Iain Banks: The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007)

Published: Little, Brown (2007)

My impression on reading The Steep Approach to Garbadale was that it was more a mixture of elements and ideas from Iain Banks' previous non-Culture novels (that is, those published without a middle initial) than a new story in its own right. The Wopuld family are rich on the back of a Victorian boardgame, now a successful computer game, but they are as dysfunctional as the Simpsons. When the novel opens, the protagonist, Alban, whose mother was a Wopuld, is estranged from the family and living on a Scottish council estate, not too close to the family's Highland estate at Garbadale. His problems with the family (and vice versa) started when his uncle and grandmother (the matriarch of the clan) found him having sex with his cousin Sophie, both being underage. The book, half flashback, tells how this happened and how the rest of Alban's life was affected (obviously Sophie's was too, but she is not the centre of the novel), up to the climactic event of the novel, an extraordinary general meeting of the Wopulds (as company shareholders) to decide whether to sell the company to an American corporation that wants to take over the game.

Comparing The Steep Approach to Garbadale to earlier novels, there is the anti-American-Imperialism, anti-Iraq War sentiment of Dead Air, with Spraight Corp perhaps partly a symbol of American domination: the real winner of the game of Empire!. There is a Scottish family with dark secrets, like the one in The Crow Road (and Alban is a very similar character to Prentice McHoan). The tone of the novel, the affluence of the characters and the corporate politics are like The Business. There are even links to Banks' first novel, The Wasp Factory.

There is a balance to be struck by any writer who has a career more than a few novels long, between offering something new each time and retaining the familiar elements which are part of his or her style. Usually, there is a fair amount of variation between Iain Banks' novels (ignoring for the moment the series of science fiction stories with a shared background published with-an-M: challenges for a writer who sticks with a single series are rather different); more at the beginning of his career perhaps, but still some change in recent years. This time, there is nothing really recognisably new, and the re-used old ideas seemed to me to be somewhat too intrusive, almost as though a lack of originality were being flaunted at the reader. One particular problem was that Alban failed to grab my attention as a protagonist: the biggest difference from Prentice McHoan is that he's not as interesting.

So The Steep Approach to Garbadale is likely to disappoint long term fans of Banks' work, but there is much to enjoy in the novel particularly if read in an uncritical spirit.

Robert M. Pirsig: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (An Enquiry into Values) (1974)

Published: Vintage, 2004.

I have been intending to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for over twenty years, but have never got round to it until this February. Though famously influential, there are still surprisingly few books at all like it, with its combination of fictionalised travelogue and philosophical speculation. The nearest equivalent I can think of is Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, which aims more at teaching the basics of philosophical thought rather than taking a polemical approach as Pirsig does here.

The narrator tells the story of a motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California, initially with friends but eventually just with his son Chris. This kind of trip obviously provides a lot of time for solitary thought, and the narrator does just that: musing about how philosophy relates to the world around us. To the narrator, the journey is also about finding and at the same time escaping the person he names Phaedrus (after a character in one of Plato's Socratic dialogues). Phaedrus turns out to be his own self, the university lecturer who suffered a breakdown and had his mind almost wiped by "Annihilation ECS", also (and to me at least, better) known as electroconvulsive therapy.

What fascinated Phaedrus, and continues to interest the narrator, is the difference - indeed, conflict - between two ways of looking at the world. The "Classic" mode is intellectual, analytical, reductionist and concerned with underlying processes; while the "Romantic" mode is emotional, artistic, holistic and concerned with surface beauty. Pirsig seems to overstate broadness of the division between the two: I would say that most people probably use a mixture, depending on context (a sports fan is likely to be more analytical about a football game, for example, but might respond to music on an emotional level, not really sure why particular songs appeal to them). It does seem reasonable that background, education and personality would make most of us use one mode in preference to the other. Phaedrus sought to bring back unity between the two viewpoints by giving the concept of "Quality" pre-eminent status, the idea being that everyone can recognise "good work" on a non-rational level and so gain an understanding of the thought mode which is more alien to their personality. Pirsig spends quite a lot of effort on the argument that Quality is non- (or more accurately, pre-) rational, but does not convince me. I think it probably can be analysed, though any analysis would need to take into account factors such as culture and personality which influence an individual's recognition of Quality on a subconscious level. Leaving that aside, the one thing I did not find clear about the philosophical discussion in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is just how the concept brings about a union between the Classical and the Romantic. It's obvious that "quality" is an element of both, but then so are other concepts (beauty, for example).

