Whit

Whit

by Iain Banks, 1995

Ever since I realized that I really liked Iain Banks’ writing style and ought to have read all of his books years ago, I’ve been erratically making my way through his body of work. His “Iain M. Banks” novels I’ve been (unnecessarily) trying to read in order, but his no-middle-initial novels I’ve been picking up at random as I find them at used bookstores.

Therefore, I'm drawing on a somewhat arbitrary knowledge of Banks' other work when I say Whit is the first Banks novel I’ve read with an honest-to-goodness female protagonist. (I don’t count Dr. Vosill of Inversions -- Banks never took us inside her head.) As a plucky, resourceful teenage girl, Isis Whit doesn’t exactly break new literary ground, but she’s an agreeable companion.

Whit is also the least violent Banks novel I’ve read. It's not exactly child-friendly, but I kept waiting for something over-the-top bloody and brutal to happen and it never did. It's misleading to say that this is a kinder and friendlier Banks novel given that there's more than one highly disturbing scene, but it's good to learn Banks was actually capable of writing a whole novel without spilling a great deal of fictional blood.

The Whit family business is a cult, the Luskentyrians, founded in the 1940s by Isis’s grandfather, the family patriarch Salvador Whit. The Luskentyrians live fairly isolated lives at their base in rural Scotland, where they abstain from most modern technology to keep their lives uncluttered, but they’re proud of Luskentyrians who go out into the world and set a good example among the “Unsaved” (also known as the “Bland” or the “Obtuse”).

One such Luskentyrian is Isis’s musician cousin Morag. The Luskentyrians have high hopes for her, but now they are worried that she might be leaving the faith. So Isis, granddaughter of the cult founder and next in line to lead the church (due to her February 29 birthday), is sent on a holy mission to London to find Morag and persuade her to remain in the faith…

But little does Isis know that she is being lied to, about many things, from many people. And over the novel’s second half, she puts the pieces together. Whit doesn’t really have the stunning ending plot twist or revelation common to many Iain Banks novels, but Isis does have to deal with a cascade of new information over the book’s latter chapters, and she does a commendably good job of calmly handling it (far better than I would have at her age).

In the end, Whit is pleasant and engaging. I’ve never encountered an Iain No-Middle-Initial Banks novel that failed to be pleasant and engaging. It's got a fair number of signature Banks authorial touches: the set piece where Isis accidentally discovers her cousin Morag's true vocation through a contrived, improbable coincidence is pulled off with narrative flourish, for example, so I shrugged and said "You get away with it this time, Banks!"

Many of the Luskentyrians’ beliefs and practices are presented as rather silly, and the cult itself turns out to be riddled with lies, but there’s still a sympathetic depiction of the sense of community that the Luskentyrians have built, and a sense in the final pages that the community can reform and improve itself if bad behavior is called out and deceptions at the heart of the community are exposed. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and all that.

This is all well and good, but part of me suspects that if we somehow got a peek at this fictional community 20 years later, we’d find that the new generation of leadership has become just as bad, and plucky teenage Isis has grown into cynical manipulative adult Isis. Maybe I'm too cynical for this story.

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Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

by China Miéville, 2015

“Perhaps understanding’s overrated,” says William, a medical student assigned to study a cadaver whose bones, as he discovered, are inexplicably decorated with carvings. “Some of us are observers by nature, not philosophers.” He’ll never know where the designs came from, so he is content to work secretly in a rented room where he keeps the cadaver he stole, carefully stripping the man’s flesh from the bones.

The attitude, held by William in the story “The Design”, is also held by many other inhabitants of the stories that China Miéville wrote and collected in Three Moments of an Explosion. In “Polynia”, icebergs appear floating in the air above central London; in “Covehithe”, sunken oil rigs have come to life, laying their eggs on the coast like they've always been members of Earth’s ecosystem. This is not to say Miéville is writing solely ecological metaphors: more mind-bendingly strange than either of these is the behavior of the corpses described in “The Condition of New Death”, which have taken to behaving like dead bodies in video games.

By the time we catch up with them, the inhabitants of these stories are no longer asking about the whys and hows. The uncanny new situation is a fait accompli; the question is, what are we going to do now? How will we react and evolve now that consensus reality has become something that used to be unthinkable?

Not every story quite fits this pattern; a very few don’t use speculative-fiction tropes at all. “Dreaded Outcome”, about a therapist whose methods make use of her skills as a trained assassin, could make a good TV or film adaptation, though the dark humor would have to be calibrated exactly right.

These are the first Miéville short stories that I’ve read. I’ve enjoyed four of his novels in the past, and in these stories Miéville has struck me as a writer who prioritizes setting and situation over characters (not that he can’t write characters; he just doesn’t seem to prioritize it), and this suits the short story form perfectly.

Three of the shorter stories are actually blow-by-blow descriptions of movie trailers for imaginary movies. As a storytelling device, this impresses me a lot (Why didn’t I think of that!): Miéville is utilizing the well-known tropes of the movie trailer (“In a world where…”) to convey the outline of a story that he’ll never tell in detail.

There were a few stories that left me cold, generally because I felt I didn’t “get it”. For instance, “The Dusty Hat” will be better appreciated by someone with experience as a political activist. (I find politics fascinating, but if I were involved myself the frustration would drive me batty.) But that is a matter of personal taste more than anything.

In this post, I’ve used adjectives like “uncanny” and “mind-bendingly strange”; of course, what most people do with his fiction is call it “Weird”, often with a capital W because the weirdness defines a whole sub-genre. (His Wikipedia bio does this in the second sentence.) Miéville's situation-creating skills are second to none, and I ought to read more of his fiction. It’s been six years since I read Embassytown -- what should I pick up next?

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