B i b l i o f i l e

(Publisher: Little, Brown 2009. 404 pages).

However, those who are not lovers of the science fiction of Iain M Banks would be unwise to let the knowledge that this novel is “science fiction” deter them from reading it. They will find this very different from his self-proclaimed SF. Unlike much of the latter, this is a Banks SF novel that is readable. Banks clearly wishes to class this as a mainstream novel, and it should appeal to his non-SF readership.

Transition deals with a well-established SF theme: parallel worlds. This is an idea that hails from the more tendentious end of the metaphysical speculations of quantum physicists. In Transition there are an infinite number of Earths, and the extent to which they vary from one another is dependent upon when and by how much their histories diverged from the home world of the hero.

The hero is not based on the version of the Earth on which this review is being written, a device that enables Banks, through the medium of the hero’s viewpoint, to say of our world:

I would guess I am in a fairly standard late-twentieth or early twenty-first-century Degenerate Christian High-Capitalist reality (a Greedist world, to use the colloquial).

Another character amusingly characterises Libertarianism (the doctrine that the capitalist market should be free of any state regulation) as:

“A simple-minded right-wing ideology ideally suited to those unable or unwilling to see past their own sociopathic self-regard.”

The parallel worlds device also enables Banks to make a sharply satirical riposte to the claim that there is something particular to Islam that predisposes some of its adherents to engage in terrorist attacks on unarmed civilians. In one of the parallel Earths to which the hero travels there are terrorists inspired by Christianity, which is described as a

…bizarre, perverted and cruel religion with its emphasis on martyrdom, cannibalism and the alleged ability of their holy men to forgive all sins no matter how horrendous and barbaric…

Christianity is

“The religion of zealotry… The religion that loves its martyrs, the religion of the doctrine of Original Sin, so that blowing even babies to smithereens is justifiable because they too are sinners.”

Those who would excuse the use of torture against suspected terrorists would do well to heed the words of the character, guilty of once torturing a suspected Christian terrorist, who runs foul of the torturers himself:

“Don’t you see? You can’t have a state where torture is legal, not for anything. You start saying it’s only for the most serious cases, but that never lasts. It should always be illegal, for everybody, for everything. You might not stop it. Laws against murder don’t stop all murders, do they? But you make sure that people don’t even think about it unless it’s a desperate situation, something immediate. And you have to make the torturer pay. In full. There has to be that disincentive, or they’ll all be at it.”

* * *

The only real truth that torture produced was that people would admit anything to get the torture to stop, even if they knew the admissions they were being called upon to make would eventually prove fatal for them, or others. The whole process was pointless and cruel and a waste, he claimed. A state that allowed or condoned torture lost part of its soul, he said.

Transition is an enjoyable light-hearted adventure (the pace of which seemed to flag for a stretch in the middle) that makes some pertinent points about contemporary British/Euro-American society.

As in most novels of adventure, the hero of Transition overcomes the obstacles too easily and the resolution is pat. Such failings might be forgivable were the plot as a whole not literally incredible. This lack of credibility stems not from its science fictional premises (that there exists a powerful secret organisation attempting to manipulate the histories of parallel Earths) it stems from the unrealistic, rather juvenile quality of the storyline.

Transition does not work as a serious novel (that is, a novel that one can take seriously – it is possible for a light-hearted adventure to be taken seriously) nor does it quite work as a piece of pure escapism and one cannot help but feel short-changed and wondering whether there is any point to it.

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Paul T Kegan 29/05/10.