As the title suggests, much of the philosophical speculation is illustrated with reference to motorbike mechanics. The mechanics is rather more simplified than the philosophy, but it is Pirsig's big selling point and leads to some nice clear exposition. The references also underline a major point of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which is that philosophy should underpin the way we act in everyday life. (Of course, it is easy to argue that it does, albeit unconsciously, but Pirsig obviously means something more deliberate and, indeed, life-changing.) A drawback of the use of mechanics to illustrate his points is that it sometimes makes the key idea of Quality seem very closely related to the Protestant work ethic: put something into everything you do and you will produce Quality outputs.

The most novelistic aspect of the book is the psychological journey made by the narrator, retracing the footsteps of his former self with an increasingly reluctant companion. The tension builds well (even if the philosophy is likely to deflate it every time it is introduced, for many readers) to a final scene which, according to Pirsig's introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition which is reprinted here, has been frequently misunderstood over the years. As Pirsig points out, the narrator of a story has the opportunity to paint himself in a favourable light, which means that nothing he says about himself (or his alter ego, Phaedrus) can be taken at face value. But even if the reader ignores this advice, it seems to me that it would be quite hard to feel that the narrator is a nice person, particularly considering his behaviour to his son. Phaedrus is rather more congenial, though his obsessive search for philosophical truth might make him a rather disconcerting person to spend time with. The ending still feels a little contrived to me, but this is partly because it is the kind of event that seems to mark an end rather than because it is intrinsically unconvincing.

In the afterword, Pirsig describes Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a "culture-bearing" book, using a term derived from a Swedish word which has no direct English equivalent. What this means is that it appeared at the time of a cultural shift, and by being a head of the curve, became incredibly successful as a result. I think this is perhaps undervaluing the book: people did find their lives changed by it, and it has continued to find a readership ever since. In other ways, it is a good description of a book which is very much of its time, something which is probably an important reason for my feeling that the philosophy was less than convincing. (The other book Pirsig mentions as a culture-bearer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is similarly not going to be as effective now as it was when it appeared, because the issues it addresses are less in the mind than they were then.) While it remains a fascinating read, particularly to anyone interested in philosophy or cultural history, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is no longer likely to change your life.

Ursula K Le Guin: The Lathe of Heaven (1971)

Published: Panther, 1974

This short novel by Ursula Le Guin - over 850 pages less than the other book I was reading alongside it, Peter F. Hamilton's Pandora's Star - is quite untypical of the work for which she is best known: her anthropologically based examinations of alien societies such as The Left Hand of Darkness, or the young adult fantasy of The Wizard of Earthsea. While most of Le Guin's science fiction is original and unusual, particularly for its time, The Lathe of Heaven directly recalls two authors that one would not necessarily associate with her. These are Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny, both interested in the mind and the nature of reality.

The two major characters in The Lathe of Heaven are psychiatric patient George Orr and his therapist, Dr Haber. Orr believes that his dreams sometimes alter reality, and the effects of dreams produced under Haber's post-hypnotic suggestion convinces the psychiatrist that this is not a delusion. Haber sets out to improve the world, admittedly an unpleasant place: overpopulated, polluted, and violent. Orr becomes increasingly reluctant to dream under Haber's direction, mainly because of the guilt caused by some changes (such as his response to a suggestion that over-population be solved, which leads to the deaths of billions in a plague of environmentally related cancers: an event that only he and Haber remember not occurring some years earlier). He was involuntarily referred to Haber in the first place, so he can't just ask to stop the treatment.

This could very easily be an idea used by Philip K. Dick, touching on his common theme of the nature of reality. This is particularly important here, as the suggestion that the whole of Orr's dreaming might itself be a dream, as the end of the original dystopian world approaches. The lack of the profusion of secondary ideas that fill Dick's work is the main difference.

