The Player of Games by Iain M Banks

I need to start off with a disclaimer. Or maybe it’s more of a confession. I’ve been caught in a love/hate relationship with Iain Banks/Iain M Banks pretty much since I first heard of him, back when I came across a TV interview he did for the release of The Bridge. I was fascinated by the idea of the novel, so I picked up a copy and read it. And loved it.

After that first encounter with his fearless storytelling, I would occasionally try another Banks, TBR pile allowing. Which is where the problem started. You see, some of his books took root really easily. The Wasp Factory left me breathless. The Crow Road instilled a sort of melancholy nostalgia in me that I don’t think I’ve ever lost. Complicity was pacier than I expected. Dark and playful. Coming along just as I’d gotten into reading old Gonzo articles and grisly murder mysteries, it felt made for me. There were trickier reads ahead, though.

Canal Dreams was muddled more than insightful for me – especially in that awkwardly action heavy second half. Dead Air belonged in a list with the likes of Martin Amis’ Yellow Dog and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – the scar tissue book pop culture books that couldn’t quite digest the pain and confusion of 9/11. Although Banks, being Banks, also wrote the channel hopping, sci fi flavoured Transition, which dipped into the same territory in places. A Song of Stone took some work. The Steep Approach to Garbadale just made me wish I’d read The Crow Road again.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no doubting the man’s creativity. Stories seemed capable of pouring out of his head like he’d tapped into some sort of literary waterfall. I just always got the feeling that he wasn’t too worried about taking the reader with him. Which was fine when you could keep up, but a lot less fun when the first couple of hundred pages could end up feel like you were tackling a vertical ascent.

It wasn’t like his writing came across as purposefully obtuse or weird, either. Banks just followed his own compass. Sometimes the result could feel incredibly worthwhile. Other times, you wanted a chance to raise your hand and ask a few questions about what he’d been aiming to achieve.

When I first started dabbling in Iain Banks’ back catalogue, I left his pure, weapons grade science fiction alone. It was set in a universe so vastly different from his other writing, let alone pretty much anything else, that it felt like they deserved more than the M in the middle of his name on the cover. Maybe a health warning for those of us not quite ready to dive into the social questions that a ship’s Mind or Culture threatening civilisation could provoke over three hundred plus pages. From the outside, clutching your copy of Espedair Street, they seemed so baroque, so abstract, so alien. It felt like he was setting me a test that I kept failing.

True, some of his M free books do have the ring of sci fi to them. Transition. Walking on Glass. The Business, to a certain extent. But whenever I would pick up one of his pure sci fi novels, just the language alone would leave me feeling like I’d discovered a secret code without the Rosetta stone. Their pacing always felt off as well. It was like his science fiction required you to operate under the pull of a very different gravity to normal fiction. Or, to put it another way, it was as if you’d accidentally changed the channel from rock to prog rock and couldn’t change it back. Don’t get me wrong, though, I’d been brought up on Arthur C Clarke and Tolkien. It wasn’t like I expected everything to read like an airport thriller.

Use of Weapons was the first one I actually bought, but it didn’t get read for a long time. There were a few false starts. A lot of slow approaches through the first fifty or so pages, as I tried to wrap my head around the style, tone, and the seemingly boundless creativity once he got out past our orbit.

Then when I was on holiday one year, I picked up Consider Phlebas and, after deciding that I didn’t need to know how to pronounce half the title, I read it over the fortnight we were away. With no other distractions, I found I could really sink into that book. It wasn’t always easy or friendly. It didn’t feel too bothered how I was feeling or if I was fully onboard. It certainly wasn’t what I’d call a page turner. Instead, Iain M Banks was revelling in the world he was creating - the Culture, the drones, the wildly named characters and worlds. I was just there to watch the undeniably clever, possibly sentient firework display. Although, within those galactic restrictions and social commentary, it was the characters who carried me through to the end. After taking that trip, I found Use of Weapons a far easier to read.

Last year, during a holiday in Devon, I found a second hand bookshop which had almost all of the Iain M Banks back catalogue on their shelves. I picked them up and lugged them round for the rest of the day, knowing it had been more of an investment than a purchase. I wasn’t going to power through these books. I don’t think Iain M Banks ever intended his sci fi to be gulped down like fast food. It’s a banquet. Or a series of banquets. A five star dining equivalent of a pub crawl.

The Player of Games, which sits between the two Iain M Banks books I’ve already read, had to go through a couple of false starts again before I really started to get into it. The world building, as always, took centre stage as I settled into that slightly unforgiving rhythm. A rhythm that felt all the more grandiose after I’ve spent the last few months with people wanting to talk about the genius of the Avatar movies. After that, an Iain M Banks’ Culture novel certainly comes across more like palate sandblaster than a palate cleanser.

He pulls no punches in his sci fi writing. He’s not here for the space battles. Instead, Iain M Banks really puts the opera in space opera. The characters and their drives, whether they’re human or machine or alien gameplaying emperor, all sing off the page. Whilst, from time to time, the sci fi gives you a hefty slap across the cheeks to ensure you’re paying close attention.

In this case, it’s the rules of games and the social structure of the planet Azad which are there to test you. Although, it has to be said, it’ll take you over a hundred pages to get to see Azad for the first time. And, for me, it felt like a hundred pages.

Much like Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games is not a book that feels designed to keep you glued to the page with cliff hangers and sudden revelatory twists. The strange, visionary wonders of the worlds you’re going to see are incredibly bright, almost dazzling backgrounds but, really, M Banks wants to talk to you about the risks people are willing to take. He wants to look at how gambling sits in very different cultures and tell you how he feels about people so hoodwinked by their own status or reputation that they might not be able to see the whole of the board anymore. It’s an odd, if not altogether unsuccessful juxtaposition.

It's also not a bad book by any stretch of the imagination, and you can certainly feel the imagination stretching here, into all manner of shapes. There are some narration choices which don’t quite work for a slow read. Although the nightmarish, paranoid descent that takes over the last third of the novel is brilliantly unnerving. It’s just, as I’ve found the last couple of times I’ve dipped into the realm of the Culture, it takes time to adjust to the style and speed of Iain M Banks’ distant future morality plays. Time that I’m not entirely sure is always paid back with something ultimately rewarding. Sometimes the journey feels a lot more important than where it ends.

Use of Weapons was a far easier read to me. Which, to be fair, might be because I’d tuned into the prose a lot quicker. It’s just that the style and characters in that book kept me engaged far easier than the more disconnected, ego bound, midlife crisis lens through which we see our lead character in The Player of Games.

Not that I’m giving up on that pile of unread Iain M Banks books yet. There are ideas in all his science fiction novels which put most other writers in the shade. It just feels a shame that The Player of Games hasn’t left me wanting to jump right into the next book, and the next book. Instead, it’s left me feeling like I might take a bit of a break before picking up The State of the Art. Which, considering it’s a book of short stories, does make me wonder how long it’ll take me to get my sea legs when it comes to navigating my way through the Culture series.

Also, if I’m being honest, it does also make me think that I’ll probably be returning these books to the ocean of second hand books once I’m done with them. Which is something I’d never consider doing with Iain Banks’ other stories. Not even with the ones that didn’t win me over the first time.