Thursday 1 February 2024

Books on Film: The Dead

Having recently completed a reread of James Joyce’s Dubliners, I decided to rewatch The Dead, John Huston’s film adaptation of the story of the same name. Although I have seen the film at least twice before and read Dubliners countless times, this is the first time of experiencing them in close proximity to one another. Which makes comparing them considerably easier.

The Dead is the final story in the series of fifteen that make up Dubliners. It is easily the longest of the set, running to more than fifteen thousand words, and revisits many of the same themes found in the rest of the collection. Paralysis. Jealousy. Youthful folly. Alcoholic excess. Simmering resentment. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest short stories ever written.

The 1987 film adaptation of The Dead was the last film completed by director, John Huston, before his death later that year. It is the denouement to a career that spanned forty six years, including such films as, The African Queen (1951), The Misfits (1961), Casino Royale (1967), The Man Who Would Be King (1975) and Escape to Victory (1981).

However, it is Huston’s debut feature, The Maltese Falcon (1941) that, for me, remains one of the greatest films ever made. It is a movie so engrained in my consciousness that even when I return to the novel (which I have read almost as many times as Dubliners), I visualise it in black and white, despite the rich palate of colours described by Dashiell Hammett’s prose. Sam Spade’s yellow-grey eyes shine through the greyscale like a character in a Sin City movie.

Old Yellow-Gray Eyes
The Dead is about as far removed from The Maltese Falcon as one can get. The action takes place during a Christmas party attended by the main characters, Gabriel and Greta Conroy. The party is hosted by Gabriel’s aunts, Kate and Julia Morkan. Along with their niece, Mary Jane Morkan, Gabriel refers to the women as The Three Graces.

The party actually takes place on 6 January, the Feast of Epiphany, also known as Little Christmas, or Nollaig na mBan in Gaelic, meaning Women’s Christmas, when the Christmas period was over (6 January is also Twelfth Night) and it was the turn of the women of the household to celebrate.

During Little Christmas, men would take on the duties traditionally assigned to the women in a variation on the Lord of Misrule Christmas traditions, where the masters serve the servants. It should be noted that in neither the story or the film adaptation of The Dead is there much evidence of the male characters taking on these roles, or contributing much to the preparations. They are too absorbed by their own petty concerns.

My 1st copy of Dubliners
On the surface, the story of The Dead is fairly simple. Gabriel and Greta arrive late. Gabriel is to give an after-dinner speech, as he has done at the annual gathering for a number of years. Gabriel works as a teacher and part time journalist. He fusses over the details of his speech, rejecting sections for being too high brow for the tastes of his audience.

Gabriel is teased by Miss Ivors for being a ‘West Briton’, a term of abuse used for those more interested in European rather than Irish culture. She tries to convince him to make “a trip to the west of Ireland.” He refuses. Greta tries to convince him to go, so she can return to Galway, where she grew up, but Gabriel tells her she should go on her own, or with Miss Ivors,  if she so wants.

There is dancing and music recitals. The character, Freddy Malins, shows up drunk, to the chagrin of the hostesses and his mother, who is visiting from Glasgow. Dinner is served and Gabriel gives his speech to universal acclaim.

As the Conways are preparing to leave, Gabriel finds Greta listening to the tenor singer, Bartell D'Arcy, sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ (a traditional Scots/ English ballad), as if lost in thought. When he asks here about it at the hotel where they are to spend the night, she tells him about Michael Furey. Furey used to sing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ for her when she was a girl and they were courting. He died when he was only seventeen. Greta believes he died because of her, after he showed up to her house in the pouring rain on the night before she was due to leave Galway for Dublin. He refused to leave and already being sick, passed away several days later.


Greta becomes distraught as she tells Gabriel about Furey and cries herself to sleep. The story and film end with Gabriel standing by the window as he laments never having loved anyone enough to die for them. Snow is falling outside and Gabriel’s consciousness sweeps across the whole of Ireland, from the ‘dark central plain’ to ‘the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.’ Gabriel’s inner-monologue ends the film in a voice over largely taken verbatim from the closing words of the story (with changes from the third to first person).

A simple story it might be, but the power and the glory of The Dead and Dubliners in general is often what is left unsaid. What is hinted at and alluded to between the words. It is no wonder Ernest Hemingway adored Dubliners and used the stories as touchstones for his own short fiction. If anyone could rival Joyce in leaving things unsaid, it was surely Hemingway.

However, the film loses some of the subtlety of Joyce’s prose. Which is always the trade off when adapting the written word for the screen. What this means in practice is that the film version contains a lot that is essentially padding to bulk out the story to a running time of eighty minutes (John Huston’s son, Tony, who wrote the script notes that the first draft, an almost verbatim rendering of the story, came in at about a forty five minute runtime). Some of it works and some of it does not.

Watching the film with the story fresh n my mind, the elements I find most superfluous and more than a little hammy are in the treatment of Greta. In the story, Greta is pretty much caught unawares in hearing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ after so many years. This plummets her into the black mood that renders her mute during their journey back to the hotel. In the film, however, there are several moments where something someone says causes her to remember Furey and primes her for the moment on the stairs. 

Angelica Huston as Greta is fabulous in the role, but I find all the wistful looks a little grating as they lay it on thick for the audience. It’s not like the audience knows what’s going on, unless they are already familiar with the story. This somewhat dilutes the impact of the moment on the stairs.

Moreover, the depiction of the key scene is a bit on the nose with the way Huston is lit. In the story, Gabriel doesn’t recognise his wife for a moment, standing there in the semi-darkness. The film version leaves no-one, not even Gabriel, in any doubt as to who is on the stairs.

