The Player of Games

I finished The Player of Games today, the first Iain M. Banks I've ever read. (It was recommended to me as the first Culture novel, and I'd bought it on Kindle before the error was corrected.)

I don't really know what to make of it. I think it's accurate to say it was not enjoyable to read; impenetrably complex names and vague descriptions of everything from geography to characters' appearances to their actions had me re-reading pages to make sure I'd not accidentally skipped a sentence - and that's not going into the more disturbing scenes (which were, I suppose, important examples of the imperial society, but still not light reading).

And it's not like William Gibson's torrent of slang and colloquialisms, which can be similarly disorienting but always has a clear, propulsive flow. Banks' prose seemed to start and stop in strange places, almost like it was getting caught on the scenery. The action could be heating up and then would be diverted for a couple of paragraphs of slow introspection. The Player of Games seemed to be be toying with Gibson-style sketches of technology and locations but wouldn't fully commit, leaving it in a strange uncanny valley where things were almost properly described but not satisfactorily.

There's something intriguing about the Culture as a setting, though - even if it frequently felt deliberately (albeit lazily) provocative in its liberalness. It makes sense as a counterpoint to the Azadian Empire, but both are such exaggerated extremes that the conflict in ideologies is a foregone conclusion and the handful of revelations - not even twists - in the closing chapters made little difference to my perception of events and motives up to that point.

But I can't help but wonder how much of my indifferent reaction is due to unfamiliarity; this is the fourth book I've finished this year, but only the first I've not read before. By now I'm so familiar with Neuromancer, The Forever War and Watchmen that I can just soak in their atmospheres, enjoying their grammatical (and in one case graphical) construction.

Maybe in a few months or years I'll be able to revisit The Player of Games and, no longer worrying about following a story, I'll find that same comfort in Banks' writing.

In the meantime, I'll probably pick up Consider Pheblas.

Cloud Atlas

I have, as near as I can tell, a first-edition hardcover copy of Cloud Atlas sitting next to me. It was the second David Mitchell book I bought (after Ghostwritten), and the third I owned (I got number 9 dream as a gift). It was the last that I managed to actually get through (until The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet came out, anyway).

It's not difficult to admit that, initially, I didn't "get" it. Even though Ghostwritten and number 9 dream had played with nonlinear and nontraditional narratives to varying degrees, Cloud Atlas was a totally different beast. I didn't think much of The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing - and it's still my least favourite of the stories - and the way it cut off mid-sentence struck me as extremely odd. I don't think I made it far enough into Letters from Zedelghem on my first attempt to reach Frobisher's discovery of Ewing's journal - which causes that first chapter to make sense - so I abandoned it.

I can't remember exactly when I picked up the Kindle edition (Amazon can, however: January 1st, 2011), but I'm pretty sure it was around the time that the film adaptation was announced. A few blog posts mentioned the nested matryoshka structure which piqued my interest again, and I stuck through Ewing and Frobisher's opening chapters to get to Luisa Rey, where everything started to click.

Tonight, we saw the film version at the DCA, and I'm still decompressing.

Some of it was brilliant. While the Wachowski version of Nea So Copros (imaginatively renamed "Neo Seoul") doesn't really look how I imagined it, it is stunning. The way O-hawaii is shot in Zachry's story is gorgeous - as, in fact is the whole thing. There's no question it's a technical masterpiece.

Some of the story changes bug me, though - more than they should. The biggest one is giving Zachry the comet birthmark; in the novel it's Meronym who has it. If that doesn't seem like a big story point to get hung up on, it's not - I can't really explain why it bothers me. The Frobisher story, which I was never really fond of anyway, has been more or less completely gutted and rebuilt; Ayrs' daughter Eve has been completely excised from the plot and the whole thing is transplanted from Holland to Edinburgh (although this does allow Cavendish's story to visit the same house a few decades later). A lot of the Chatham Isles stuff has been cut from Ewing's story, which doesn't really have much plot impact but makes the friendship between Ewing and Dr. Goose seem even more peculiar.

The Luisa Rey, Cavendish and Sonmi stories are more or less complete though, and I think I found the first two more interesting than I did in the book. An Orison of Sonmi-451 and Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After are my two favourite chapters of the book, and I'm glad they were kept mostly intact - even if Sonmi's is simplified a lot in places for time.

And with a running time of nearly three hours, it's probably for the best that liberties were taken with the slower parts of the book; the emotional beats are all pretty well intact, although the point of the story is probably overstated. It takes a while to get going as well; I thought the early scenes were very exposition-heavy, which is probably necessary when you're setting up six different stories with six different casts set across a thousand years of human history but still feels clumsy.

It has definitely inspired me to re-read the book, though; I'm sure there's a lot of stuff I've missed previously. The last time I read number 9 dream I spotted another link to the overall Mitchell universe, so I'm sure Cloud Atlas still has a lot to find.

In a more perfect world, I like to think Cloud Atlas would have gotten a 12-episode TV series; the first half of the first five stories, two episodes for Sloosha's Crossin', and then the closing parts of the stories in reverse order.

I'm holding out hope for a Ghostwritten series with that approach. Come on, HBO - don't let me down.

Ah Um

Work's been kind of stressful the last few days, so I've been too preoccupied to come up with anything substantial to post about. I will try harder tomorrow, but I've not seen any new anime in a few days and haven't been playing games much since I finished XCOM (and restarted it on a real difficulty, i.e., Normal - I'm not confident enough yet to try it on a level more punishing than that just yet), apart from Wind Waker which is just ticking through.

So this'll be a bit of a ramble.

I haven't even been keeping on top of blogs recently, so apart from the imminent (probably kind of deserved) demise of another of the UK's high street mainstays, HMV, I've no idea what's happening in the world. Unless you count The Onion's tremendous article about "The 6 Best Dresses At The Golden Globes" - I love it when they get angry.

I have been reading a bit recently; I used an gift voucher from Christmas to pick up the Kindle version of a book I already own, which seems to be more common than buying new books for the device. I've got almost all of David Mitchell's novels on there now - the only one left is Black Swan Green, which I have in hardback but I'm not sure if I'd read it again. Might try the dead tree version again, see if that inspires anything before splashing out for the digital version.

The one I just (re)bought is number9dream, also coincidentally the first of his books that I read. I'd forgotten so many of the subplots and scenes, and it's in turns a tremendously sad and joyously happy book. I'm trying to keep an eye out for tie-ins to his other books (apart from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, they all take place in the same "universe"); I only remember one, and haven't spotted any others this time yet.

I've also just got Charles Mingus' first Columbia album, Mingus Ah Um (I always forget if Ah comes before or after Um in that title; I had to look it up again to check) and have had that on loop at work. It's pretty good, but it's a more disorganised than I was expecting. Some of the solos really clash with the rhythm/backing sections they play over, but there's some great energy in it. And Mingus was a bass player, so his contributions to the collective aren't always as obvious as Miles Davis' were on his albums. It's probably not an album to start your jazz collection with, but if you're already a fan of bebop you'll probably get a kick out of it.