Zelazny's influence is more obvious, but perhaps more superficial: there is a clear relationship with The Dream Master, which also deals with psychiatric therapy using directed dreaming. However, Zelazny's story is less about the nature of reality - though the psychiatrists are effectively creating their own worlds to share with their patients. The points of view of patient (in The Lathe of Heaven) and therapist (in The Dream Master) make the novels quite different in emphasis. The Lathe of Heaven ends up feeling more like Dick than Zelazny - or, indeed, Le Guin. This last is because it isn't as different from the mainstream of the genre as Le Guin's Hainish novels: it is unusual in her output by not being particularly unusual.

Laurie R. King: The Beekeeper's Apprentice (1994)

Published: HarperCollins, 2000

The number of novels which have purported to be lost Sherlock Holmes stories is immense, many times more pages than make up "the canon", as Holmes fanatics denote the tales of Arthur Conan Doyle. Like most literary pastiches, few of these can be said to be worth reading. Definitely forming part of this small minority are the Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King, of which this is the first.

Mary Russell, at the start of the novel, is an intellectual fifteen year old, studying while walking across the Sussex Downs during the First World War. She is concentrating so hard that she almost steps on a man watching bees. In the ensuing conversation, it becomes clear that she has met Sherlock Holmes himself, retired into Sussex to take up beekeeping (a detail taken straight from "the canon"). Impressed by her intelligence, Holmes takes Mary under his wing, and begins to train her in his investigative methods, culminating in a shared investigation into concerted attempts to kill Holmes.

King is rather cavalier in her attitude to the canon when it suits her, though this and others of her novels (not all in this series) indicate that she knows it extremely well. The most obvious deviation is in the age of Holmes, who becomes about a generation younger than Doyle makes him, which would make him barely out of his teens in the earliest stories. (This change, Holmes tells Mary, was made so that readers of Watson's tales would take the detective seriously.) From King's point of view, this change makes the novel and its successors possible, as Holmes is now in early middle age rather than in his late sixties when he meets Mary. This alone might put off Holmes purists, but King goes on to make more subtle but far-reaching changes: not so much from the facts of the canon, but to the character of Holmes himself.

Doyle's original Holmes is cold and analytical, with quirks such as the violin playing added to give a certain amount of humanity to what is essentially a detecting machine. King changes this slightly, rejecting the attributes which are not so acceptable today (drug addiction, and a modified attitude to women) and deepens the character farther, in a rather more convincing way. But he is not the Sherlock Holmes that fans have known for over a century, even if he can still distinguish the different types of cigar ash left by criminals. Clearly, she wants to buy into the Holmes background without the encumbrances of the original character; if this is a problem, then this novel and the series as a whole is not for you. I personally am in two minds about it; I like the way that others have taken the same characteristics rejected by King and made them the peg on which to hang their own re-interpretation of Sherlock Holmes (such as Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution), but on the other hand, King's character makes for a more rounded novel and makes her ideas possible - in particular, the relationship with Mary Russell.

Ignoring the questionable nature of the Mary Russell series' relationship with the Holmes canon, The Beekeeper's Apprentice and its sequels are satisfying crime novels in their own right.

Charles Stross: Glasshouse (2006)

Published: Orbit, 2006

Glasshouse (named from British army slang for a military prison) is basically a spy novel set in the future. The central character, Robin, starts the book recovering from memory surgery, a standard voluntary brainwashing technique which is part of psychiatric treatment: but he doesn't remember why he had memories removed, nor why the process was quite so drastic as it turned out to be. Then he is recruited for an experiment, in which he will live in a recreated environment from "the Dark Ages" (roughly, today) ostensibly to derive information and understanding lacking from the historical record (essentially because the knowledge required to understand our proprietary computer file formats has been lost). This sort of experiment has been done already: a famous attempt to get several families to live in a reconstructed Iron Age village in the late seventies was the earliest reality TV series I remember watching. When Robin wakes up in the experimental domain, he is no longer a man, but has been turned into a housewife in an environment distinctly reminiscent of the film Pleasantville. The undertones are even more sinister, as this isn't just a sitcom reflecting the attitudes of the fifties, but an experiment with a hidden purpose. This is made clear to Robin (or Reeve, as she is now known) when she realises that all the participants have been made fertile - this is normally a deliberate choice in their culture - and the aim appears to be to create a generation who know no other life than the experiment.

