Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks

Ellen Willott

Consider Phlebas is an action-packed, cynical space opera which follows small stories against the backdrop of a big war. The first book in Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, it is ambitious, thoughtful, and very funny.

The book opens on the protagonist, Horza, drowning in a ritualistic torture chamber filling with the excrement of those in the palace above. Strong start. None of your: 1000 names that are mostly consonants and descriptions of vast planes that have no meaning yet.

Then, a really nice balance of exposition to ‘you’ll figure it out’ ratio. Masterfully done. Horza is passionate and cynical, emotion driven and stoic, a wonderfully complex, cocky spy who can change his body to look like anyone else’s and has poison under his nails. Sexy poison toad. Or, chameleon, more accurately.

Horza is rescued, but things very quickly go to pot. His next mission goes astray, a diversion that leads him halfway across the galaxy. His landing on a dodgily-captained pirate spaceship adds a nice bit of texture to the inter-galactic politics and warfare, filling out the world a bit.

It all starts feeling a bit like A Series of Unfortunate Events or the first Earthsea book when it looks like Horza is going to jump from fix to fix, barely (and somewhat implausibly) able to wriggle out of various situations which include a megaship that’s ramming itself into an ice berg, and ritualistic cannibalism on an island on an Orbital (space city) that’s about to be spectacularly blown up. To be fair though, he does not come out of either situation unscathed; it gets nail-bitingly close.

Though of course, you know he’ll survive for as much of the book you have left. Thankfully, he reunites with the space pirate crew and his cool space lover, preventing a saga structure made up of a series of barely connected events.

The only bit that I really didn’t enjoy is Horza’s brief captivity with the cannibal cult. First of all, this is the second diversion, the second plot turn, and I’m beginning to wonder if we’re going to get back to the pull of the main plot, or whether the whole (not short) book is going to be Horza getting buffeted by the winds of fate across the galaxy like a discarded puppet in storm Ailsa.

Secondly, the cult chapter is bizarrely reminiscent of European accounts of indigenous American ritualistic torture. I should know, because I’m writing a dissertation about this at the moment. It’s not identical by any means, which suggests that maybe Banks doesn’t know that’s what he’s drawing on. This isn’t unlikely; one of my dissertation’s main arguments is about how early ethnography was translated into the mainstream of eighteenth-century European society as fictional stereotypes which grew further from the realities of the early accounts. But what with the canoes, the public displays of torture, severed fingers, cannibalism, and that fact that torture symbolises an increase in the community’s strength, it all felt a bit uncanny when I’ve just written a sample about the torture scenes that the popular readership were obsessed with in eighteen-century Europe. I accept that this is quite a niche experience of this chapter, but even people who can’t explicitly make that link would hear the racial (or pre-racial) exoticised undertones in the scene. In addition to the off-the-peg ‘rude society’ stereotypes, Banks adds some imaginatively unpleasant images that will live with me for a long time.

All this is more jarring because the rest of the book’s politics are properly left wing. You’ve got two huge political powers who both think that they are the end-products of evolution: a sly mirror held up to transhumanism. Consider Phlebas problematises liberal moral interventionism which barely disguises a desire for power.

The book ends with chillingly informational Wikipedia-style entries which summarise the war of the main story, as well as what the surviving characters went on to do. The detached voice makes it clear that both sides, now a long time ago, were both fighting for the belief in themselves as the correct branch of evolution. The final pages suddenly zoom out so that whole species become a footnote in what was seemingly a small war, relatively speaking, since only a few hundred billion individuals died. You watch as Horza goes from supporting the side with the best claim to the next stage of evolution, to none of it mattering at all. As in the next Culture book, Iain M. Banks delivers a jaded image of the inevitability and futility of war, considering the paradox of ‘warring for peace’, and prosperity giving license to meddle with the long arm of ‘secular evangelism’. Ideologies are beautiful until they are reduced to egotism and then the pragmatism of war, virtually irrelevant when it comes to guns. At the same time, the ending is very funny, as it describes in complete deadpan the various fates that befall the survivors of the story like the after-credits at the end of a Bake Off series.

I don’t know if I’m too far down the rabbit hole of my dissertation, but this book felt a lot like an intergalactic romp through questions of societal progress. And if that doesn’t make you want to read it, I don’t know what will. (Joking. Mostly.)