculating on which of the major characters (the three siblings plus two or three others) might end up dying. From his other books, I knew that Banks occasionally kills off major characters even on the “good guy” side, sometimes unexpectedly, though generally not quite as casually as, say, George R. R. Martin. In this case, I started wondering who if anyone among the main characters might not make it. Without giving too much away, I will say that as it turned out, the body count was higher than I expected. In one or two cases, one could reasonably wonder why Banks spent so much time developing a character only to eliminate them the way he does. This feeling is enhanced by the contrast between the lengthy build-up and the fast-paced conclusion, something that some readers have criticized, not entirely without reason. But as I said, Banks did this deliberately (though of course the critics may argue that he was wrong to do so), and there's something to be said for defying the reader's expectations – after all, it isn't as if unexpected death doesn't strike in real life, or that such death necessarily negates all prior meaning in the person's life (a topic that is the theme of the novel I'll discuss next). In any case, Matter has so many interesting ideas that combined with Banks’ literary but very readable and occasionally witty prose, the book is excellent reading despite these issues. As with a book like Infinite Jest (which doesn’t have a proper ending at all), the journey is well worth any disappointment the reader may feel with the destination.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
This classic novel, which won Thornton Wilder a Pulitzer Prize and has appeared on a number of best novel lists, tells the stories of the five people who died when a (fictional) bridge in Peru collapsed in the 18th century, and of the priest who investigated their lives in hopes of scientifically proving that God had chosen these particular individuals to die on this occasion. Some of the characters are based roughly on real people (for instance, there really was a famous actress in 18th century Peru named Micaela Villegas who was known as La Perricholi and was the mistress of the Viceroy), but while Wilder’s depiction of 18th century Peru seems very true to life, his primary interest is not to relate actual history, but to explore deeper questions. According to Wilder himself, one of his inspirations was Luke 13:4-5, in which Jesus ask rhetorically whether the people who died in the collapse of a tower in Jerusalem were guiltier than anyone else, and concludes that they were not. Wilder uses his novel to pose a similar question about what gives a life meaning. But, as he explained afterward, the book is not meant to actually answer these questions, just to state them clearly. The result is a thought-provoking meditation on human existence. Wilder’s prose is clear and very readable, which together with the relative shortness of the book (just over a hundred pages) makes this one of the most accessible classic novels around.

Beowulf (translated by Burton Raffel)
Beowulf, written – or composed, as it was probably originally an oral work rather than a written one – by an unknown author sometime between 700 and 1000 CE, is the most famous extant work in Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon). This modern translation is surprisingly readable. This is probably helped by the poet’s digressions being shorter and less frequent than I recall Virgil’s being (it’s been longer since I’ve read either of Homer’s epic poems, so I can’t remember how often he went off on tangents), not to mention the relatively short length of the poem (it’s just under a hundred pages in the volume I have).

One interesting aspect of the poem is that in several cases where the poet mentions a woman who is the daughter, mother or wife of a male character, he doesn’t give their name (Beowulf’s mother is one such example). This would seem to hint that women were considered unimportant. On the other hand, a couple of women do get named, such as Hrothgar’s queen’s Welthow and Higlac’s queen Higd, and are described quite favorably. Welthow is even given several speeches. Another interesting thing about the poem is that it is obvious that it was a major inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s work, and even for fantasy role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. Of course, Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and wrote scholarly works on Beowulf, so it is not really surprising that it would have influenced him, but it’s still striking how much of it will seem familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings (such as the references to kings as “ring-givers”) or to D&D players (Beowulf’s search for and battle against Grendel’s mother in an underground lair sounds very much like a D&D adventure). So not only is Beowulf a must-read for those interested in the history of English literature or in the societies of the medieval Viking peoples, it also holds considerable interest for fans of fantasy and even role-playing gamers.

The Grand Tour: A Traveler’s Guide to the Solar System by Ron Miller and William K. Hartmann
I recently finished reading through the third edition of this book (published 2005), an updated and expanded edition of a book I first acquired as a boy in the early 1980s, when it was one of my favorite astronomy books. The approach taken by the authors is different from the standard way of examining the Solar System starting with Mercury and traveling outward. Instead, they look at the planets, satellites, asteroids and other bodies in the Solar System (other than the Sun itself) beginning with the largest, the gas giant Jupiter, and proceeding in order of size. Thus Saturn is next, followed by Uranus, Neptune, Earth, Venus, Mars, Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, Saturn’s moon Titan, Mercury, and so forth. Though there are quite a few photos taken by space probes or the Hubble Space Telescope, most of the illustrations are artwork and paintings by the authors, showing imaginary but highly realistic views of the various Solar System bodies. While Miller did the majority of the art, Hartmann, who is also a professional astronomer, did a substantial amount as well. Both also shared writing duties. In the course of the book they occasionally go off on short diatribes about ignorant people back on Earth, such as “conservative ideologues” who attack the science of climate change or the contrast between the empirical science that allowed astronomers to predict the tidal heating of Io and the claims of “religious fundamentalists and mystics” like self-proclaimed astral travelers and so-called creation scientists. But these asides are quite brief, not to mention being correct, so the vast majority of the book is filled with clear descriptions of the various planets and other objects, and those incredible illustrations. While it may be that no human alive today – or even in the far future – will actually be able to stand on most of these bodies and see the literally otherworldly vistas they offer, through Miller and Hartmann’s work we can at least get a good idea of what it would be like to do so.

