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Novels with mysteries at their hearts need to be based on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “What you can’t talk about, you have to be silent about.” The space at the centre may be so precisely delimited that you can measure its shape, or its dimensions, though perhaps not both at once… Or it may be like the Escher drawing, where the descent of one staircase towards the solution is suddenly revealed as being the ascent of another one away from it. Endless, only vaguely explicable, carnage is not the answer. Perhaps the most interesting authorial decision in Consider Phlebas is that the protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul, is a Changer (a shape-shifter) who chooses to side with the Idirans, despite the fact that they are religious extremists who don’t mind exterminating other species, because Horza despises the Minds of the Culture, choosing the “side of life” instead. Although he freely admits that the Culture has never done him wrong, he categorically hates what he considers a decadent and arrogant civilization that considers its lifestyle and values superior to all others. All for Nothing: Every damn escapade that Horza gets his team involved in ends in disaster. Yet, he still won't quit while he's behind. It’s looking very bad for Horza indeed, when quite suddenly the wall of his cell is blasted away. His employers, the Idirans, have come to his rescue. Chapter 2: The Hand of God 137
There's a big war going on in that novel, and various individuals and groups manage to influence its outcome. But even being able to do that doesn't ultimately change things very much. At the book's end, I have a section pointing this out by telling what happened after the war, which was an attempt to pose the question, 'What was it all for?' I guess this approach has to do with my reacting to the cliché of SF's 'lone protagonist.' You know, this idea that a single individual can determine the direction of entire civilizations. It's very, very hard for a lone person to do that. And it sets you thinking what difference, if any, it would have made if Jesus Christ, or Karl Marx or Charles Darwin had never been. We just don't know. [2] Literary significance and criticism [ edit ] Shapeshifter Identity Crisis: Horza (as a shapeshifter) has a literal invocation of this trope. He doesn't lose control of his shifting, but several of the dream sequences he experiences hint that he may not actually be who he thinks he is. Batman Gambit: Xoxarle breaks one of Balveda's arms, and leaves her hanging on for dear life to a gantry with the aim of forcing the incredibly pissed-off Horza to choose between avenging his pregnant girlfriend and saving her... He chooses the latter. This allows Xoxarle to ambush the Changer, inflicting the injuries which ultimately kill him. Literary Allusion Title: From T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Phlebas the Phoenician died at sea, and now lies forgotten. The verse asks that the reader remember Phlebas in his youth, and how he spent his life on worldly concerns that all came to nothing with his death. Better to Die than Be Killed: Lamm claims that his space suit contains a small nuke that he intends to detonate rather than be killed or captured, with the added implication that he'd also do it if someone pissed him off enough. When the Megaship job goes south, Lamm and several other crewmembers are left behind, and in a fit of rage he proves that he wasn't kidding.Unaha-Closp plays a vital role at the end of the novel, contrary to Horza's implicit discrimination against the drone. Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Jandraligeli proves himself to be quite possibly the sanest person on the CAT when he jumps ship on Vavatch to join up with a Free Company which actually has its shit together. He rises through the ranks to captain one of their ships, raking in enough of the company's profits to enjoy a hedonistic retirement, and finally meets his end by going Out with a Bang at a relatively ripe old age. The Culture is an intergalactic utopia, but readers should not come to Consider Phlebas expecting dystopian narrative. The machines, led by their brilliant and sentient Minds, are benevolent and they seek to offer a paradise to the humanoids in their care. The novel is not even a dystopian narrative in the way Thomas More’s Utopia often seems disturbing in its stringent rules and guidelines. Readers are meant to envy life in the Culture. Consider Phlebas is Banks's first published science fiction novel, and takes its title from a line in T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land. A subsequent Culture novel, Look to Windward (2000), whose title comes from the previous line of the same poem, can be considered a loose follow-up. Bora Horza Gobuchul is a Changer and an operative of the Idiran Empire. He was one of a party of Changers allowed on Schar's World, and for that reason is tasked by the Idirans with retrieving a Mind that had crashed to the planet. Horza is humanoid, but committed to the Idiran cause despite the fact that he does not believe in their god and does not agree with their harsh and aggressive expansion. He despises the Culture for its dependence on machines, and the fact that Culture's machines seemingly rule over the Culture humans, which he perceives to be spiritually empty and an evolutionary dead end.
Quayanorl suffers mortal wounds and is left behind. Gruesomely injured, blind, and dying, he still manages to drag himself to perform one last action against his enemies, which averts the impending happy ending and turns it into a kill 'em all. What Happened to the Mouse?: Thanks to the Fat Bastard I'm a Humanitarian Prophet, Horza loses a finger. In fact, he has to pull the bones, now completely stripped of flesh, off his hand himself. No mention of his missing digit is ever made again. Did he regrow it? (He was changing to a semblance of Kraiklyn at the time) Are his crew just that incurious? Who knows?Sympathetic P.O.V.: Horza hates the Culture and, for example, while the later novels draw humor from the humorous/macabre names the Culture gives to ships, he's disgusted by this apparent display of the Culture's cavalier attitude towards something as grim as interstellar warfare. Consider Phlebas is the first Iain M. Banks novel set in The Culture. It concerns the war between the Culture and the Idiran civilisation, an event whose repercussions affect all of the future novels in the series. Interestingly, the novel is mostly told from the perspective of Bora Horza Gobuchul, a "Changer", who sides with the Idirans and sees pretty much all of the Culture's signature aspects in a highly negative light.