Transition is a novel by Scottish writer Iain Banks, first published in 2009. The American edition was published under the name "Iain M. Banks", which is the name Banks used for his science fiction work.
I realised a couple of weeks ago that I had never actually finished this one. A gap in my Banks reading had to be addressed. I powered through it this time but I did think it was merely one of his average ones. As it has an unreliable narrator thing going on (a trope Banks has used before) I was irked. I prefer my stories to have their own internal consistency. I enjoyed this in patches, some of his observations and sequences were very well done and the logical implications of a multiverse well teased out. However, overall, the plot didn't really work for me.
Banks has a number of themes that appear repeatedly across his now quite large output of fiction and they ALL get stuffed into this one. That makes for quite a rich book but some of it is just so unsubtle that it's irritating - take Adrian, the 100% cliche drug/financial dealer whose role is very minor as compared to the space he's given. Adrian is given that much space so that Banks can have another go at Capitalism, without any subtlety involved and giving a girl in a bar a walk-on part as Banks' mouthpiece for what is wrong with modern business; Public Limited Companies, apparently. All of this was done much better in The Business.
We have another take on Interventionism, as if the Culture novels hadn't discussed it to death by the end of Excession (the fourth one).
Solipsism rears it head again, intertwined with, "What is Reality?" …
Banks has a number of themes that appear repeatedly across his now quite large output of fiction and they ALL get stuffed into this one. That makes for quite a rich book but some of it is just so unsubtle that it's irritating - take Adrian, the 100% cliche drug/financial dealer whose role is very minor as compared to the space he's given. Adrian is given that much space so that Banks can have another go at Capitalism, without any subtlety involved and giving a girl in a bar a walk-on part as Banks' mouthpiece for what is wrong with modern business; Public Limited Companies, apparently. All of this was done much better in The Business.
We have another take on Interventionism, as if the Culture novels hadn't discussed it to death by the end of Excession (the fourth one).
Solipsism rears it head again, intertwined with, "What is Reality?" Look in Against a Dark Background and The Bridge for earlier occurences.
Religion/terrorism/Islamophobia/the state of Britain these days, over-reliance on swearing, too much sex, yep, all the trademarks are here.
What has been absent lately but makes a very welcome return here, is an imaginative, well told, coherent, compelling story, although it does open really badly, with Banks being far too clever for his own good. He needs some new philosophical/political ideas to examine in his books, though.
