Riting a revyoo as thoh I wuz Bascule seems 2 me the obveeyus cors. 1 mit even say the playd cors; the yoosd up an cleechayd cors. But a browz uv the revyoos postd on Goodreedz indicayts uderwize. I wood ½ thot bi now sumbudy wood ½ ritten a revyoo in the styl uv Bascule but it apeerz not 2 b the cays.Thayr r meny protaguniss in Feersum Endjin but Bascule iz reely the dryvin chayractr. Hez the regyoolar gi we can idennify wif. Hez the unliklee hero frust in2 sercumstansis beyond hiz understandin or cuntrol and givin the oportoonity 2 mayk brav deesishins wif the fayt uv hyoomanity in the balans. Hiz brayvry leedz him 2 perform acts uv grayt consikwens, even if he cant c thos consikwensis frum hiz limitd perzpektiv. Bascule playz an eesentil rol in helping the gud giz win the day and he duznt even no it (until the end, enwayz). Hez juss dooin whot seemz ryt to him.Enwayz, az u ½ now gesd, Bascule ryts in an uncunvenshinol fashin. Ubowt a ¼ uv the book, maybee a litl mor, is riten in the 1st persun by Bascule, hoo hass a lerning disubiluty. He can tok normuly but can onlee ryt foneticly. An the ofor, Ean Bankz, poolz this of brilyantly.As I sit here attempting to write like Bascule I can tell you it isn’t as easy at it might sound. It takes some amount of concentration. And it takes some concentration to read Bascule’s account of events. It’s not for the lazy reader. Banks’ ability to write awkwardly and unfamiliarly yet make it sound like a substantive, caring, and relatable person is pretty damn amazing. But like many of Banks’ novels there's more beneath the surface. Underlying Bascule’s phonetic writing is a point of much more substance, a commentary on the struggle we humans endure to communicate with one another and with the world. It’ll take me several steps to get there, so try to hang with me ...The world of Feersum Endjin contains too many details to paint them all, and the big picture itself is difficult to paint because you can’t stand back far enough to take it all in. Take, for example, the absurdly oversize castle called Serehfa in which much of the Earth’s population lives. We’re talking a castle built to scale for people who stand hundreds of meters tall. A castle with walls standing several kilometers high, the tops obscured by haze and the shear cliff-faces running to the horizon on your right and left. A central tower that tickles the underbelly of outer space. A structure set atop a three-kilometer tall mesa in one room that, seen from afar, looks like a chandelier lowered from the ceiling for spring cleaning. Seen up close, the chandelier is a city of elaborate, soaring, glass-paneled skyscrapers. A structure is set kilometers high in the corner of one room that, seen from afar, looks like a baroque decorative gargoyle. Seen up close the gargoyle is a residential complex where people enjoy the view from balconies in the eyes. The larger rooms have their own weather systems. One room contains a volcano. Others contain lakes and rivers and hills and valleys. The rooms in the higher levels—each level standing a couple kilometers tall—are perpetually cold, and one of them holds a year-round ski-resort. In what would be a castle’s dungeon, the somber port city of Oubliette (you heard that right) sits beside a black ocean that hasn’t seen sunlight in millennia. Now, stay with me here ...You can visualize parts of the castle Serehfa. Your imagination has painted pictures—perhaps even detailed pictures—of the corner of one room and the centerpiece in another, of one small piece of the horizon-spanning castle walls. Your mind is busily filling in random details plucked from your memory to create a room with a volcano, and a room with lakes and rivers, hills and valleys. You know what a ski resort looks like so your mind simply places it inside a vast interior space. But visualizing the whole castle? No. Definitely not. Just a few scattered pieces that contain sufficiently familiar elements for your mind to grab on to, like a