Using science fiction to satirise the attitudes of the present is hardly cutting edge science fiction. Even the use of time travel, re-enactment or simulation is common: it forms a major part of the film Star Trek IV, as well featuring in Pleasantville already mentioned. Other science fiction joins Stross in describing our age as psychotic or crazy (notably Robert Heinlein's Future History stories). Stross is at the edge end of this tendency in the genre, certainly more so than anything mentioned, but his writing here also contains much humour. (This is generally his writing style: dark but knowing.) The principal way in which Stross differs from many of the others who have satirised the present day in this way is that his future setting is very different from our own, even though the way in which it could have come about (apart from the unexplained cornucopia technology) is fairly believable as are continuing parallels with our own time (such as the detail that the cornucopia machines are subject to hacking and the equivalents of computer viruses) and people who are still recognisably human. To compare with Heinlein again, in his earlier works his future society is hardly distinguishable from that which he describes as crazy. Glasshouse also has a really good ending, after Reeve starts receiving messages that Robin had implanted deep into his subconscious before the memory surgery.

Glasshouse is publicised as a sequel to Accelerando, but this doesn't seem quite right to me. While dreaming of similar themes, much of the envisaged future here is different from that at the end of the earlier novel. It doesn't manage to be quite as interesting as Accelerando, which I feel is Stross' strongest work so far; nor is it as entertaining as the Merchant Princes series. However, it is still both interesting and enjoyable, and well worth reading.

Donald Clarke: The Rise and Fall of Popular Music (1995)

Published: Viking, 1995

What requirements are there for a history of "popular music"? In some ways, Clarke's work seems to fit the bill admirably. While he doesn't actually define what he means by the phrase, and discusses music which has never been all that popular with the general public, the book basically covers music from non-classical genres in the US from the early nineteenth century to the 1960s. He talks briefly about British music in the eighteenth century, and again looks at the UK in the prelude to the British invasion of the mid sixties, and ends with some discussion of later trends (of which more later) and a couple of paragraphs about the music of the rest of the world, but actually he what Clarke is looking at - and what the history of popular music effectively boils down to - is the way that the modern music industry developed, from the first publishers of sheet music for a mass market. In musical terms, the body of work produced by this industry most deserves the label "popular", as a major part of the American cultural domination of the modern world. This doesn't just include music which is popular at the time, but should reasonably also discuss the music which influences popular genres or is not yet popular (such as the blues), and popular music which is no longer primary in the market (such as post-war jazz). Clarke does both, perhaps concentrating too much on the latter. Overall, he has chosen a reasonable interpretation of what is meant by "popular music".

The author of such a history must be knowledgeable about the subject; this is not so easy as it sounds as there are few people who know much about nineteenth century black-face performers and about bebop. While Clarke manages this admirably up to about 1965, he is opinionated and dismissive of almost all popular music since then - jazz, becoming a niche interest by that time, no longer really falls into the "popular" category and should really have been discussed mainly to suggest reasons why it became less popular - it became viewed as "art music", but was this because it became more difficult to understand as a listener, or was it due to perception or marketing?

