Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks

1. The pacing in the story is inconsistent to me. There are portions that seem to drag, portions that seem to speed by, and a few portions that feel just right for the amount of action, ideas, and characterization involved. Specifically, he drew out the build-up to the ending too far. I understand drawing that buildup out somewhat helped him increase tension, but he drew it out too much: at the start, I was wondering where he was going because he started so far back; and by the end I grew a bit bored and had to reread a couple of paragraphs here and there because my mind started wandering. He even includes a few wry phrases as a wink to the readers that he knows what he’s doing—Horza is sitting in the control room surrounded by a lot of controls and data screens, his back turned to an alarm that starts flashing, while Horza contemplates:

So far we've done it, despite the mistakes, but it's so easy to miss something, to fail to spot some tiny detail in the mass of data which later when you've forgotten all about it, when your back is turned creeps up and clobbers you. The secret was to think of everything...

Banks also ends rather abruptly, though he effectively then fills the ending in with appendices and an epilogue. However, the long-buildup to the climax and the quick ending are not what annoyed me most with the pacing. Instead, I’m most annoyed he set up this conflict so effectively early on, then seemingly drops it for half the book while Horza is working to get to a place where he can be working towards his mission objective. Banks spends way too much time on the middle portion of the book, Horza being thrown into situation after situation after situation that doesn’t directly deal with the conflict as set up in the start. By the time Banks got to the end, the main conflict and Horza’s mission were almost forgotten. This was off-putting throughout.

2. These pacing problems allow Banks to world-build wonderfully: it's like he's focused on building the world instead of telling a story. But he uses each plot arc to offer variations within the world and build it out in the reader’s mind. Some of the scenes and characters are simply there to build the world and nothing else. This makes portions seem unimportant to the plot and let's the whole come off like a world-building exercise, not a novel. These scenes should be doing more than one thing. Though the pacing inconsistencies are odd, there are no wasted words in here: every phrase and action is focused on world-building, wrinkling the characters, or progressing the plot. And by the end, Banks is starting to use sentences and situations to do all three at once, and that’s where his best work exists. So he paces it poorly, but through his desire to build the world out fully—which he successfully accomplishes.

3. And these previous two points set the stage for this realization: Banks experiments throughout this work. It is mostly all first person, straight narrative, but within that broader tactic, he varies his techniques widely. Some portions monologue heavily as Horza struggles with his central question, some show his actions. Some isolate Horza, and some put him in complex contexts. Some deal with the wider conflict directly, some do not—though most mix the war and the not-war. Some chapters are split between two major subchapters that each take a different first person character that do not know each other or ever directly interact—though one character affects Horza, he’s got no idea how or who. Some, like during the long buildup to the climax, jump between characters’ perspectives rapidly—including a couple of single lines. I’m probably forgetting a couple of Banks’ main narrative tactics in the above list, but the point is that he varies the storytelling methods widely throughout the work. Yet the novel remains legible. He's a new writer experimenting. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But mostly it does.

4. Banks’ writing communicates effectively, and his descriptions are above average. But other than one portion, I never really marveled as the writing. That one portion starts with a beautiful description, then mixes description and action wonderfully:

... A sky like chipped ice, a wind to cut you to the body core. Too cold for snow, for most of the journey, but once for eleven days and nights it came, a blizzard over the field of ice we walked on, howling like an animal, with a bite like steel. The crystals of ice flowed like a single torrent over the hard and frozen land. You could not look into it or breathe; even trying to stand was near impossible. We made a hole, shallow and cold, and lay in it until the skies cleared.

We were the walking wounded, straggled band. Some we lost when their blood froze in them. One just disappeared, at night in a storm of snow. Some died from their wounds. One by one we lost them, our comrades and our servants. Every one begged us make what use we could of their corpse once they were gone. We had so little food; we all knew what it meant, we were all prepared; name a sacrifice more total, or more noble.

In that air, when you cried, the tears froze on your face with a cracking sound, like a heart breaking.

Mountains. The high passes we climbed to, famished in that thin and bitter air. The snow was white powder, dry as dust. To breathe it was to freeze from inside; flurries from the jagged slopes, dislodged by feet in front, stung in the throat like acid spray. I saw rainbows in the crystal veils of ice and snow which were the product of our passing, and grew to hate those colours, that freezing dryness, the starved high air and dark blue skies.

Three glaciers we traversed, losing two of our comrades in crevasses, beyond sight or sound, falling further than an echo's reach.

