TransitionBy Iain Banks (Little, Brown £18.99)
Plenty of contemporary authors have written both realist fiction and science fiction. Anthony Burgess was a master of historical and present-day narrative, but his greatest work was A Clockwork Orange. Kingsley Amis, the great comic realist, wrote an alternate-universe novel, The Alteration. Then there's Margaret Atwood, with her disturbing futuristic dystopias; although she famously denies that what she writes is sci-fi, saying that her books don't contain, for example, "talking squids in space."
Iain Banks, though, has divided up not only his repertoire but also himself— although neither version of Banks could exactly be said to be a pseudonym. There are the "Iain Banks" novels: books like The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Whit that are set in, for want of a better description "our" reality. The characters are often hyper-real, with rich fantasy lives, but they take place in roughly the present day, and there are no rockets, aliens or trips to other planets. Then there are the "Iain M Banks" novels—glorious explorations of a far-future civilisation, "The Culture," which has developed beyond money and scarcity, converses happily with aliens and whose citizens can change gender on a whim and produce drugs at will from the glands in their heads. These books haven't yet featured talking squids in space, but it's probably just a matter of time.
That single initial distinction suggests an unusually fine dividing line between Banks's realistic and science fiction. And it's the question of boundaries—and the ways in which they might be dissolved—that forms the core of his magnificent new novel, Transition. Although written by plain old Iain Banks, the plot of Transition is far removed from conventional realism. At its centre is the character of Temudjin Oh, an assassin working for a shadowy organisation, The Concern. The Concern's objectives are mysterious, perhaps because, like Oh, it operates across multiple realities. The consciousness of the assassin Oh travels across realities to complete his assignments, in each new world taking over the body of his probable "self" or the nearest available equivalent, while his own "husk" body remains safe in his original reality.
Banks's tale is both tightly woven and grand in scale. While Oh investigates the roots and aims of The Concern, a second narrative voice tells the seemingly unconnected story of Adrian Cubbish, a charming hedge fund manager making a killing in "our" London during the 1990s and 2000s. A third voice, The Philosopher, explains the sequence of events that led him to his current profession—torturer—while a fourth, Patient 8262, muses on his life as an invalid in a hospital bed.
One of Banks's greatest skills is narrative voice, and each story has its attractions: from the breezy narration of the trader Adrian, for whom money is "what it's all about in the end" to the lugubrious Patient 8262 with his mundane worries slowly shading into horror. The writing is pacey and, for a writer whose science fiction work has never been filmed, the style is extremely cinematic. But it's in the force and breadth of its ideas that Transition is really extraordinary. This is a novel concerned with solipsism, and how—and why—we might cure it. "Solipsism," says Patient 8262, is "in a sense the default state of humanity." We are born believing that we are the only creatures that really exist and it is, he continues, quite normal for each of us to reach adolescence thinking "that we are invulnerable, almost certainly marked out for something special."
Yet, as the novel explores from dozens of angles, it is this natural solipsism that prevents us from reaching beyond our personal and tribal borders and creating something greater. Banks even locates the epicentre of the current financial crisis in human solipsism—this time made manifest in the concept of a limited company, which can operate as if it were financially unconnected to its owners and investors. A limited company is, as one character says, "a one-way bet"—its investors will receive huge rewards for success but not similar-scale penalties for failure.
Transition is a clever novel: an exhilarating read that leaves a timebomb of philosophical engagement ticking in the reader's mind. But it also calls into question the need for that "M" in Banks's name. After all, the obsession with realism in our fictions is relatively modern. We don't call Homer a fantasy writer because his epics contain witches, monsters, magic and demons. We don't split Shakespeare's plays into "fantasy" (Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest and Hamlet—for the ghost) and "realistic" (Henry V and Romeo and Juliet perhaps, although the latter does contain a magical potion). It's probably only since Samuel Richardson that readers have become obsessed with the question "did this, could this really happen?"
In Banks's case, the question is misleading. A master of dizzying perspective shifts, he's at his best when taking the reader outside the world of normal experience—through coma dreams in the "realist" The Bridge, through a religious cult in Whit, through far-future technology in his "Culture" novels—and then encouraging us to look back at the world we come from and understand how small it really is. It is, surely, the desire to stand outside ourselves that drives us to read fiction in the first place. Like the characters in Transition, we long to inhabit different lives and worlds. As Banks's literary dual personality shows, the distinction between imagining what it would be like to be a different person and what it would be like to be a different species, or come from a different planet, is vanishingly tiny. In every case, it's what we want to leave behind—ourselves—that really matters.