Where? There on the stair. Where on the stair? Right there.
The film also alters Miss Ivors reason for leaving. In the story, she leaves before dinner, but no reason is given, other than she feels she has outstayed her welcome. In the film, she is leaving to attend a union meeting, having already confessed to being an Irish nationalist.

Given the time in which the film was made and the febrile political situation in Northern Ireland at the time, as well as the financial support the IRA received from America’s Irish population, this is surely deliberate. A nod to nationalism: Of which, I think it is safe to say, Joyce would not have approved. One has only to read the Cyclops episode of Ulysses to find a clue to his opinion on such matters.

Indeed, there are these odd moments that seem to play into an idealised theme park version of Ireland found in the United States. It’s not quite leprechauns stealing me lucky charms and dying everything green, but the score can’t help but include strains of the kind of diddly-dee ‘Irish music’ you find in many tired, clichéd depictions of Irish life, from John Ford’s The Quiet Man to divers episodes of Star Trek.

The irony that Colm Meaney, who played Chief Miles O’Brien in both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9, appears as Raymond Bergin is worth mentioning in passing. The familiar Star Trek trope known as, O’Brien Must Suffer, includes Meaney being made to suffer through many of those tortuously clichéd Star Trek scenes (see The Next Generation episode, Up the Long Ladder, for instance, which is painful to watch).

The Dead is the epitome of refinement by comparison. Meaney’s performance is understated. He is very much a secondary character, but no true Star Trek fan can help but follow him as he dances in circles around the room in the background. As a Joyce and a Trek fan, I am always happy when the two intersect (as with the Deep Space 9, Quark, who, like the fundamental particle, takes his name directly from Finnegans Wake).

Chief (right), what are you doing here?
Mr Grace is the one character added to film who doesn’t appear in Joyce’s story. It has been suggested he was partly included to give him some of Mr Browne’s lines and make the latter  a more overtly comic character. Browne is the only protestant character in the story, which might also have something to do with it, making him more a more scornful character to play to the predominantly Catholic Irish American audience.

Mr Grace performs one of the set piece of the film, a poem he says is called, ‘Broken Vows’ (which facilitates one of Greta’s moments of misty eyed wistfulness). Sean McClory, who played Mr Grace, coincidentally, appeared in The Quiet Man as Owen Glynn.

Another set piece comes when Aunt Julia sings a warbled voiced version of ‘Arrayed for the Bridal’, and the camera sweeps the rooms of the house, alighting on various items, from photos and needlepoint, to vases, candlesticks and porcelain angels.

I feel these are the additions that Joyce would appreciate. Music was always a part of Joyce’s life. He might have been a successful opera singer if he hadn’t chosen writing (and his terrible eyesight hadn’t precluded sight reading). His books are filled to the brim with music and the moments of recital feel as much a nod to Ulyssean episodes like Sirens as anything else. It is easy to see how much John Huston was influenced by Ulysses (his mother smuggled him a copy of the book out of France when it was still banned in the US).

The other main criticism one might make of the film adaption is that it somewhat diminishes Gabriel’s place in the story. He is still the most important character in the film, but Joyce’s story is much more focused upon him. For the most part, he is as much a point of view character as others found in Dubliners (cf. Eveline, After the Race, A Painful Case, etc.). The comic elements around Browne and Malins, as well as the set pieces, defocus Gabriel centrality to a large extent.

However, Greta is much more present in the film version. Despite the hammy elements of her various reminiscences, Angelica Huston’s portrayal makes Greta all the more sensual than the rather staid woman found in Joyce’s story. Joyce wrote better female characters later in his career, most notably Molly Bloom in Ulysses. As Joyce largely based both characters on his wife, Nora Barnacle, it is apt that Huston plays Greta closer to Molly than the actual character in The Dead.

Nora Barnacle
Joyce very much based Gabriel on himself with Gabriel’s cycling trips to the continent to brush up on his French and German. Joyce’s degree was in modern languages (French, German and Italian). He and Nora lived on the continent for all but the first few months of their relationship. Though I can’t quite imagine Joyce on a bicycle. His eyesight was too bad for that.

Donal McCann as Gabriel isn’t very Joyce like. Joyce was tall and skinny. McCann is shorter and stocky. Although both Joyce and McCann died tragically young in their 50s.Yet McCann is perfect in the role and it’s as difficult to imagine Gabriel as anyone else as it is to imagine anyone but Humphrey Bogart being Sam Spade.

It has its issues, but the film version of The Dead is still satisfying to watch. To those of us who read and reread Joyce, study him and learn at his knee and who lament his reputation as being difficult and opaque and not more widely read as a result, any cinematic representation of Joyce’s world is gratifying. It would be nice if someone would produce an anthology from the rest of Dubliners, with different directors tackling one story each. However, it seems unlikely.

So other than Joseph Strick’s 1967 version of Ulysses, which I still haven’t seen, The Dead is about the best we are going to get. Joyceans celebrate Epiphany as the first date in the Joyce calendar and some even hold a recreation of the meal and celebration featured in The Dead. I will settle for reading the story and watching the film.

Then again, I was born on 2 February, which is Candlemass, Groundhog Day, and also James Joyce’a birthday. Which is a pretty good birthday to have. And a damn good celebration.

Other Books on Film

A Scanner Darkly
Drive My Car
Dune

James Joyce, about to perform Dirty Old Town (niche humour)

 

Saturday 1 April 2023

We Haven’t Met But You’re a Great Fan of Mine: Iain M Banks’s Culture Series

 (spoilers and trigger warnings apply)

The eight, nine, or ten books of Iain M Banks Culture series (depending on how you count them – see below) are some of the most important science fiction novels published in the last forty years. Variously called space opera, utopian futurism or anarcho-techno-syndicalism, the Culture goes beyond the standard sci-fi typified by Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke and their contemporaries. Here there are big ideas, even if some of those ideas are not explored in any great depth, but they are the backdrop to each stand-alone novel. Character, rather than science, takes centre stage in the Culture.

