Look to Windward

By Iain M. Banks


I was once working in a dreadful factory job, loading pallets with resealed packets of industrial beer, and on breaks reading one of Iain Banks early works. "What's it about?" asked one of my more literate team mates, just at the point the stories had intersected and folded in on themselves. I wasn't quite sure. I mean I'd had a pretty good idea until ten pages earlier, but it had suddenly got complicated and clever. "So not very good then?" asked workmate, forcing me to admit that while I didn't quite know what it was about, it was a very good book. (Walking on Glass, since you asked).
But that was Iain Banks, and one of his early books, this is Iain M. Banks, and I pretty much understood it all along. Which saddens me.
Iain M. writes big spectacle science fiction, generally set in an egalitarian high tech utopia called The Culture. Iain, without the M. used to write strange books which were neither realist nor fantasy, but somewhere in between. Then the M. came along, Iain pushed all his weirdness into his M. identity, and both sides became a bit more predictable.
This one is about a composer, an exile from a caste ridden alien race, now resident on a Culture world, and the emissary from his people who is perhaps sent to bring him home, perhaps sent for more sinister purposes.
There's a degree of structural cleverness, alternate chapters from each perspective, but it's not really breaking new ground. There's a degree of mystery - just what is composer Ziller running away from, just what is the Major's mission, and will he carry it out? Pretty much standard thriller stuff though. The mysteries are petty, the result pretty much inevitable.
Nothing fundamentally wrong you understand, but could try harder.
And to be fair, has. All three of the more recent books I read before getting to this on catch up were a lot more inventive. And one was the welcome return of weirdness to Iain without an M. in Transition. I could really do to read that again in the hope of understanding it properly. Alas, I understood Look To Windward perfectly the first time.