Realities Check [Review: Transition]

As Iain Banks’ novel Transition opens the reader is presented with a series of different narrators in quick succession. I was initially confused – were they the same person at different times, separate narratives linked only by theme, or would the link between them be a metaphysical one? Iain Banks’ novels are mostly thrillers and while there are plenty of plot twists they are still easy to follow. An exception is The Bridge, which is more complex, and like Inception or Life On Mars it takes place on different levels of consciousness. My first, misguided impression was that Transition was heading somewhere similar.

This opening makes for a difficult, off-putting first third of the novel and some readers may not pass this stage. I therefore feel I am performing a public service by broadcasting the fact that this is not randomness or surreality but the opening gambit of an extremely well-planned novel - soldier on and much will become clear.

It gradually becomes apparent that the narratives are the voices of separate people, all employed in some capacity by the shadowy Concern. As with much of Banks’ writing there are parallels to be drawn with American interventionalism. Concern agents travel across alternate realities and make changes to the course of local events. Ostensibly the Concern’s mission is the greater good of humanity, but the agents are assassins and torturers while the leadership is, naturally, all about personal power, privilege and immortality, while the layers of the Concern may hide a darker agenda.

There are no thoroughbred heroes in Transition but amongst the ranks of villains and antiheroes there are insiders questioning their loyalty to the Concern or their understanding of its' mission: these insiders, like double agents, make for interesting stories driven by character development and change.

Transition is one of Banks’ best and freshest novels for a long time and if it’s not shocking compared to, say, Complicity (aww bless, he’s writing about torture and orgies again…) it’s gripping and satisfyingly complex. In the UK the book has been presented under the name Iain Banks rather than Iain M. Banks – the Earth(s)bound setting may mean this novel is more accessible to readers who are not already Culture citizens, although as onesuch myself who am I to say?

However, while Transition is not a Culture novel, it’s built on similar themes of power, abuse and politics, and on familiar sci-fi concepts: Quantum Leaping into the minds of others, Sliding across alternate realities. In addition to the basic skill of transitioning, Concern agents may have a range of other psychic powers: Tandemers can take passengers with them – for some agents this can only be achieved during sex – Trackers can track other agents through transitions, Blockers block other agents’ powers, and some agents have a limited form of foresight. Similar psychic powers turn up in the film Push, although exploding fish seems beyond the reach of the Concern.

Lonely Planets

Another positive feature of a series (as opposed to a stand-alone novel) is that it sometimes gives the author the chance to take you deeper into their imaginary universe and give you a guided tour of a key location. Two good examples are Chasm City (Alastair Reynolds) and Look To Windward (Iain M. Banks).

Reynolds' novel continues in the same vein as Revelation Space - trust nothing you read. Chasm City is a multilayered society with extremes of poverty and avarice, and a criminal Layer Cake that leaves no sector untouched, and the mysteries and betrayals are equally multilayered. The architecture of the city itself relates to its past as you will discover, with structures at a certain altitude distorted by a nanoplague.

Ma'saaq Orbital, the setting for Look To Windward, is a Culture ringworld, and the population have expanded around the ring to find the space to explore their imaginative and eccentric Culture lifestyles. The plot takes the reader around the ring. Ma'saaq is governed by one of Banks' superintelligent ship AIs, and this AI, it's history and the significance of it's ruling task are explored in depth.

Both locations and their populations are fleshed out into complex and plausible human societies - this is travel fiction at its best. Curiously both locations feature an eccentric cable-car network - Reynolds' cars traverse the height of an overgrown city sector by leaping from vine to vine; Banks are clockwork and deliberately maintained in a state of disrepair for artistic reasons.

End Game

The twist in the tale is a familiar and well-used device in sci-fi writing, particularly in the golden era - many Asimov stories, for example, seem to be constructed purely to end on a (bad) pun. Some twists are of course better than others - but can the surprise ending actually be detrimental to some novels?

I recently read The Squares of the City. John Brunner's novel of 1965 combines town planning, politics, mind control and sublimated civil war, structured around a chess metaphor. My copy has a cover by Peter Goodfellow combining chess, computer and architectural imagery.

Boyd Hakluyt is an Aussie traffic expert whose work takes him to the Ciudad de Vados, a futuristic city built by the dictator of Aguazul, a fictional South American state. He is hired to redesign the road system in order to disperse the slums, but becomes increasingly drawn into the tension between the citizens and the poorer nationals who are resentful of the city's wealth.

Chess is Aguazul's national sport; a key scene features a Prisoner-style live re-enactment of a chess game watched by the two political leaders (dictator Vados and minister Diaz). The two political movements are more evenly matched than they first appear, and the plot is a series of moves and counter-moves as characters are blocked, taken out of play (sometimes murderously) or exchanged; similarly Hakluyt receives expositions from both sides, often reversing his allegiance. Femme fatale Maria Posador tells Hakluyt, while beating him soundly at chess, that "each move must be seen in relation to the whole." Hakluyt gradually moves from his initial belief that people don't mind being governed - they just resent the mechanisms of government - to an understanding that the situation is more complex, and is both about the extent of control and the awareness of the control. Chess and town planning are both good metaphors - they both revolve around freedoms and restrictions of movement.

This particular rabbit-hole runs deeper still. The book is in fact a novelization of a real championship chess match from 1892, between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin, with chessmen represented by characters and institutions - the author helpfully provides details in the afterword which is fascinating. Iain M. Banks covers some similar ground in his novel The Player of Games - again the board game, the complex Azad, is a metaphor for political control, and the Player, Culture gamer Gurgeh, has to see the real poverty and cruelty of the kingdom to understand what he is playing for (naturally he is shown this by his drone companion). Ideas about the relationship between games and real life continue in the more recent Matter.

This novel ought to have a great deal of literary depth - it's a clever concept and is extremely well realised, and it has a lot of intelligent things to say about human relations and control. And it succeeds - almost. What lets it down is the ending which takes the metaphors and turns them into a pointless, literal reality that just dissipates the energy that the novel builds up so well.

Read it. But skip the last chapter and write your own.