HAUNTED WASPS – Shirley Jackson & Iain Banks (1959 & 1984)

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

I thought We Have Always Lived in the Castle was a 5-star read, so imagine my surprise that I couldn’t connect with this book, written three years prior by troubled soul Shirley Jackson. It’s a bit of classic, and no less than 13 of my friends on Goodreads have read this as well, 12 of them rate it positively, most whip out even 4 or 5 stars.

It started out alright, but when Eleanor Vance arrives at the strange old mansion in the hills, things soon become a bit boring. I felt Jackson managed to convey the psychological horror much better in Castle.

I can’t fully put my finger on it, but I think my main issue was the tone in which Hill House was written. There’s a faux objectivism in the scientific endeavor of Dr. Montague’s semi-paranormal research that felt a bit flat, as it was echoed in Jackson’s tone. Add to that a certain detached irony in Jackson’s narrative voice: that irony made it so that the story didn’t feel real to me. As a result, I became less and less engaged with the characters, and also the house itself gradually lost its attraction, to the point I simply didn’t care anymore, making me stop at the halfway point.

Another thing that killed it for me was the fact that the proceedings were fairly obvious, the story fairly transparant in its method – admittedly also because I read some reviews upfront. Jackson sets up a creepy environment – via a house that has a geometry that is slightly off and a history of suicide, etc. – and in that environment the main character can then start her descent into madness. I didn’t feel there was much mystery in that.

Jackson didn’t convince me during the first half that there was enough of interest to pursue Eleanor’s mental journey, even though I feel she did manage to make her an interesting character, at least at first, when she brakes free from her sister.

I’m truly disappointed, I expected a lot after the triumph that was We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

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TRANSITION – Iain M. Banks (2009)

This is it, the last speculative fiction book of Banks I had to read. Surprisingly, Transition was marketed as an Iain Banks book in Europe, adopting his ‘non-genre’ moniker. Yet this would be classified as science fiction by most: a many-worlds thriller in a contemporary setting, so the American publisher decided to use Iain M. Banks instead.

I have often wondered wether I have changed a lot as a reader – Banks meant so much to me when I first started reading scifi – or if it’s just a coincidence my final three Banksian reads were unsatisfactory. His final 2 Culture books were fine, but Inversions and The Algebraist were bore-outs. Transition isn’t as bad as those 2 – it’s generally entertaining – but it has a few huge problems, making it rather pulpy. This critical Guardian review calls it an airport book, and I would concur: fun beach reading, as I tend to say, but not much more.

Negatives first, including something about an eternal orgasm.

THE ALGEBRAIST – Iain M. Banks (2004)

People change. I’ve been reading SF for about a decade now, and Banks was one of my first loves. As I’ve explained in my review of Inversions, when he died in 2013 I still had a few of his books on my TBR, and I decided to savor them. Bad decision it turns out: much to my disappointment, I was terribly bored by The Algebraist. I stopped on page 242 of 534 and in hindsight I should have stopped at least 100 pages earlier.

I will never know whether I would have liked this book 5 or 10 years ago. A reread of some Culture novels will probably shed some light on that, but I cannot remember those books to have the problems I encountered here. Three and a half years ago I still liked Surface Detail, and I liked it a lot.

The Algebraist has drained my energy, and as a result I don’t even feel like writing a lengthy review – even though I usually like panning books that failed to connect with me. So let’s make it snappy.

There’s two main reasons why this space opera tome didn’t work for me.

INVERSIONS – Iain M. Banks (1998)

When cancer tragically stole Iain Banks from our world in June 2013, I still had 4 of his books on my TBR-pile. Surface Detail, Inversions, The Algebraist and Transition. I decided to savour those, since there would never be the joy of waiting for a new Iain M. Banks to be published again. Surface Detail  was the last Culture novel on my TBR, so I read that first. After more than a decade of near abstinence of fiction, it was the Culture series that turned me into an avid fiction reader again. A friend told me he liked The Algebraist – a non-Culture doorstopper with sentient gass giants – a lot, and found Transition to be one of the wildest books he ever read. That set the order for the remaining books: read Inversions first, then The Algebraist and end with Transition, spread out over a year or two, three.

Over a week ago, I decided to start Inversions. It feels more like fantasy than science fiction. It is considered a Culture-novel by some, since it’s probably set in the same universe, and Banks himself has hinted at the fact that two of its principal characters are Culture agents – for those of you that haven’t read a Culture novel: read the opening section of this page, and get yourself Player of Games asap. Banks has employed the technique of writing fantasy stuff in the context a bigger galactic SF context elsewhere – parts of the excellent Matter are set in a kind of medieval kingdom too.

Sadly, Inversions is one of the few Iain M. Banks books that have disappointed me. Reading Feersum Endjinn was a chore that didn’t really pay off, and Inversions, well, that simply felt uninteresting. It seems fantasy, but it’s not done well: there’s no interesting world-building whatsoever. No magic, no different societies, no mythos, no cool creatures, no nothing. It’s a standard medieval human setting on a planet with more than one moon.

The first 50 pages were great, I even was a bit awestruck by how easy Banks’ prose is on these eyes – I had forgotten what a smooth writer Banks can be. But by page 100 the book had me bogged down, as it turned out to be a 1st person recount that mainly consists of pages and pages of lifeless, uninspired dialogue. The two fictional narrators aren’t style champions: I counted the  ‘X said’ or ‘said X’ construction 6 or 7 times on numerous pages, with a couple of ‘smiled X’ thrown in for variation. As a result, I lost interest in the characters, and more and more felt like I was reading really, really generic medieval fiction – aside from the book’s narrative construction. There’s no interesting mystery either, and hardly any action. If this hadn’t been a book by one of my favorite authors, I wouldn’t have finished it.

Some of Bank’s usual themes – morality, some discussion about a version of the Prime Directive, etc. – are so obviously present in the words of some characters that they come across as Banks’ hand puppets, instead of real people. That’s a downside of knowing an author well.

Inversions is about perspective too. The book is an epistolary novel – of the found footage type – and has 2 tales and 2 narrators. Both stories reflect on each other a bit. As a literary construction this surely has some merit. But as I said, not a lot happens. Some flat character ambassador tries to assassinate somebody else, and so forth. I didn’t connect with either party, since they felt constructed rather than real.

Flashes of Banks’ brilliance do shine through at times. There are some interesting scenes, and his talent for aphorisms still shows.

You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you’re doing.

His main strength though – a wild, vivid, grand and daring imagination – simply isn’t played out here. Inversions isn’t grand scale utopian dreaming. Some reviewers have called this book subtle. I stick with dull. You be the judge, just don’t let this be your first Banks.

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Consult the author index for my other reviews, or my favorite lists.

Click here for an index of my non-fiction or art book reviews only, and here for an index of my longer fiction reviews of a more scholarly & philosophical nature.

SURFACE DETAIL – Iain M. Banks (2011)

It’s simple: if you like Banks’ Culture novels, you’ll like this one. It’s not the best Culture novel – that’s Excession – but it’s still excellent.

If you don’t know the Culture novels, don’t start here: start with The Player of Games, and work your way up in the order they’ve been released. Banks is a giant, and his highly imaginative Culture series is one of the best things that ever happened to space opera, and his premature death one of the worst.

originally written on the 27th of October, 2014