The Culture refers to an utopian, post-human society in which biological life and general AI (‘Minds’) exist and work together. Not that this is a human society. Although the Culture is located in the Milky Way, the novels take place as much as fifteen hundred years apart. The titular story of The State of the Art collection does take place on Earth, but humanity is otherwise not featured. That said, the majority of the main characters in the Culture books are humanoid in appearance. Banks, after all, is writing for other humans.

Post-human in this sense refers to the various genetic and technological advancements that augment the people of the Culture. They live for hundreds of years, with many using a ‘neural lace’ grown around the brain to protect them against unexpected death, uploading the consciousness to a lab-grown replacement body. Many in the Culture switch between genders and raise children as both men and women. They also employ various glands in the body to secrete drugs for sleep, alertness, time dilation or enhanced memory, to name but a few examples.

The majority of Culture inhabitants no longer live on planets. Instead, the Culture has constructed great rings (‘Orbitals’), millions of miles in diameter, on which cities are built on plates on the inner ring. Each of the billions of inhabitants are in communication with the central Mind that controls every aspect of their environment. Humanoid Avatars act as the Minds’ representatives on the surface.

The other main population density are found on the various spacecraft of the Culture that whip around the galaxy at speeds many times faster than light. The larger General Systems Vehicles (GSVs) can be home to billions of people, although the average GSV is about the size (or volume) of a large city and house millions rather than billions. These ships are also managed and operated by a central Mind and its Avatars.

The ships of the Culture are perhaps the most well known element of the series, due to the comical names the Minds choose for themselves. Just Read the Instructions, No More Mr Nice Guy, The Anticipation of a New Lover’s Arrival, Poke it With a Stick, Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life's Rich Tapestry, the list is extensive1.

There are also ships named in honour to other sci-fi and cultural items. The Someone Else’s Problem seems to be named after the SEP field from Douglas Adams’s Life, the Universe and Everything2: Minority Report after the Philip K Dick short story (and the schmaltzy Hollywood adaptation): Clear Air Turbulence after the Ian Gillan Band album, which bears a resemblance to the yellow striped ship on the LP cover.

Many people know the names of Culture ships thanks to Elon Musk. In an act of typical small-mindedness, Musk named a number of Space X rocket platforms after GSV ships, including Of Course I Still Love You and A Shortfall of Gravitas. Which is a bit like naming a paddle boat after the Titanic. It’s further evidence that Musk might have read a lot of science fiction, but he doesn’t seem to have understood much of it.

The other main occupants of the Culture are Drones. Anything from the size of a fingernail to as large as a dustbin, drones are robotic life. Like R2D2 hovering in the air. The electrical field around them, which presumably allows them to hover, glows in different colours depending on mood. Although entities in their own right, Drones usually accompany a main character on their journey or mission (just like R2D2 in fact). A subset of Drones are Knife Missiles, which are a more overtly weapons-grade Drone. For the most part, Knife Missiles are to Drones what Avatars are to Minds.

The controversy over how many Culture novels there are and what constitutes a Culture novel is complicated by two entries in the series. The aforementioned The State of the Art is a collection of short stories that features two, possibly three, stories set in the Culture universe, including the title story. However, the book also includes a number of non-sci-fi, Earth based stories. Banks published science fiction as Iain M Banks and regular fiction as just Iain Banks. While The State of the Art is a hundred pages long, more than half the book’s length, five of the eight stories included are normal fiction.

Moreover, the novel Inversions is set entirely on a world equivalent to Earth’s medieval era. While there are two moments of Deus Ex Machina that seem to be caused by Culture-esque technology, possibly a Knife Missile, the narrator, Oelph, is a native of the planet, where electricity has yet to be invented, The incidents in question are not witnessed by him directly and he speaks about them as miraculous events (any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic). Alternating chapters focus on The Doctor and The Bodyguard3, who both seem to be Culture citizens in disguise, but the book is routed in medievalism. It’s more The Name of the Rose than The State of the Art.

As such, I will focus mainly on the remaining eight books that make up the Culture series. Luckily there is more than enough material to consider.

Preference is subjective and comes down to personal choice, but I think most people will agree that The Player of Games is the first great Culture novel. The first book in the series, Consider Phlebas, is good, but its follow up is on another level and is arguably the best of the first four Culture books (five, if you include The State of the Art).

All of the Culture novels feature Special Circumstances, the Culture’s equivalent to the CIA or MI6. Many main characters are officers of Special Circumstances, but in The Player of Games, Jernau Morat Gurgeh is a master board game player recruited by Special Circumstances to travel to a civilisation in the Small Magellanic Cloud. The journey takes years, during which time Gurgeh learns to play a game so complex that no one, not even Special Circumstances, expect him to last beyond the opening rounds of the tournament he is about to enter.

The Azad, to whose homeworld Gurgeh is travelling, are a species that base their entire society on this one game. The most skilled players become generals and professors. Even emperor. The Azad spend their entire lives learning the game in order to rise through the ranks of their society. Gurgeh has only a few years to learn the game during his journey out of the galaxy, but hides and underplays his understanding of the game, even from Flere-Imsaho, the Special Circumstances Drone sent to accompany him.

The Player of Games has some similarities with Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. In both books, the central game is complex and neither is described in any great detail. The Glass Bead Game requires expert knowledge of music, mathematics and philosophy. The Azad game involves mini games played using cards or dice, but the main game is played on a board large enough for players to walk around it and interact with the pieces.

