Feersum Endjinn

[sawyl]

After my mild disappointment with Iain Banks' Transition, I took the opportunity over Easter of reconnecting with an old favourite: Feersum Endjinn, a standalone novel set on a far-distant post post-human Earth.

The narrative of book is divided into four strands, each of which is assigned to a different narrator. The first is a young woman, Asura, who finds herself unexpected reincarnated in an anonymous mausoleum, possibly in Italy. Knowing almost nothing about the world around her but equiped with a burning but unclear sense of mission, she throws herself on the mercy of the first people she meets. Fortunately they take pity on her, help her to improve her language and send her off to the last great concentration of humanity: the fastness of Serehfa.

The next narrator we meet is more conventional. The King's Chief Scientist, Hortis Gadfium is working on a project to rediscover the lost secrets of rocketry. Her deadline is pressing. The solar system is about to enter a vast interstellar dust cloud that will destroy it and, unless Gadfium can come up with a way to escape Earth's gravity, then humanity will perish. What makes all this extraordinary is that Gadfium is surrounded on all sides by staggeringly advanced technology. She lives in Serehfa, a gothic castle built on a vast scale with rooms kilometers high and towers that soar above the atmosphere, where people travel around in dirigibles, climb walls using hydraulic lifts and clean wooden floors with hydrochloric acid. Unimpressed by her superiors' lack of support for the rocket project, Gadfium and a few colleagues have entered into a conspiracy to tap the dormant forces of Serehfa which, they suspect, my bring their salvation.

The third narrator, the powerful aristocrat Alandre Sessine, is dead, his finally incarnation killed shortly after his first appearance. He then finds himself cast into a cybernetic afterlife in the Crypt, a vast and chaotic simulated reality somehow tied up with the fastness. But Sessine's peace is short-lived. He discovers that the death of his body hasn't stopped his killer from wanting to obliterate him and he flees into the depths of the crypt, searching for a way to revenge himself.

The last narrator is probably the most unconventional. Bascule the Teller is young in a society where almost everyone is old; he works as a sort of monk in a secular society, contacting and reassuring the memories of the dead stored in the Crypt; he's constantly curious about the world around him, always asking questions. Oh, and he's dyslexic. So his portions of the narrative appear phonetically, but in a way that gives a strong feel for his manner and accent:

Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Ergates thi ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u ½ a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith.

When Bascule's friend, a talking ant called Ergates, is abducted by a bird, his determinate to recover her and his dyslexic manners bring him to the attention of a group determined to prevent the post-human relics of Serehfa from being reactivated. Pursued, Bascule goes on a Cook's tour of the fastness, climbing the heights and plumbing the depths, still searching for his friend. Eventually, he and the other narrators converge and the story starts to resolve itself.

What I really like about Feersum Endjinn is the strength of the world that Banks creates and the elegant way he allows it to unfold. Asura's ignorance makes it only natural that the first person she should meet, the patriarchal Pieter Velteseri, should try to explain the way of the outside world to her and so, by extension, to the reader. Bascule, with his exuberance and curiosity, does much the same for the fastness and for the virtual world of the Crypt, with his peculiar style of narration helping to emphasize the alien nature of the places he describes. Gadfium and Sessine, as capable and knowledgeable characters who already understand their world drive the plot forward through the landscape described by the others.

I also rather like the hopeful message of the book, which contrasts strongly with the melancholy of Against a Dark Background, Banks' other standalone novel from around the same period. It seem to suggest that anyone, even a humble ant, can make a difference if only people try to do what they know to be right. It says that an everyman like Bascule, a person who is targetted by mistake, can overthrow governments if given the right set of incentives (and the right set of friends), and it reminds the reader that people who aren't limited by fears and conventions and conservatism can move the universe.

While the book might not be for everyone — some people find the phonetic sections deeply annoying — I really recommend Feersum Endjinn. It's short, focused, very human and shows what Banks can do when he's on form.