This brings us to the main problem with the book, which is this antipathy to anything more recent than 1965 or so that isn't jazz. The problem with rock music, as Clarke sees it, is poor musicianship. It is certainly true that the standard to which instruments are played is often lower (though there are virtuoso players - many heavy rock guitarists, for example) and the stars are often bolstered by unsung session musicians (and Clarke misses the opportunity to point to one of the most famous examples of this, the original single version of Mr Tamborine Man by the Byrds) or by production techniques which smooth over the rough edges. However, the democratisation of popular music brought in by rock and roll is something of a return to the earlier traditions of folk musics, with the first half of the twentieth century where professional players and singers provided music for the masses being something of an aberration. This change, though, is effectively what Clarke means as the "fall" of popular music, and he talks about it as the legacy of the fame of Elvis Presley (as a former truck driver with no musical education) and the Beatles (who made it fashionable for bands to write their own material, however poor, rather than relying on professional song writers). However, rock music is popular, without a doubt, and (despite the judgements explicitly promised in the title) a history of popular music shouldn't be so dismissive, particularly as it leads to the omission of several important developments. It would be possible to dismiss jazz for equally personal reasons (I used to feel that except in the hands of an absolute master, improvised solos were just too banal to be worth listening to, for example): just because the author doesn't like a genre, doesn't mean that it's not popular music.

Some of the issues he raises have basically ceased to be the case: Clarke bemoans the loss of local music stores with knowledgeable personnel, and the Internet has more or less replaced this, as people can order just about any recording that's in print (and many that aren't) through Amazon or other record stores, view Web sites which tell them anything they want to know about a band, and listen to music from local (or not so local) up and coming musicians through MySpace and its competitors. Similarly, he is scathing about the quality of US radio, and the rise of independent media such as podcasting has thrown up an alternative. (However, since the nature of podcasts is that the listener needs to actively subscribe, it requires more engagement than overhearing a radio station playing inside a shop, so the two kinds of media are not precisely parallel.) The current fuss about the sharing of music over the Internet is also something which might well have been mentioned had the book been written now (and the importance of the Internet is a measure of how much has changed in the last ten years): it would follow on from the discussion of earlier attempts by the music industry to act restrictively against changes in the marketplace.

In other cases, his opinionated stance means that Clarke almost completely ignores developments which to me seem to be important. The rise of the power of an artist's image is really important in modern popular music, and it is not something ever mentioned directly (MTV and video, crucial elements of this change, get a brief mention). There are entire genres and approaches to music making that are either completely (punk) or almost completely (reggae) left out. Synthesisers are ignored. As a result, The Rise and Fall of Popular Music is at best a personal history of popular music, rather than one which covers everything which should really be in such a book.

In the end, it is fascinating to read, but will probably infuriate many readers. Re-reading it now has certainly inspired me to listen to more jazz: and that means that The Rise and Fall of Popular Music has done the best thing that a book on music can do, which is to send the reader back to the music itself.

Stephen Hunt: The Court of the Air (2007)

Published: HarperVoyager, 2007

Iain MacLeod's The Light Ages is one of my favourite fantasy novels of the decade, and one whose influence seems clear in Stephen Hunt's debut. The world here is very like MacLeod's: a pretty unpleasant early industrial landscape with magic. Rather than the nineteenth century slums of the north of England which interested MacLeod, however, Hunt is clearly inspired by the brutalities of the French Revolution.

Two orphans, one from an orphanage in the city, the other brought up on his uncle's country estate, suddenly find themselves hunted by ruthless killers: they are obviously special to someone, but they have no idea why. In the first half of the novel only the "bad guys" know what is going on (and even they turn out to be disparate groups all keen to trick each other, to carry out schemes designed to put their group on top). This works very well, and by the half way stage, I was thinking that this would be one of my top fantasy novels of 2007.

But then the story moves into a description of an epic battle, with encounters between many of the characters who have been involved in the story so far. This half of the novel is much more problematic. The battle, with ground, aerial and underground forces, as well as a mystical battle and a multiplicity of factions, is extremely complex, and Hunt never really gives enough of the big picture for it to cohere in the mind. (Admittedly, I was suffering from a fever when I was reading the end of The Court of the Air, so my mind was not at its sharpest.)

So, there are many excellent things in The Court of the Air. There are two that I have not mentioned so far: I like to see fantasy novels that stand alone, that do not have to be read as part of a series. Hunt also excels at a key skill of the fantasy genre author, the invention of names, which are vitally important in the depiction of atmosphere. Even so, it fails to live up to its promise, and left me sufficiently disenchanted that I have not even listed Hunt as an author I should look out for in the future.