Both the Azad and the fictional European country of Castalia are authoritarian in nature. The Glass Bead Game takes place at some unspecified time in the future. The Player of Games takes place a century after The State of the Art, which is set on Earth in the 1970s. Mastery of the game in both The Player of Games and The Glass Bead Game allows for social advancement in their respective societies. How much, if any, knowledge Banks had of Hesse’s novel is unclear, but the books are at least connected in spirit to one another.

Indeed, The Player of Games is the most unique of the Culture novels. There are more accomplished books later in the series, but The Player of Games is a true stand-alone novel in the sense that it has a tone and a style that Banks’s didn’t really use again. Consider Phlebas is similar in the way it follows one POV character for the majority of the narrative, but Bora Horza Gobuchul is a more self-possessed character than Gurgeh. Gobuchul is a mercenary and a survivor. Gurgeh is a civilian and a pawn in the Culture’s plan to destabilise Azad society.

Consider Phlebas is in its way also unique, in that it is the only book that focuses solely on a character from outside the Culture. In this first entry in the series, most of what we know about the Culture is gleaned from what their enemies in the Idrian War think of them. Though, to be fair, they are not exactly wrong. The Culture might be a utopian society, but its dealings with rival empires are Machiavellian in the extreme. Their treatment of the Azad, who live in a dwarf galaxy and lack the capability to cross into the Milky May, demonstrates this. It’s safe to say the Culture do not abide by any equivalent of Star Trek’s Prime Directive.

Consider Phlebas takes place about seven hundred years before the events of The Player of Games and five hundred years before any other book in the series (although there are flashbacks in Excession that take place more than a thousand years earlier). Rather like Asimov’s Foundation and its connecting series, events in The Idrian War become the subject of rumour and folklore in later Culture novels.

After The Player of Games, Banks never again concentrated entirely on one character. Each subsequent book is either a duet of dueling narratives, like Inversions and Use of Weapons, or we find a true space opera of competing stories, all focused on one event or plotline. Excession, Matter, Surface Detail, in fact most of the later novels, are all examples of this second kind of storytelling.

Again, preference is subjective, but for me the best of the Culture novels is Look to Windward. More of a dueling kind of narrative with some elements of space opera, Look to Windward swirls around its main protagonist. Major Quilan is another character from a species external to the Culture, the Chelgrian. Quilan’s wife, also a soldier, is killed during a civil war the Culture instigated (part Machiavelli, part CIA). He is offered the chance to take revenge on the Culture, although the true nature of his mission is kept from him until the end of the book.

Look to Windward is a kind of sequel to Consider Phlebas, in that they both take their titles from lines in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land (although there is little else to connect them). I think what elevates Looks to Windward is its treatment of grief and PTST and survivor’s guilt. Quilan’s motivation, ultimately, isn’t about revenge but death-wish and an inability to carry on without his wife. He is vulnerable and, like Gurgeh, used as a pawn by more powerful forces manipulating his grief.

The resolution is bleak but it is honest and not muddied with high-minded rhetoric about the human condition. The best novels offer no resolution because life itself is unresolved. Every life ends in tragedy of one sort or another, if only for the people left behind. Science fiction, it is worth repeating, is about taking contemporary human concerns and placing them at some sufficient remove in time or space in order to examine them with greater objectively. In that sense, Look to Windward is the most human of all the Culture novels. It is melancholic and dark, but it is also the book to which most people should be able to relate.

Banks wrote the Culture novels as a riposte to the dystopian science fiction of the day4. Yet for supposedly utopian science fiction, the Culture series is shot through with all of the most extreme forms of violence, including rape, cannibalism and dismembered bodies fashioned into household furniture. True, most of this violence is committed by non Culture species, but the eponymous society has just as much blood on its hands. The Culture is a model of the western world, where opulence and comfort have been achieved at the expense of colonialism, slavery and bloodshed.

Nowhere is the violence more evident than in the penultimate Culture novel, Surface Detail. Here the two main female characters, Lededje Y'breq and Chay, are both victims of sexual violence. Lededje is killed by her abuser as she tries to stab him to death and is resurrected tens of light years away by a neural lace grown in her skull without her knowledge or consent. Chay is an operative in a digital hell, created to control the native population, who becomes trapped and is repeatedly tortured, raped and tricked with visions of escape, before being made into an angel of death, able to kill one person a day and release their souls from hell.

In the meantime, the Culture are going about their usual machinations. They seem to be trying to protect Veppers, the operator of the various digitals hells, who also happens to be Lededje’s abuser. The Culture, though,  are plotting against him. A rouge Culture Mind, Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, helps Lededje return to her homeworld, but prevents her from exacting revenge on Veppers when confronted with him. It is another act of duplicity by the Culture and with the servers destroyed that maintain digital hell, Veppers is ripped to pieces by tech implanted in Lededje’s regrown body.

A fitting end perhaps, but it once again shows the darker side of utopia. In a future where we could upload and resurrect ourselves at the flick of a switch, what value would we place on life itself? Like being able to download a book or an album in an instant and then leaving it unheard or unread because it has no physical presence or intrinsic value. To a species obsessed with ownership, would life become equally worthless when it is so easy to download and retain? Another throwaway commodity, like single use plastic. And what protection would we afford peoples lacking similar means to save and download themselves? The history of colonialism and globalisation give hints of a worrying conclusion.

What most utopian science fiction writers quickly learn is that perfection is boring5. The original Star Trek series (TOS) from the 1960s was an optimistic, utopian vision of the future, produced against the backdrop of the Summer of Love and the civil rights movement. By the time The Next Generation aired in 1987 (coincidentally the year Consider Phlebas was published), the cynicism of the 70s and 80s Reganomics had made that vision seem as naïve as it ultimately was. The imperfect world of Deep Space 9 (1993-1999) was both a more honest view of the world and an accurate prediction for many of the issues still facing us to this day. The narrative limitations of utopia had given way to boundless imperfection and dystopia, creating one of the best science fiction shows in TV history, as well as leading to the Battlestar Gallactica reboot, which plumbed the depths of dystopian science fiction in the years following 9/11.