good handhold on a cliff face. But pull back and urge your imagination to paint the entire monstrosity ... and you’re hand will miss a handhold, your foot slip from a niche, and you go tumbling right on down. Still with me? Even through the mixed metaphors? Good. Let’s take the next step ...What if the castle Serehfa was not just a physical setting for our young hero Bascule’s adventures? It’s a hell of a setting, to be sure, another example of Banks’ penchant for conceiving breathtaking, larger-than-life locales for his characters to roam. But what if Serehfa was, let’s say, a lens to focus the reader's thoughts and a pattern for those thoughts to follow ... an archetype, perhaps. Once you know how to picture Serehfa (by which I mean you’ve realized that you can’t picture Serehfa, you can only picture pieces of it), you can begin to picture how you exist in, and relate to, our contemporary human society. You're thinking that sounds ambitious, yes? A tenuous connection, maybe? Well, let’s see if I can make this idea stick ...The society in Feersum Endjin is too massive, complex, and even contradictory to pull together in a big picture that makes much sense. That society encompasses the living and the dead, the first-lifers and the reincarnated, the physical and the virtual, the human-basic and the chimeric. Those diverse brush strokes are weaved together in a multifaceted symphony of color that defies our ability to imagine. What Banks paints for us through the stories of Bascule and other individuals are the detailed sections--like the rooms in Serehfa--that our minds can conceive of. But focusing on the detailed sections prevents us from seeing the whole picture. So we try to step back. Unfortunately, stepping back causes us to lose sight of the comprehendable details, leaving a wash of generalities, and, worse, the stepping back is in vain because we never can step back far enough to take in the whole construction. Sounds like our archetype, doesn't it? Yes, you answer with a bored sigh. It's so faaaascinating, you say sarcastically as you snicker to one another. I know, I know, you’re attention span is getting shorter as this review gets longer. Don’t worry, there’s just one more step, I promise ...I maintain that our contemporary human society is not so different from the Serehfa archetype, nor from the fictional future society to which we've already applied the archetype. We may not have chimerics walking the sidewalks, or sentient AI's floating around our internets, or reincarnated people in our living rooms, but our world is no less strange or diverse in its own way; no less intricate or impossibly complex. We each can see and understand the detailed sections painted by our own stories and those around us, but when we step back, when we lose the context of the individual, we are prone to make sweeping generalities.Fine, you say between yawns, so what? What has this all got to do with Bascule and his learning disability? Okay, so there's one more step. I'm sorry about that, but here's where I try to bring it all together: The way Bascule writes is the way we relate to this world, to our "Serehfa." Our world is full of rules, oh so many rules, for fitting in. And like the rules of the English written language, some make sense and some don’t. Some are consistent while others are contradictory. Some rules have a logical basis while others are wholly arbitrary. So how do we survive in this vast, complex monstrosity of a world where we’ll never understand the whole picture but we can see little sections in detail and which imposes upon us multifarious rules that make no sense? We speak to it phonetically, willing people to understand us and praying people will forgive us for our lapses, trying like mad to concentrate on the phonetic mutterings emanating from our friends and loved ones so we can understand them. And all the while we’re hoping like hell that the insignificant section we paint leaves some meaning behind when we’re gone.
