Surface Detail
Author: Iain M Banks
Publisher: Orbit Books, London, England
Edition: 2011 Reprint
ISBN: 978-1-84149-895-9
Condition: Good. Clean copy with tight binding.
Language: English
Binding: Paperback
Pages: 627
Additional Information
Iain M Banks has never been known to spare his characters suffering. Across his previous Culture novels, major and minor players have been blown up, tortured, hacked to pieces and, in one particularly gruesome example, skinned and turned into a chair.
Within the first four chapters of Surface Detail, Banks introduces three likable, sympathetic characters and then immediately appears to kill them off. But in the world of the Culture, where a neural lace woven into the brain allows people to back themselves up, and simulated realities can be indistinguishable from the real thing, death is rarely permanent.
So we follow the fortunes of Lededje Y'breq, an indentured slave marked with a full-body tattoo branding her as the property of the vile Veppers, as she attempts to escape and have her revenge. Interlaced with her story is the tale of Vateuil, a universal soldier fighting a never-ending war on fronts as diverse as the siege of a medieval castle and an attack on an ice-fortress by barely corporeal energy beings. Dotted through the book are the moving travails of Prin and Chay, elephant-like aliens who have infiltrated their society's version of hell to expose what goes on there but find escaping harder than they'd hoped.
The idea of hell is at the heart of the book. Many civilisations in Banks's imagined future are able to record mind-states, to rehouse old minds in new bodies and to allow disembodied minds to inhabit virtual environments. Banks posits that some civilisations would create afterlives. And some of those afterlives would, inevitably, contain hells. This depressing conclusion is sadly persuasive. The suggestion that some societies, given enough resources, would create a monstrous place of torment with which to threaten their citizens seems all-too-plausible to anyone who's seen a fundamentalist Christian "Hell house" designed to terrify teenagers into obedience and conformity.
It's over the fate of these hells whether they are to remain or be destroyed that Vateuil is fighting his endless war. It's to expose them that Chay ends up trapped in one. And, although Lededje doesn't know it, her quest to revenge herself on Veppers ends up being pivotal to the battle.
As with many of Banks's works, this is an engrossing novel of ideas ornamented by fantastically cinematic set-pieces. The "surface detail" of the title a reference to Lededje's fractal tattoo recurs in the decisions that have to be made along the way. Repeatedly, Banks introduces characters and then swoops outwards, taking us to the macro context where the minutiae of those lives are invisible. The needs of individuals and the needs of the many are in constant conflict. Is Lededje's desire for justifiable vengeance worth more than the possibility of destroying the hells for ever? Can Chay be sacrificed for the greater good? When spaceships battle on an epic scale, what happens to the tiny, fragile people within them?
Those who love the Culture will know the best lines often go to the artificial intelligences. In Surface Detail the stand-out character is a sadistic Abominator class ship called the "Falling Outside the Normal Moral Constraints". The warship's barely concealed glee when, after centuries of waiting, it finally gets to blow some other ships up, is hilarious, and its motives remain intriguingly mysterious. Some other characters, particularly the Special Circumstance agent Yime Nsokyi, remain a little underdrawn. But this is a minor quibble the novel's real power lies in the absorbing questions it poses about the value of the real, as opposed to the virtual, about who or what is expendable, and whether a society is better held together by threats or by promises.
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