There was an attempt to return to utopia in later Star Trek series, but Voyager needed the introduction of Seven of Nine to create conflict and as good as Enterprise became, it’s main human characters often come off as arrogant and self-serving evangelists for the American way of life above all other ideologies. People denounce modern Trek for being a betrayal of Gene Rodenberry’s vision but that vision turned out to be kind of bunk. It was of its time and has not aged well. The idea that no-one in the future would use slang or idiom or more than the most mild of swearwords is a white, educated, middle class view of the world. Every indication is that these things will increase as society becomes more tolerant of colourful language and embraces language outside of the ‘norm’. English in particular has always appropriated words from other languages. The English of the 23rd and 24th centuries will probably sound nothing like 21st century English. If English survives at all.

Science Fiction reflects the time in which it was written. TOS is a reflection of the 60s and second generation Trek a reflection of the concerns of the 80s and 90s. Modern Trek is a reflection of today. People swear in new Trek because characters are allowed to swear on mainstream TV today in a way they couldn’t in 1966 or 1987. In the same way that same sex couples exist in modern Trek in a way TV executives were intolerant (and openly homophobic) towards in the past.

Much of this is also true for the Culture series. It might be a utopian society, but watching normal people going about their ordinary, comfortable lives isn’t very interesting. Hence the main characters of the Culture novels are soldiers and mercenaries and sex slaves and exiled war criminals. Banks argued that the Culture has lived in relative peace for thousands of years and the few episodes depicted in his novels are the exception rather than the rule. The Culture, he said, only interfere in the development of other societies when they absolutely have to, or when a threat to the Culture is identified.

This seems like a conceit. All the evidence from the Culture books indicates they interfere more frequently than either they or their creator would like to admit. Special Circumstances has a lot in common with Star Trek’s Section 31, the covert organisation introduced in Deep Space 9. As we see with their treatment of the Azad and the Chelgrian, Special Circumstances often interfere in the affairs of other planets and societies not because they must but because they can. Section 31 are prepared to commit genocide against the Changelings in order to win the Dominion War. Like all science fiction tropes, these are reflections of our own covert organisations overthrowing democratic governments (or bombing civilians in revenge for crimes of which they are not guilty and had no power to prevent) in order to maintain western global hegemony. We do it not because we have to, but because we want to. After five hundred years of colonialism and empire building, it has become a destructive habit. We just can’t help ourselves.

The Culture novels show that all the technological advancements we can imagine won’t save us from ourselves. People still suffer from boredom and depression and post traumatic trauma. People still cheat and lie, especially to themselves. People still die, despite their best efforts at preservation, and people still grieve for those they have lost. Despite the most advanced general AI working in concert with one another, the Culture is still deceived and bested by individuals and other societies alike. We can’t solve all of life’s little problems and the more we do, the more new problems will blink into existence in unpredicted ways. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t try.

Maybe this is why Banks became more and more interested in medieval societies in the later Culture novels. As well as Inversions, Matter and Surface Detail feature worlds with societal levels roughly equal to the Middle Ages. Amusingly, Banks at one time became so obsessed with the game, Civilisation, he hadn’t done any writing in three months and had to delete the game from his computer and smash the CD to avoid missing another deadline. Although Inversions predates this incident by several years, Matter appears to be the book he was working on at the time.

The main focus of Matter is a feudal society on the eighth level of the Shellworld, Sursamen. The plot centres on palace intrigue. The king is murdered by his adjunct under the cloak of a battlefield injury. His son, Prince Ferbin, witnesses his father’s slaying and flees through the various levels that make up the Shellworld, each an environment in itself, as he attempts to reach the planet’s surface and recruit mercenaries to help him defeat his father’s killer. His younger brother is declared heir to the throne until such time as the regent can arrange the boy king’s death. Meanwhile their sister, Djan Seriy Anaplian, who left the planet fifteen years earlier to became a Special Circumstances agent, hears of her father’s death and makes the journey home. 

Despite the usual elements of space opera, Matter has as much in common with Game of Thrones as it does Foundation or The Expanse. How much of the plot developed from Banks’s addiction to Civilisation and how much he played the game as ‘research’ for the book is unclear6. Yet it clearly affected the structure of the book, albeit containing some good science fiction world building. The denouement is as violent and incident packed as any Culture novel, relying on every iota of Culture technology. Yet the final scene of the book returns to the simple life of feudal Sursamen.

War is a common feature of the Culture novels. The Idrian War. The civil war of the Chelgrian. The medieval conflict in Matter. The War of Heaven being waged in Surface Detail. The various internal wars in which Cheradenine Zakalwe is embroiled in Use of Weapons (another non-Culture citizen recruited by Special Circumstances who conceals the true nature of his origins).

Indeed, the lion’s share of the Culture series is about military engagement and covert operations. Other than the first act of The Player of Games, it is not until we get to Look to Windward that we spend any extended period of time in the Culture itself, where much of the main narrative takes place on the Orbital, Masaq’. More time is given over to travel on one GSV or another, but these seem to be the hedonistic, pleasure cruise, party bus division of the Culture and more atypical than life on the Orbitals.

Again, utopia is boring, narratively speaking, and little focus is placed on the sedate regions of the Culture, except as a force pulling at the hero as they the resist the Call to Adventure. In Joseph Campbell’s hero cycle, the Culture might be viewed as the immature state we are destined to reject in setting out to become adults. The majority of the Culture’s unseen citizens are in a state of arrested development as a result of extreme luxury and the guiding hand of the Minds and Special Circumstances. Eden, like all utopias, is stultifyingly boring, which is why Adam and Eve couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.  Yet the Culture has not one omnipotent being watching over it, but countless numbers of them, patrolling Eden’s gates and sending angels down to issue their proclamations (and avenging angels to defeat their enemies). This perhaps explains why the Culture is involved in so much war and conflict on and beyond its borders. Sheer, unmitigated boredom.