Deep in a mountain ring we came to a marsh; it lay in that scoop like a cess for hope. We were too slow, too stupefied, to save our Querl when he walked out into it and floundered there. We thought it could not be, with air so cold around us, even in that wan sunlight; we thought it must be frozen and we saw what only seemed to be, and our eyes would clear and he come walking back to us, not slip beneath that dark ooze, out of reach.

It was an oil marsh, we realised too late, after the tarry depths had claimed their toll from us. The next day, while we were still looking for a way across, the chill came harder still, and even that sludge locked itself to stillness, and we walked quickly to the other side.

In the midst of frozen water we began to die of thirst. We had little to heat the snow with save our own bodies, and eating that white dust until it numbed us made us groggy with the cold of it, slowing our speech and step. But we kept on, though the cold sucked at us whether awake or trying to sleep, and the harsh sun blinded us in fields of glittering white and filled our eyes with pain. The wind cut us, snow tried to swallow us, mountains like cut black glass blocked us, and the stars on clear nights taunted us, but on we came.

Near two thousand kilometres, little one, with only the small amount of food we could carry from the wreck, what little equipment had not been turned to junk by the barrier beast, and our own determination. We were forty-four when we left the battle cruiser, twenty-seven when we began our trek across the snows: eight of my kind, nineteen of the medjel folk. Two of us completed the journey, and six of our servants.

Do you wonder that we fell upon the first place we found with light and heat? Does it surprise you that we just took, and did not ask? We had seen brave warriors and faithful servants die of cold, watched each other wear away, as though the ice blasts had abraded us; we had looked into the cloudless, pitiless skies of a dead and alien place, and wondered who might be eating who when the dawnlight came. We made a joke of it at first, but later, when we had marched a thirty-day, and most of us were dead, in ice gullies, mountain ravines or raw in our own bellies, we did not think it so funny. Some of the last, perhaps not believing our course was true, I think died of despair.

We killed your human friends, these other Changers. I killed one with my own hands; another, the first, fell to a medjel, while he still slept. The one in the control room fought bravely, and when he knew he was lost, destroyed many of the controls. I salute him. There was another who put up a fight in the place where they stored things; he, too, died well. You should not grieve too much for them. I shall face my superiors with the truth in my eyes and heart. They will not discipline me, they will reward me, should I ever stand before them.

Other than this beautiful section, and a few others like it, It seems like Banks spent his energy mostly in thinking through the storytelling tactics and world building, rather than the writing. It’s a 471 page long book and these portions are too few and too far apart to really make me interested for just the writing. It’s like he turns his writing on in spurts, and typically stays with an economical, clear voice. That said, his writing rarely bored me, and I look forward to seeing if he becomes a better and more consistent writer in later works.

5. The theme is apparent enough, I think. At one point a character points it out fairly obviously:

That is the way with all of your kind. It is how you are made; you must all strive to claw your way over the backs of your fellow humans during the short time you are permitted in the universe, breeding when you can, so that the strongest strains survive and the weakest die. I would no more blame you for that than I would try to convert some non-sentient carnivore to vegetarianism. You are all on your own side.

It’s anti-war, but even more than that, it’s anti-conflict. The future-game Damage is described in a slightly silly way. And I can’t help but feel like he intentionally let the reader down with the quick ending, forcing them to contemplate what Horza’s quest and struggle was really for, ultimately realizing—through the appendices—that it might not have been for much. I mean, Horza himself gets pretty confused about the war: he’s initially anti-Culture before he ends up conflicted about them and the whole war. I think Banks skillfully points out that war is a gray area: it’s always some bad and some good. [Poking around the internet I found this by Banks himself, so my guess was pretty close:

“I've read so many SF books where the action is terribly, terribly important to the fate of everyone and everything. That fate of a whole planet can hang on the outcome of a protagonist's actions. Sometimes, the fate of the entire universe! Well, if you look at history, this is very unusual indeed. What usually happens is that people suffer and die and get involved in all sorts of mayhem and catastrophe and it doesn't make that much difference in the end. That was one of the ideas behind Consider Phlebas. There's a big war going on in that novel, and various individuals and groups manage to influence its outcome. But even being able to do that doesn't ultimately change things very much. At the book's end, I have a section pointing this out by telling what happened after the war, which was an attempt to pose the question, 'What was it all for?' I guess this approach has to do with my reacting to the cliché of SF's 'lone protagonist.' You know, this idea that a single individual can determine the direction of entire civilizations. It's very, very hard for a lone person to do that. And it sets you thinking what difference, if any, it would have made if Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx or Charles Darwin had never been. We just don't know.”]