Culture and Stuff

I have now got my greasy hands on my housemate's shiny copy of Iain M. Banks' new novel Matter, the first new story of the Culture in eight years. The Culture, for those who don't know, is a galaxy-spanning anarchist civilisation who roam the stars free of disease, danger and possessions, interfering quietly and not-so-quietly in the affairs of less advanced and less well behaved societies. See here, if you want the details without the hassle of having to follow a story at the same time.

I am a few chapters in and things seem suitably byzantine and set up for excitement, and I have already had to make several detours to the seventeen-page glossary handily placed at the back to remind you which character is which, what species your dealing with, and what certain arcane, alien or techno-babble means. Here are some samples:

spore-wisp - plasma seed of a stellar field-liner

Despairationials - extremist group, Syaung-un

Stalks - slightly derogatory term used for landgoing peoples by aquatic peoples

Tubers - black hole smoker species

Godded - a Shellworld with a Xinthian at its core

The Road

I am unfortunately and somewhat shamefacedly unfamiliar with the work of Cormac McCarthy. All the Pretty Horses has been on my shelf for over a year now, despite me having started and enjoyed it, then for some reason been distracted. I may now restart it with renewed interest having read The Road this weekend, McCarthy's recent Pulitzer Prize winning and Oprah-celebrated novel.

As I understand it, McCarthy is a novelist who has largely worked within the West, that broad and unrepressable American myth. The Road, however, deals instead with the mythic future of the post-apocalypse, describing the journey of a man and his son across an America burned and shattered by some unspecific catastrophe. These two legendary spaces bear some similarities - just ask Kevin Kostner. Each is defined by its landscape, and each demands survival of its characters, survival against the wilderness, and against lawlessness. The Road's desperate family are migrants - pioneers - who must live off an unfamiliar land, scavenging ghost-cities and ashen forest floors, endure the terrible elements, and avoid the roaming savages who have shed civilisation in favour of brutish cannibalism. They do not head West , however, but South, to escape the killing winters; and they do not travel with either certain or illusory promises of gold and land, orange groves and opportunity. They go with no "long term goals," as they realise, only the ebbing determination to live, the vague hope of encountering other "good guys," and most importantly, the assurance that they are "keeping the fire."

The fire is the remaining embers of old values, old culture, and keeping it is no easy task. The man (unnamed, as are all in this world), must represent to his son, born in the months following the catastrophe, the memory of the old world. They play cards with an incomplete deck, forgetting the old rules so inventing new games; they lose their books so must invent new stories; the child plays with a toy truck, while real trucks, to the extent that they now exist, only represent danger and fear; the father carves a crude flute for his son, who can only play tuneless weird sounds - the last music - and who eventually discards the instrument. The fire, however, is perhaps best and most fully represented in their simple refusal to eat of the most available nourishment - other humans. It is an extraordinary book, written with brilliantly stark and lyrical language, frightening and redemptive. Do what Oprah tells you - read it!