The First Punic War: A Military History by John Lazenby
This book is the only one I know of devoted solely to the first of the three wars between Carthage and Rome, though there are a few (one of which I own) that cover all three wars and even more that cover the Second Punic War. One of the best of the latter is Hannibal’s War, which was also written by John Lazenby. While The First Punic War comes across as somewhat more cursory and less detailed than Hannibal’s War, this is largely a problem of the sources, as Lazenby explains at the beginning. Quite simply, the ancient accounts of the First Punic War that have survived are much more limited in scope than those that deal with the Second Punic War and themselves lack much in the way of detail. In addition, the extant accounts date from well after the war, though some of them may be based on more contemporary sources that haven’t survived. Given these problems, Lazenby did a good job of bringing the ancient sources, supplemented by some archaeological information, together into a clear account of what was the greatest naval war of ancient times (and included one of the largest – if not the largest – naval battles of all time, the Battle of Ecnomus). I might have liked to see a bit more commentary on Lazenby’s part about some of the individuals and events, as he mostly sticks to a bare recitation of the facts. However, given the limited information at his disposal, perhaps he was wiser to refrain from, for instance, commenting much on the generalship of various Carthaginian and Roman leaders. In any case, this is a good account of this important war, though those who prefer more colorful history might be better off with an account of the much better-known Second Punic War. On the other hand, this war seems like fertile ground for a historical novel, since its twenty three years and numerous battles on sea and land, coupled with our limited knowledge of the details, leave a lot of scope for an imaginative writer to work in. Certainly for anyone attempting such a work, Lazenby’s book would be indispensable.

Inversions by Iain M. Banks
As sort of a belated tribute to Iain Banks, I decided to reread one of his novels soon after finishing Matter, despite my general rule of not reading two books by the same author within a short space of time, unless they are part of a connected series. Inversions, if I remember correctly, was actually the first Banks novel I ever read, or at most the second (it’s possible that I read Consider Phlebas or The Player of Games first, since I no longer quite remember the sequence in which I read them).

It was not even obvious at first glance that Inversions had anything to do with science fiction. It is set on a world where the technological level is roughly that of Europe in the late medieval to early Renaissance period. It consists of two interwoven accounts, centered around two individuals who seemingly have only two key characteristics in common; they are both outsiders hailing from very distant lands and they are both extremely competent at what they do. In many other ways, they are opposites, as to a certain extent are the leaders they serve. Vosill, or simply the Doctor, is a physician to the King in a long-established monarchy, while DeWar is the bodyguard of a leader responsible for overthrowing a monarchy. One heals, while the other kills. On the other hand, Vosill’s master seems to be a conservative with a deep belief in the divine right of kings, while DeWar’s comes across as more progressive.

But of course, as is usual in Banks’ novels, there is more going on than meets the eye. For one thing, we learn that Vosill and DeWar may have more in common than anyone around them knows. DeWar relates a story that clues the reader into both of their origins, without laying it out specifically. It also hints that the two of them are opposites in an additional way: they hold opposing beliefs about the right of a technologically superior civilization to interfere in the course of a more primitive one’s development. In some ways, the entire novel is a reflection of these opposing beliefs. Needless to say, there are many other surprises and plot twists in store for the reader, together with Banks’ excellent and often witty prose.

Anyone who has never read any of Banks’ sci-fi novels might enjoy reading this the way I did the first time, without any preconceived notions about the unspoken background of the book and specifically the two chief protagonists. Anyone who wants to do so should stop reading this now and just go out and get the book. For anyone who is more familiar with Banks’ work or doesn’t mind a very minor spoiler, I will conclude by saying that Inversions is a masterfully written look at the Culture, the utopian, galaxy-spanning society Banks created, from the bottom, i.e., from the perspective of one of the less advanced planets that the Culture decides to take a hand in influencing toward a particular path of development. It is all the more clever in that the reader is never specifically told that the Culture is involved, though the clues are fairly obvious to those familiar with it, and even those who aren't will beginning to guess by the end. In any case, it is definitely recommend reading.