matter

So I finished Matter, by Ian M Banks.

I should perhaps say up front that I'm really gorging to spoiler it in the below discussion, so if you've not read it and think you might want to, probably best to not read on.

If I'm honest, I was a little disappointed.

There were two main reasons for this. First off, given that the novel is well over 500 pages, it's a little disappointing that the "end game" feels really short and truncated and rushed. And second, that endgame kinda wasn't really worth it.

I think this novel is quite close in style to Excession. In excession, the Culture basically encountered an "Outside Context Problem". The idea of an OCP is something that's just so far outside of your perception of the world it causes more than a few problems. Banks apparently got the idea from playing the game civilisation.

To paraphrase - imagine you're a tribe on a beautiful continent and you've managed to work yourself up into a functioning society with a religion and the ability to build nice houses and do clever stuff like irrigation. You're also the dominant force on the continent - the other tribes are all either friendly or subjugated and everything's going swimmingly, thanks.

And then over the horizon come some big iron ships filled pale looking fellows that carry sticks that make a lot of noise and cause your mighty warriors to drop dead. Then they announce you've been "discovered" and you're all subjects of the emperor now and he's quite keen on gold tributes and these holly men would like to have a chat with your priests.

Well, that was all a great idea, but I didn't really like the Excession book. My problem was the pacing - there seemed to be tonnes of set-up and then the whole action part was compressed into half a dozen pages at the end. Plus, that end wasn't all that satisfying anyway.

And that's the exact same problem with Matter - there are hundreds of pages of what feels like build up and then the end is all wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am.

What makes this especially annoying is that quite a lot of that set-up period is wasted on blind alleys. For example, Ferbin goes looking for this guy who helped his father, but when he finds him, he can't help at all. It makes it feel like an excuse for Banks to just go on a few flights of fancy and come up with weird stuff to entertain. Think Tom Bombadill in LotR - totally pointless and un-necessary, but the author's having fun.

There's also a hell of a lot of stuff being layered in that I think is meant to explain what happens at the end. The problem is that this actually undermines the surprise of the ending. But also, even through there's so much of this setting up, the actual end still ends up with a whole bunch of unanswered questions.

So, this thing they dig up turns out to be an Iln machine that then tries to destroy the Shellworld.

Okay, fair enough, but why is never explained at all. Now that's not so bad, as it's a relic of an ancient race, and a bit like real archaeology you're left guessing (note that nobody really has a good guess in the book). However, what makes no sense is why the Iln put this Shellworld destroying machine on the Shellworld in the first place and didn't just blow the place up.

Why do that? And the place they find it appears to have been custom built to house it. Was that done by the Iln or someone else? If so, there's no hint of who did it.

There's just so many unanswered questions it becomes annoying. Now often Banks will cleverly use the Prologue and Epilogue to answer these sorts of questions, but here he doesn't.

I dunno, it feels like he wrote a 1,000 page novel and the publishers said "look - we can go to about 600 pages, but that's about it" and so he took a hatchet to the back end and it ends up kinda not working.

I don't actually think that's true - I think actually the short, truncated nature of the endgame is supposed to act as a deliberate contrast. Part of the feel of the theme of the book is about contrasting the different civilisation advancement levels and, like excession, when the relatively backward people of the Shellworld finally uncover this ancient, yet advanced thing the shift of gear is a way of emphasising contrast. Their problems, in a sense, are petty on a galactic scale, yet also no less important.

My real problem is it feels like he's re-treading old ground and also the old ground of a novel I didn't really like that much.