Curiously, for a gender fluid utopia, relationships depicted within the Culture are for the most part hetero-normative. There is the relationship between Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil in Excession, in which they both pass through a number of sex changes and impregnate each other, as well as living for a time as a same sex couple. But even this ends in infidelity and infanticide. Yet in a gender fluid society, wouldn’t this be the most interesting kind of romance? One that places no limit or importance on gender or sexuality, but only the love of one sentient being for another over the centuries as they navigate the interpersonal dynamics with each change in gender that seeks to keep things fresh. There is of course the conversation about sexuality as genetics rather than a choice, but one can imagine in a future where one’s gender can be so easily switched, one’s sexuality becomes equally fluid. Life as not only post-human but post-genetic and post-gender. Sexual evolution facilitated through technology.

This is perhaps the biggest criticism of the Culture novels. That Banks built a world of interesting possibilities and then didn’t follow through with its many potential thought experiments. It is true that the Culture books are space opera and each concentrates on some crisis point within the galaxy, but these are also character studies and the sex lives of the characters are for the most part hetero-normative. Whatever the mainstream distaste for such considerations, it seems a lost opportunity to create a world of gender fluidity and then only shine a light on the most frozen regions where men love women and women love men. Other than Genar-Hofoen and Dajeil, the only other kinds of same sex coupling are in the orgiastic parties of the hedonistic GSVs. Or the affair between Gilt President Geljemyn and her underling in The Hydrogen Sonata, which is still a hetero-normative cliché.

To Banks’s credit, the Culture novels are filled with strong, self-possessed, fully realised female characters. They are often the main protagonist in a cavalcade of characters, particularly in the final three books in the series (Matter, Surface Detail and The Hydrogen Sonata). Even in the duelling, two character novels (Use of Weapons and Inversions), female POV characters take up half of the narrative. I’m not sure the Culture ever crosses the threshold for passing the Bechtel Test. The nearest two named women come to having a conversation about something other than a man is in Surface Detail, where Culture agent Yime Nsokyi is sent to prevent Lededje from killing Veppers. The closest we come is with Nsokyi being in conversation about Lededje. The two women never meet and the Nsokyi subplot is perhaps the least important of the novel.

However, it is again a curious kind of redundancy to talk of male and female characters in a gender fluid society. There are no trans characters and the only kind of androgyny is found in the Avatars that represent the Minds. I don’t think we can judge Banks too unfairly, as this is a problem inherent in all science fiction. In shining a light on the rest of the universe, we really only reflect our own personal experience and preference (and prejudice), in the same way that alien races in Star Trek are indentified as ‘other’ by slightly different nose,  forehead and neck ridges. Aliens always conform to human expectations. Klingon women still have cleavage and even reptilian women are identified with prominent bosoms, despite not being mammalian. Even lizard women must conform to an adolescent male idea of sexuality on which much of entertainment is still based.

Indeed, many of these issues come down to the simple fact that science fiction was for the longest time the sole preserve of male writers and directors. Just as progress on Earth moves slowly because white, male, hetero-normative power structures are reluctant to relinquish power and increase diversity, so do we see a mainstream view of society reflected in our science fiction.

If you want a vision of something outside of the conventional, waspish view of the universe, you have to step outside the white-male-centric world and read science fiction written by women and people of colour. Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, with its species of non-binary peoples, was considered revolutionary when it was published in 1969 (though it seems fairly tame by today’s standards, which is a testament to progress made in the last fifty years). Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (aka Lilith’s Brood) presents visitors to Earth who are so truly alien that humans become nauseous at the mere sight of them7. Or Afro SF (published 2012), a collection of short science fiction stores written by African writers, which reflects the issues facing the continent, from post-colonialism to political corruption, in the same tradition of all science fiction. There are myriad other examples, all of which get buried beneath the foundations of classic science fiction, which is, for the most part, entirely white and  entirely male. This is starting to change. Albeit slowly.

These criticisms are perhaps a little unfair and overly harsh, because I am a massive fan of Iain M Banks (and Iain Banks) and of the Culture in particular. They are all better than average novels, well written and well executed. What’s more, there is incredible variety in their structure. No two books are exactly alike. Consider Phlebas is a series of adventures. The Player of Games is one contiguous narrative. Use of Weapons is the first dueling narrative, one story moving forwards, the other backwards in time. Excession is the first of the space opera books. The dueling narratives of Inversions are lock-stepped in time.  Look to Windward mashes everything together. Matter and Surface Detail are perhaps the most similar, but still significantly different.

I think what Banks’s science fiction represents is a bridge between the classic 20th century science fiction that runs from Asimov to Philip K Dick and the emergent 21st century worlds of Liu Chixin, Arkady Martine and the countless modern science fiction writers I have yet to read (I have a pile I am working my through). I don’t know if or how much James S. A. Corey’s Expanse series was inspired by the Culture books, but it seems a kind of natural successor. For all its utopian pretensions, the Culture introduced a grittier, darker kind of universe to science fiction and the Expanse definitely leans into that. Both series employ a similar level of casual violence (though the TV adaptation dials it up somewhat). I like the Expanse books, but the prose seems a little terse at times. Could do with a few more run on sentences. A minor criticism.

