REVIEW OF #54 SURFACE DETAIL

FROM TOM 

I can’t vouch for Books 1 through 8 of Iain M. Banks’s Culture Series but by Book 9 it’s anything goes. A spaceship has an avatar whose idea of a character test is elevator surfing.  Of course.  A protagonist dies in Chapter One but rises from the grave in Chapter Four because a mysterious stranger once slipped her a neural lace which she eschews in her resurrected form because now she actually is risking her life for some reason that can only be down to narrative tension in pursuit of the former slave master who killed her for what has turned out to be a short while.  Naturally.  Or is it virtually? Like the world Captain Vatueil occupies in which he tunnels beneath a besieged castle before being captured, tortured and killed as part of another character test. Really? Certainly not as real as Pavulean Hell, a place of never-ending misery that makes Hieronymus Bosch’s “Last Judgment” look like Constable’s “The Hay Wain”, specifically for two investigative, dual-snouted quadrupeds intent on exposing to the outside world the endless Promethean tortures inflicted on the wicked.   

I wrote the previous paragraph after reading the first hundred pages of SURFACE DETAIL and thinking it was a dog’s dinner thrown against a wall of week-old pizza. I mean, spaceships with comma-infested names? Was that so they’d sound the way William Shatner would pronounce them? By page 200 I just wanted to get through the book as quickly as possible before any more characters of grotesque physiognomy, vocabulary or morality were introduced. I was speeding to the end of a thoroughly dissatisfying read when the character Yime Nsokyi reappeared after a 100-page or so absence and I thought, Remind me, why in the name of Pavulean Heaven is she pursuing main character Lededje across the galaxy? And through the magic of the Kindle “Search” option I not only found the answer to my question but also just about every other one I had about this book (pages 165 to 179 in case you’re interested).

And then the scales fell from my eyes. In an instant, what had seemed like a mish-mash of indecipherable, apathy-inspiring gobble-di-gook made sense, and I thought, Wow, this is one impressive achievement of created world and plot intricacy.

FOUR STARS