Well. It's earth that's on the verge of an ice age. It's also an earth where people who are left behind (earth having been vacated by those who wanted to be space explorers) have forgotten science, and are mystics. It's an earth where cities have died and the last bastion of civilization is an enormous castle called Serehfa. It's an earth where the people live 8 lives, after which they move into a virtual world called the crypt and have 8 more lives to live there. It's an earth where there's a battle on between the rulers and the engineers, to control who gets to live when the ice age does happen. In the middle of this are four people who are protagonists of our story. Count Sessine is a high born who has already exhausted all his physical lives, and is perilously close to have finished with his virtual life as well. Before that he needs to find out why he is being hunted down and assassinated. There is a young woman who goes by the title of "Asura", who is either a virus trying to infect everything she touches, or she's the one hope of humanity sent by the uncorrupted portions of the crypt. The problem is that she doesn't know which one she is. There is a Master Scientist, a high born called Gadfium, who along with others is conspiring against the king, because she does not agree with the war against engineers. Then there is Bascule, a dyslexic young one who has a healthy imagination and curiosity to see something through. He is also a teller, a person who can contact beings in the crypt and get their stories. I thought about writing this review in Bascule fashion, but couldn't get beyond two lines. It's a feersum thing indeed. Considering Bascule takes up about a full quarter of the book and is consistently the most interesting part of it, by far, Iain M. Banks has my unending respect. It's not for everyone. I've always been able to read text speak easily (just not able to write it), but I know a lot of people who would be put off by chapters worth of it. But it's worth the extra time it takes to read it. It's only writing, mind. Bascule has grammar, just not spelling. More than that, Bascule has humor. And that becomes important because other three quarters of the book is made up of very serious persons. It's a great world, sometimes confusing, sometimes contradictory, always imaginative. The societal structure is very well done. It's dense enough to require full attention. Even though I was as attentive as I could get, I probably still need another go around to actually figure out some of the architecture of the world. The crypt is a fascinating space, especially with Bascule as a navigator. It was a bit long, and more than a little convoluted. I lost track of the characters more than once, because of all the duplicates of physical and virtual people running around in crypt space. The ending too was abrupt. I would have loved to know more about the crypt and its denizens. I would have loved to know what they do to disperse the dust cloud. But it was still a super fun read that I normally wouldn't have read. This was my first Banks book, and I will be back for more.
Do You like book Feersum Endjinn (1996)?
Iain M. Banks is the only sf author I've actively pursued in years. His Culture novels have been particularly interesting, their sociological framework being unusually intelligent for the genre.This is not a Culture novel per se, though, god knows, it may fit in somewhere as pre-C in the broad canvas of Banks' imagination. What it is is a future Earth story, date unstated, but certainly not near-future. The ostensible plot-driver is an interstellar cloud which, increasingly, is occluding solar radiation, threatening all life on the planet. As usual, the story is approached from the perspectives of several, disparate characters and much is left mysterious until the final chapter.Unfortunately, much, too much, remains mysterious even after the final page is read. Assuming this is a standalone novel, it lacks the advantage of the Culture ones in that they, among themselves, pretty much explain, or at least promise to explain, everything. Here one wonders about how this advanced society lacks space faring capacities when it is clear that much of the population, "the Diaspora", flew off long ago. In other respects they're quite technologically advanced, yet in still other respects they're politically and sociologically atavistic. Common people exist in this book only as faceless masses ruled by--get this!--a king and council. The impression after finishing the thing is that it itself wasn't finished.Most irritating is that one of the major protagonists is only represented phonetically (e.g. the book's title)--a disability mentioned but once explicitly, a device which serves no purpose so far as I could see except to slow down the reading.If I'd never read anything by Banks except this, I'd never read him again. Fortunately, I know better and intend to try some of his straight fiction next.
—Erik Graff
Iain M Banks went off and wrote a few non-Culture sf books just to prove he could, and what we got was a dazzling, baroque novel about a moribund future Earth about to be swamped by an interstellar dust cloud and the efforts of various parties to activate ancient defense systems which, if they actually exist, may save the day, while the ruling elite for reason of their own, work to thwart these efforts. The book is also notable because fully one third of it is spelled fonetikly, with the result that it's best read in a Scottish accent and probably some sort of literary joke about Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. It's utterly brilliant.
—Nigel
When I finished this novel I wasn't sure if I liked it. With a good portion of the book written in the vernacular of our grammar-challenged hero, and a whole lot of heady stuff like cyber regions and vast settings, Iain Banks isn't giving the reader an easy go of it. I even had to seach the Internet fordiscussions on the story afterwords to be sure that what happened was what I thought had happened.Looking back after a few days I just can't help but be impressed with the novel as a whole. So yeah, if you've read Iain Banks, you already know what a brilliant chap he is. This, like all his other novels I've read, is worth the effort.
—Bill