 
 
There are features to Banks’s final Culture novel, The Hydrogen Sonata, that make it seem like a book written by a man who knew he was dying. The Gzilt are preparing to Sublime, an activity which had been alluded to in other Culture books, but not enlarged upon. To Sublime is to enter a higher state of reality and leave the physical world (the Real) behind. The book is written as a sequential narrative, counting down to the day on which most, if not all, of Gzilt society will Sublime. Though the reality of Subliming might not be as concrete as many believe. The search for this truth drives the book’s narrative.

All good metaphors for death and the beyond. In fact, Banks wrote the book before his final diagnosis. His final non-fiction book, The Quarry, is the one he completed as he was dying and is structured around a son and his terminally ill father. However, if Banks was going to write a final Culture novel (it was the last book released before his death), the themes addressed in  The Hydrogen Sonata are a fitting and ironic way to conclude the series. It is one of the best of the series: The conclusion feels like Banks accepting death and the uncertainty of what lies beyond. No matter the circumstances under which he wrote it, The Hydrogen Sonata always reminds me of Karaoke and Cold Lazarus, the final two TV series written by Dennis Potter in the mid-90s as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. The desolation of the final scenes of The Hydrogen Sonata play out like a metaphor for a world without Iain Banks living in it. Which is a sadder and more impoverished place to be.


Banks died ten years ago as I write and as a committed socialist and humanitarian, I can only imagine what he would make of what has happened to the UK and the world in general in the decade since he left us. Brexit, Trump, Ukraine, the cost of living, Partygate, anti-Wokeness, transphobia, the refugee crisis: Utopia rarely seemed so beyond our reach. We could do with a few Minds about now to save us from the mindless. And the heartless. And ourselves.

The Culture showed that science fiction novels can embed themselves in a common world without the need for a continuous narrative featuring recurring characters. Which is still something of a radical idea. Even the great world building books of science fiction and fantasy are concentrated on a common theme, whether it be the forging and destruction of the one true ring in the Lord of the Rings, or the formation and concealment of the various incarnations of the Foundation in Asimov’s novels. The actors might change, but the goal remains the same. Either that or authors create new worlds with each new novel8. Few authors other than Iain M Banks use world building as a background to a series of single arching, single use narratives.

The moving finger writes. And having writ, moves on. And we must move on. To the science fiction inspired by the Culture. And to the books that follow in its wake. Iain M Banks smoothed the way. His pioneering work should not be forgotten.

Footnotes:

1A complete list is available at: https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
2Similarly, the five year long party held on a floating platform in The Hydrogen Sonata appears to be based on a similar one in Life, the Universe and Everything, which, in that book, has been going on for four generations.
3The Doctor’ chapters are narrated by Oelph and ‘The Bodyguard’ by a more general narrator.
4I always find it funny that when Blade Runner was released in 1982, it was considered a bleak vision of the future - today it looks almost naively optimistic.
5It’s why Dante’s Inferno is enthralling, Purgatory interesting and Paradise dull as dishwater.
6Ironically, given Banks’s issues meeting his deadlines, Matter is the book I read quicker than any other. I managed to read all six hundred pages in two days, while holding down a full time job.
7Butler’s Patternmaster series does explore elements of the gender fluid relationship of long lived entities, but that relationship is for the most part patriarchal and domineering.
8Three other Iain M Banks novels, The Algebraist, Feersum Endjinn and Against a Dark Background are non-Culture books, but nonetheless just as good.


 


Tuesday 3 January 2023

Books on Film: Dune

He is the Kwizatz Haderach 
He is born of Caladan
And will take the Gom Jabbar
He has the power to foresee
Or to look into the past
He is the ruler of the stars.
                             Iron Maiden, To Tame a Land


Dune, as Frank Herbert’s son, Brian, observed, is to science fiction what the Lord of the Rings is to fantasy (Arthur C Clarke agreed with him). And as with Christopher Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings, Brian Herbert continued the Dune books after his father died.

As with Tolkien and fantasy, science fiction existed long before Frank Herbert entered the scene. Yet no writer before or since has done so much to enrich the genre. Every futuristic film or TV series released since 1965 carries at least trace amounts of Dune DNA. George Lucas ‘borrowed’ so heavily from Dune and other sci-fi worlds for his first Star Wars film that Frank Herbert created a tongue in cheek organisation called, We’re Too Big to Sue George Lucas.

Tatooine, the Jedi, the Sith, the Empire and Imperial forces, as well as the Pit of Salaccc (a barely disguised sand worm) are all repurposed elements from the first Dune novel. Even more of it was apparently included in the original drafts for A New Hope, including reference to a shipment of Spice and liberal use of Imperial Houses, a la House Atreides.

The idea of imperial houses did eventually find its way into the various incarnations of Star Trek, through the Klingon Empire. There would be no House of Mogh, Martok or Duras (to say nothing of the House of Quark) without the influence of Dune. Moreover, the Klingon language draws significantly from the influence Arabic as used by Herbert in his world building depictions of the Fremen and their desert culture.

Star Wars notwithstanding, various attempts have been made to bring Dune to the screen, big
and small, over the years. Before Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film covering the first half of the novel (Part 2 is due for release in 2023), there was David Lynch’s 1984 big screen adaptation, as well as the miniseries made by the Sci-Fi Channel in 2000. Both fail to do justice to the book. The Lynch film is a mess, partly because the studio imposed its own edit on the film (though personally I find most David Lynch productions to be equally incoherent), partly because it was made to conform to a standard of 1980s sci-fi films (compare Lynch’s Dune with Blade Runner, The Terminator, or Return of the Jedi, for instance, not to mention later films like Robocop). 

