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20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A ripping yarn on a vast stage, 13 Feb 2002
This is my first Iain M Banks novel. I have known *of* him for a long time, and thought it was high time I read some of his work.So, I asked a friend to recommend one sci-fi and one contemporary work, and this is the former nomination (thank you Dazey!). For me, starting a sci-fi book is a perilous time. I need to be convinced within the first few pages, else I will be turned off. And in sci-fi, getting convinced can take some doing. But Banks pulls it off with consummate ease. He is a truly natural story teller, and his writing has great fluidity and reality whether the location is Glasgow or Schars World. And so to the specifics of this novel. We follow the adventures of Horza from the first page of the book, where he faces certain death, to the last, where... he faces certain death! Along the way... yep, you guessed it, he faces certain death. Horza lurches from one disaster to the next, but all along he is following a path which seems to be destiny. A return to Schars World, where his past, and his love, were left behind. These are not normal times in the galaxy. The backdrop to Horza's odyssey is a war raging across 100,000 light years, fought between the Culture and the Idirans. The scale of this war is breathtaking, with billions dying and battle ships that are kilometers long. In such times, the journey of Horza and his rag-taggle company could pass unnoticed, except that Horza has been working for the Idirans, and Schars World holds something that both sides of the conflict are desperate to capture. Thus Horza becomes a mortal in a war between Gods. That sounds like a greek reference, and indeed there is more than a hint of greek mythology in the epic tale. Where this book really *works* for me is in the meshing together of this personal odyssey and the galactic war. Horza as a tiny piece of flotsam on a stormy ocean. Along the way he constructs a very credible universe, a convincing hero and manages to find time for humour, pathos and tragedy. Consider Phlebas is space opera of the highest, most defining, variety.
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by Iain M. Banks
by Iain M. Banks
by Iain M. Banks
by Iain M. Banks
by Iain M. Banks
