Look to Windward, by Iain M Banks
Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2008 4:13 am
Since the publication of The Star Fraction, MacLeod has been linked with Banks: as well as their shared home-city of Edinburgh, there’s a similarity in tone in their fiction, and a common political dimension. In Cosmonaut Keep , MacLeod has based his story around a joke. And so too has Banks in Look To Windward . Admittedly, there’s always been some element of piss-take in Banks’s SF novels, but in Look To Windward it’s more overt than usual. Entire conversations are no more than a sequence of one-liners. One narrative strand initially seems to be linked to the main plot, only to prove completely irrelevant. And for the ending, Banks introduces some new technology which makes a nonsense of much of the Culture’s technological underpinnings. But, of course, none of this is entirely unexpected in an Iain Banks novel.
The biggest joke of all, however… Ziller and Quinlan are Chelgrians, members of an alien race that has only just recovered from a fierce civil war. Ziller is a voluntary exile, currently living on the Culture Orbital Masaq’. He is also a highly-regarded composer, and something of a folk-hero to dissident factions of Chelgrian society. Quinlan is an army major, tasked with inviting Ziller back to post-civil war Chel. Or at least that is his purported task. (Saying more would constitute a spoiler.)
Look To Windward is essentially a character-study of Quinlan, an alien. Banks must be taking the piss: who else would write a character study of an alien? And do it so badly? Because Quinlan is only really a funny-looking human. Banks has written a character-study of a “man in a rubber suit”. He gets away with it because he writes so well, but any differences between the Chelgrians and humans are, besides the obvious physiological ones, purely societal. The Chelgrians had a caste-based society (the cause of their civil war); the Chelgrians can communicate with those who have gone Beyond, i.e., those members of their race who have died and been accepted into “heaven”.
Even the plot of Look To Windward , which is founded on Quinlan’s real mission on Masaq’, is a result of social and historical forces, and not psychological. Quinlan could just as easily have been a member of a variant human society.
Along the way to the denouement, Banks expands his universe by unconvincingly tacking on a cosmic dimension. All of Banks’s Culture novels have been space operas, and all have been, at base, about people. Their galactic backdrop was merely Big Country, which allowed for outrageous landscapes. Look To Windward , however, tries to be cosmic in scope. There have been races which have “transcended”. It’s the nearest Banks has ever come to a meaning to life, the universe and everything, and it sits oddly on the history he has built through his previous novels. Yes, the core of Look To Windward is the purely personal decision that must be made by Quinlan (and, by extension, Ziller also), but that decision is function of this newly-added cosmic dimension. It’s as if a manual for a word-processing package had suddenly started discussing computing theory. It doesn’t quite fit, and it’s unnecessarily complicating the story.
Other than the above, there’s little to quibble about. Banks throws in more of his outrageous landscapes, and adds welcome detail to a landscape that has appeared in previous books, namely an orbital. The Chelgrians are disappointing as an alien race, but not as individual characters. Using music as a focal point in a novel is never easy—the writer usually comes across as either pompous or deluded—but Banks manages to successfully overcome that hurdle. The Culture’s technology has never been more than off-the-page hand-waving, flashing lights and machines that go “ping”, but that’s never been a handicap. In Look To Windward , however, Banks manages an own goal by introducing a completely new order of technology. And for what seems a mostly pointless reason—perhaps I should rephrase that: closure is never pointless, but tying up everything often results in an ungainly knot.
My favourite Banks SF novel is still Against A Dark Background , perhaps because it so clearly presents itself as what it actually is: pure space opera. The freedoms of the Culture make it an interesting background, and the perfect backdrop for the stories Banks tells, but the more he tries to widen his gaze the more it is revealed for the ramshackle Heath-Robinson construction it is. Those glints at the ground-level of Banks’s Culture novels are brilliant writing; those glints in the universe of the Culture novels are magpie-like borrowings from the rest of the genre. Against A Dark Background boasted the first of these, but not the second.
The biggest joke of all, however… Ziller and Quinlan are Chelgrians, members of an alien race that has only just recovered from a fierce civil war. Ziller is a voluntary exile, currently living on the Culture Orbital Masaq’. He is also a highly-regarded composer, and something of a folk-hero to dissident factions of Chelgrian society. Quinlan is an army major, tasked with inviting Ziller back to post-civil war Chel. Or at least that is his purported task. (Saying more would constitute a spoiler.)
Look To Windward is essentially a character-study of Quinlan, an alien. Banks must be taking the piss: who else would write a character study of an alien? And do it so badly? Because Quinlan is only really a funny-looking human. Banks has written a character-study of a “man in a rubber suit”. He gets away with it because he writes so well, but any differences between the Chelgrians and humans are, besides the obvious physiological ones, purely societal. The Chelgrians had a caste-based society (the cause of their civil war); the Chelgrians can communicate with those who have gone Beyond, i.e., those members of their race who have died and been accepted into “heaven”.
Even the plot of Look To Windward , which is founded on Quinlan’s real mission on Masaq’, is a result of social and historical forces, and not psychological. Quinlan could just as easily have been a member of a variant human society.
Along the way to the denouement, Banks expands his universe by unconvincingly tacking on a cosmic dimension. All of Banks’s Culture novels have been space operas, and all have been, at base, about people. Their galactic backdrop was merely Big Country, which allowed for outrageous landscapes. Look To Windward , however, tries to be cosmic in scope. There have been races which have “transcended”. It’s the nearest Banks has ever come to a meaning to life, the universe and everything, and it sits oddly on the history he has built through his previous novels. Yes, the core of Look To Windward is the purely personal decision that must be made by Quinlan (and, by extension, Ziller also), but that decision is function of this newly-added cosmic dimension. It’s as if a manual for a word-processing package had suddenly started discussing computing theory. It doesn’t quite fit, and it’s unnecessarily complicating the story.
Other than the above, there’s little to quibble about. Banks throws in more of his outrageous landscapes, and adds welcome detail to a landscape that has appeared in previous books, namely an orbital. The Chelgrians are disappointing as an alien race, but not as individual characters. Using music as a focal point in a novel is never easy—the writer usually comes across as either pompous or deluded—but Banks manages to successfully overcome that hurdle. The Culture’s technology has never been more than off-the-page hand-waving, flashing lights and machines that go “ping”, but that’s never been a handicap. In Look To Windward , however, Banks manages an own goal by introducing a completely new order of technology. And for what seems a mostly pointless reason—perhaps I should rephrase that: closure is never pointless, but tying up everything often results in an ungainly knot.
My favourite Banks SF novel is still Against A Dark Background , perhaps because it so clearly presents itself as what it actually is: pure space opera. The freedoms of the Culture make it an interesting background, and the perfect backdrop for the stories Banks tells, but the more he tries to widen his gaze the more it is revealed for the ramshackle Heath-Robinson construction it is. Those glints at the ground-level of Banks’s Culture novels are brilliant writing; those glints in the universe of the Culture novels are magpie-like borrowings from the rest of the genre. Against A Dark Background boasted the first of these, but not the second.