The ‘84 film, however, is a masterpiece compared to the version made by the Sci-Fi Channel at the turn of the millennium. While it manages to stick pretty closely to the plot of the book, it fails in almost every other regard. Despite a number of accomplished actors lending their considerable talents to the production, the whole thing plays out like an amateur dramatic society’s attempt to act out the novel while suffering through a series of hallucinations brought on by food poisoning. It doesn’t help that the sets and special effects are kitsch as kitsch can be. Like off cuts rejected by Babylon 5 for looking too cheap. It manages to make the Star Wars prequels for a moment (and only a moment) look professional and well thought out, rather than another fevered dream created by someone who’d apparently never seen the original films.

All of which makes the prospect of creating a new version of Dune daunting, if not a little insane. This book, which many consider unfilmable (though come on, it’s not Ulysses or Infinite Jest), has resisted cinematic fidelity for more than half a century. Why should it reveal its true self now?

Yet this version (at least the first part released so far) is a masterpiece and an instant classic of science fiction cinema. There are some changes to the book, which cannot be avoided in lifting a book from the page, but it hits all the main beats of the original narrative and far more is retained than one would expect. It is, for instance, a minor plot point that Paul Atreides mother, Jessica, is not married to his father, Leto. That fact though is included in the dialogue despite making little difference to the plot one way or another. It is such minor attention to detail that makes this seem like a film made with fans in mind. It’s possible to watch the movie without having read the book, but this feels, finally, like a love letter to Dune and its readers. Though like 2001: A Space Odyssey, a reading of the novel helps to flesh out the film.

While the 1984 version might have been weighed down by contemporary 80s science fiction, the 2021 update instead luxuriates in its homage to science fiction and fantasy from the last half century. The opening scenes on the planet Caladan seem to nod to the landscapes of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films and to the TV adaptation of Game of Thrones. The sleek, tall ships that land on Arrakis (aka Dune), clearly take their influence from the Imperial craft found in Star Wars (Dune perhaps returning the favour and stealing back from George Lucas). And who can witness the central structure of the Atreides stronghold on Arrakis and not see the Tyrell Corporation pyramid from Blade Runner rendered in sandstone?

Beyond even cinematic homage, however, are the references to recent world history. A Hollywood blockbuster about an imperial power overtaking stewardship of a desert world and its Middle Eastern inspired inhabitants can hardly avoid weaving into its tapestry elements of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. House Atreides brings with it an invading force and if the stronghold is not actually under siege (not by the indigenous population at least), the obvious analogue is with the American Green Zone established in Iraq following the 2003 invasion.

Again, it is hardly important to the plot, but the attention to detail contributes to the world building and continues a fine tradition in science fiction of taking contemporary human concerns and transporting them to a sufficient remove in space or time so we can consider their implications from a distance. Even cinematic war tropes are threaded in, with Stellan Skarsgård’s portrayal of Baron Harkonnen borrowing so heavily from Marlon Brando’s portrayal of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, you expect him to moan, “The horror.” at any moment.

Dune is perhaps more depressingly relevant than ever, written as it was by a man concerned with the environmental issues of his day. The desert might be seen as a metaphor for the slow erosion of the natural world. Even today, we see China building defences to prevent the encroachment of the Gobi desert into its towns and cities and sub-Saharan countries planting acres of trees along the desert for the selfsame reason. While the omnipresent threat of nuclear war might have abated somewhat since the 1960s, climate change is just as real and disrespectful of public opinion or political bargaining. Dune and Arrakis are manifestations of a world reclaimed by nature and rendered all but uninhabitable without survival equipment. We should heed the warning, but probably we never will.

The inclusion of many actors of colour and of Middle Eastern heritage to the cast of this Dune is important, though I’m sure the usual suspects were crying, “Woke!” like a nervous tick. Yet when we consider one of Herbert’s influences for the plot of Dune was the life of T E Lawrence, particularly the film, Lawrence of Arabia, where most of the Arabian characters are played by white actors in black face (most notably Alex Guinness, who would, of course, go on to play Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars), it is a step in the right direction. I always think we should take a tally of all the non Caucasian people who have been played by white actors in the history of movies, TV and theatre and when that amount falls into arrears with all the white characters played by people of colour, then the anti-woke brigade can have cause to complain. Even then, we should probably ignore them.

The Villeneuve adaptation isn’t entirely perfect. Jessica is a little too passive a character in the first half of the film and unlike the ideal for a witch of the Bene Gesserit. Paul likewise is a little too Emo. Though as he is fifteen in the book, his portrayal by Timothée Chalamet is perhaps a closer approximation to a sulky teenager than either Kyle MacLachlan or Alex Newman in the film and TV series respectively. Chalamet seems closer to the character described in the novel, although in reality he is only the same age MacLachlan and Newman were when they played the role.

No film is ever going to be an exact replica of the book. Nor should it be. Screen and book have different grammar and syntax associated with them. Like the difference between mainstream music and jazz. Though in rereading the novel, Frank Herbert was obviously influenced by the visual language of cinema. Dune is a book that moves from scene to scene more like a film than the fluid narrative structure of many novels, where one chapter blends seamlessly into the next. Dune often jumps in place and time with barely a mention of what happened in the interim. Like Ishmael’s journey from Manhattan to New Bedford, that is dispensed with in a sentence in the second chapter of Moby Dick[1], so House Atreides are on Caladan one moment and already arrived at Arrakis in the very next chapter.

It is therefore odd to think how long Dune has resisted a truly faithful big screen adaptation, given its cinematic construction. We can only hope this year’s sequel sticks the landing as gracefully as Part 1 managed the takeoff.

I am perhaps lucky in the sense that I have avoided watching previous versions of Dune until very recently and only after seeing the Villeneuve film for the first time. Both the Recency Fallacy and First Love Fallacy come into play. There are no previous versions to erase from my memory. This version of Dune is the definitive one. All other versions are poor imitations. Vive la Villeneuve. 

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[1] “Quitting the good city of old Manhatto, I duly arrived in New Bedford.”