Plenty of contemporary authors have written both realist fiction and science fiction. Anthony Burgess was a master of historical and present-day narrative, but his greatest work was A Clockwork Orange. Kingsley Amis, the great comic realist, wrote an alternate-universe novel, The Alteration. Then there's Margaret Atwood, with her disturbing futuristic dystopias; although she famously denies that what she writes is sci-fi, saying that her books don't contain, for example, "talking squids in space."
Iain Banks, though, has divided up not only his repertoire but also himself— although neither version of Banks could exactly be said to be a pseudonym. There are the "Iain Banks" novels: books like The Wasp Factory, The Crow Road and Whit that are set in, for want of a better description "our" reality. The characters are often hyper-real, with rich fantasy lives, but they take place in roughly the present day, and there are no rockets, aliens or trips to other planets. Then there are the "Iain M Banks" novels—glorious explorations of a far-future civilisation, "The Culture," which has developed beyond money and scarcity, converses happily with aliens and whose citizens can change gender on a whim and produce drugs at will from the glands in their heads. These books haven't yet featured talking squids in space, but it's probably just a matter of time.
That single initial distinction suggests an unusually fine dividing line between Banks's realistic and science fiction. And it's the question of boundaries—and the ways in which they might be dissolved—that forms the core of his magnificent new novel, Transition. Although written by plain old Iain Banks, the plot of Transition is far removed from conventional realism. At its centre is the character of Temudjin Oh, an assassin working for a shadowy organisation, The Concern. The Concern's objectives are mysterious, perhaps because, like Oh, it operates across multiple realities. The consciousness of the assassin Oh travels across realities to complete his assignments, in each new world taking over the body of his probable "self" or the nearest available equivalent, while his own "husk" body remains safe in his original reality.
Banks's tale is both tightly woven and grand in scale. While Oh investigates the roots and aims of The Concern, a second narrative voice tells the seemingly unconnected story of Adrian Cubbish, a charming hedge fund manager making a killing in "our" London during the 1990s and 2000s. A third voice, The Philosopher, explains the sequence of events that led him to his current profession—torturer—while a fourth, Patient 8262, muses on his life as an invalid in a hospital bed.
One of Banks's greatest skills is narrative voice, and each story has its attractions: from the breezy narration of the trader Adrian, for whom money is "what it's all about in the end" to the lugubrious Patient 8262 with his mundane worries slowly shading into horror. The writing is pacey and, for a writer whose science fiction work has never been filmed, the style is extremely cinematic. But it's in the force and breadth of its ideas that Transition is really extraordinary. This is a novel concerned with solipsism, and how—and why—we might cure it. "Solipsism," says Patient 8262, is "in a sense the default state of humanity." We are born believing that we are the only creatures that really exist and it is, he continues, quite normal for each of us to reach adolescence thinking "that we are invulnerable, almost certainly marked out for something special."
Yet, as the novel explores from dozens of angles, it is this natural solipsism that prevents us from reaching beyond our personal and tribal borders and creating something greater. Banks even locates the epicentre of the current financial crisis in human solipsism—this time made manifest in the concept of a limited company, which can operate as if it were financially unconnected to its owners and investors. A limited company is, as one character says, "a one-way bet"—its investors will receive huge rewards for success but not similar-scale penalties for failure.
Transition is a clever novel: an exhilarating read that leaves a timebomb of philosophical engagement ticking in the reader's mind. But it also calls into question the need for that "M" in Banks's name. After all, the obsession with realism in our fictions is relatively modern. We don't call Homer a fantasy writer because his epics contain witches, monsters, magic and demons. We don't split Shakespeare's plays into "fantasy" (Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest and Hamlet—for the ghost) and "realistic" (Henry V and Romeo and Juliet perhaps, although the latter does contain a magical potion). It's probably only since Samuel Richardson that readers have become obsessed with the question "did this, could this really happen?"
In Banks's case, the question is misleading. A master of dizzying perspective shifts, he's at his best when taking the reader outside the world of normal experience—through coma dreams in the "realist" The Bridge, through a religious cult in Whit, through far-future technology in his "Culture" novels—and then encouraging us to look back at the world we come from and understand how small it really is. It is, surely, the desire to stand outside ourselves that drives us to read fiction in the first place. Like the characters in Transition, we long to inhabit different lives and worlds. As Banks's literary dual personality shows, the distinction between imagining what it would be like to be a different person and what it would be like to be a different species, or come from a different planet, is vanishingly tiny. In every case, it's what we want to leave behind—ourselves—that really matters.
