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42 of 45 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very "deep" book, requiring some thought to fully take in., March 17, 2003
The back of the book has a quote from a reviewer saying "He warns you up front, this is a dark novel." Well, compared to Banks' _The Wasp Factory_, this really isn't such a dark novel. I'll quote another reviewer from USENET who said "I can't trust an author who develops characters and kills them." This, however, is also a trait of Banks', and I cant imagine anyone would read this book expecting everyone to escape unscathed from the ominous, looming evil which permeates, quite frankly, every Banks book I've read. The book tells a story of a woman, who becomes a metaphor for the star system she lives in. Unlike the Culture novels, the "Golter" system is at least a hundred million light years from the nearest star. They are entirely isolated. They have colonized all the planets and moons in their system, but have no hope of ever reaching anyone else. Sharrow is the same way. Alone, even while surrounded by others. As the system society begins to attack itself, so, too, does Sharrow lose friends. Entire cities are wiped out. This is not unexpected. You're reading a Banks novel. However, the finish of the book (as other reviewers have hinted, the last 100 pages are worth the rest of the book being somewhat slow and, well, pointless) is quite profound, and ties the rest of the story together in ways I really hadn't anticipated. It actually took me a couple days to reflect on it, and how I felt about the story he had told. Surprisingly, after a couple days, I realized that what Banks was getting at was the good that actually came out of all the death and destruction in the book. I'll leave the reader to discover that on their own. I'd highly recommend this to any Banks fan, but perhaps not to a first time Banks reader. Consider _Excession_ instead.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Kindle edition's formatting, May 4, 2010
There are plenty of reviews covering the story and storytelling. What I'd like to address is the Kindle edition's formatting.
It has two glaring issues; one slightly annoying, the other quite annoying.
1) Hyphens abound. It's as if words that were hyphened to be split between lines in the paper edition has retained their hyphens in the Kindle edition. This means you get hyphens in the middle of the page, in words that otherwise should not have one. Not a big deal, but it does distract.
2) No blank line between paragraphs. This can be quite confusing, as you sometimes end up reading several seemingly completely out of context sentences, before realizing you're actually reading a flashback now. Without the blank line to alert you to the context shift, it can be hard to catch. You can go from a love-making scene to a war zone, wondering what kind of kink just entered their bedroom when the text switches from sweaty bodies to the smell of blood and burning.
In areas of the book where there's a lot of jumping back and forth, sometimes several times in just a page or two, it becomes a bit of a chore to read.
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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another Banks' spin on the meaning of life., May 14, 2005
Vicious stuff; the kind of thing you expect from Banks.
The man is just amazing, an imagination more fecund than anything else I've ever encountered. Like _Use of Weapons_ we have the destructive sibling rivalry, like _Consider Phlebas_ we have a grand tour meeting strange and marvellous things along the way.
But most important, in the background we have the *large* theme. In the end, like the culture novels, this is a book about the point of life. The setting is a planetary system millions of light years from any other star and thus incapable of expanding beyond a very finite space. Given this limitation, civilizations have risen and fallen countless times.
The current system is an extreme version of the 20th century west mixed with medieval times --- wealthy corporations as more powerful than states, excessive bureaucracy and legalism --- but the specific details are not that important. The important issue is the question of should it be changed? And if so, too what? If it should be changed, how much suffering is justified in doing so? And what's the point of change, anyway; the new system will be just one more regime like countless regimes that have gone before.
What makes Banks so interesting (and so unpalatable to many readers) is, of course, that he has no answers to these questions, and that he doesn't have much faith in the stock answers society provides. The bulk of his books, including this one, is essentially, IMHO, arguments by example against the happy pat ways in which society answers these questions when they arise.
What makes this book so upsetting is perhaps that he doesn't even provide up the hedonistic comfort of the culture books, the idea that man is optimized for pleasure and might as well concentrate on that. All we get is a very Buddhist endless cycle of suffering with no escape.
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