Zzzzzzzzzzz
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I had to force myself to read this - I would usually fly through a new IMB book in hours, but this has taken me over a month to plod through. The plot doesn't get interesting until page 358.
I've read much worse, but there is real a sense of disappointment when you have looked forward to a book being released and it turns out to be a grind to read.
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flawed but classic Uncle Banksie
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It could be that Uncle Banksie has taken a slight stumble with this one - especially the machina ex deus (yes, that's intentional) ending. I can understand all the gripes I'm reading in these reviews. However, certain set pieces are classic Banks, his imagination has in no way pooped out yet, and the writing is, as always, stellar. While I preferred Look to Windward (loved it, in fact) and the Algebraist, I'd say if you're a big fan of Banks' SF, go for it, you won't be disappointed.
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more like 2.5 stars, but (heh) no matter
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Banks's first 3.5 Culture novels (Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, Use of Weapons and State of the Art) established The Culture as one of the great SF settings. However, the nearly 20 years since then have seen it has become a victim of its own success: subsequent Culture novels were variations on a theme: take a quirky, unique setting, present some vague threat or mystery to drive the plot along, add in the typical Culture combination of liberal angst plus hypertechnological might, and - boom - the Culture always wins, even though the individuals protagonists themselves are left either world-weary or dead.
Despite its reliance on these stock elements and considerable length (over 500 pages), Matter builds its tension well, intercutting between the Culture and the Feersum-Enjinn-like setting of the Shellworld. Its main problem is that, as the speed increases and events reach their climax in the last 50 or so pages, all the carefully built themes, mystery and characterisation goes out the window, and the action (and most of the characters) come to an abrupt end.
Matter, then, is for most of its length an entertaining read but ultimately a disappointing one. Banks's skill as a writer and his undeniable imagination are enough to keep the pages turning, but by the end, his limitations are even more starkly underlined. There's sadly nothing new here &, while he may write more Culture novels in the future, unless he is able to say something new or do something different, it'll be increasingly hard to look forward to them.
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Matter matters...
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I have read a number of reviews about this book and must say I am surprised. I believe that this is a classic Iain M. Banks book. The story is excellent. The characterisations are superb. The imagination of the shellworld is fabulous. The ending takes your breath away - I finished this book a number of days ago and am still having flash backs to the final sequence!
Sure there are periods in the book where things go slow - show me a great book where that is not the case.
I thought the different views of the family members and their different journeys was very compelling. Love the Culture. Loved the book.
All in all an absolute return to form (I agree that the Algebraist was a struggle!) and a quite marvellous read.
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Not the best Culture novel
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I suspect that this is a book that will repay second and maybe third readings. On the first reading it feels a little bit disjointed - narratives start and then are derailed by characters' movement between worlds, there's a whole chapter where a character thinks about whether to go home or not, narratives aren't exactly resolved. The story starts in a fantasy sort of setting, a land of feudal, pre-industrial society, where a king is murdered by his closest friend and it is observed by the heir to the throne. It feels a bit like Macbeth or Hamlet or a hundred other such stories and I had a hard time getting into the story until it started moving out into the Culture. But even there things felt familiar. Another Culture story, another Special Circumstances agent, another Ship with murky motivations. And then the ending... I wasn't sure how to take the ending. It happened very quickly and forced aside all the other issues the story had been dealing with until that point.
In a way I like it. I like the idea that there are always things going on around and outside and above and below that have an effect on events and that one event is connected to a thousand others, so that shifts in scale will make that event unimportant in the grand scheme of things. But in another way it stops the story from feeling satisfying.
Maybe in a few months I'll reread the book and I'll amend this review to show how a second reading works, if knowing what you know by the end has an effect on how you read the story. But at the moment, I think this is a case of a clever point overcoming a story.
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