A mind game of a book: This is a superb book. Much of the book is taken up with the thoughts of the main character and his thoughts are presented in phonetic fashion, which means it might be difficult for some readers if they can't latch onto the accent.

The structure of the story plays games with the reader's mind and once one gets to the end of the book one is left rethinking the whole story.

This book very clever and very rewarding.

As with Banks' other book I read--Excession--this one is a good read but still slightly disappointing. Banks implies so much in order to give the narration epic depth, that ultimately it feels like he's unable to deliver. Nevertheless, both books have managed to keep me enthralled to the last page. Now, isn't that odd? ( )

The good: ambitious; visceral descriptiveness, good language

The bad: too reliant on technological/alien/sci-fi complication and not enough on story or character. These essentials almost feel drafted in as a self-conscious effort to create something intensely imaginative (which is partially successful). There isn't enough warmth or humanity; instead, tere is something of a slick, nasty undercurrent which renders it rather empty. In summary, accomplished, but not engaging or rewarding enough to make re-reading worthwhile. ( )

A citation on the cover calls this book 'sharp, witty, comprehensibly terrifying'. What they should have said was 'dull, boring, incomprehensibly mystifying'. Normally Banks is very, very good, this book is clearly not his best. Its hard to read, and follow, and he never really does develop enough of the story, or the main theme, for it to be effective. ( )

As several other reviews have noted this, more than any other Ian Banks novel I've read, is a stylistic experiment by the author. There are four main characters, and the story is told generally by rotating through their viewpoints, with an occasional section from a 5th. Count Sessine, who spends most of the novel, dead, acting in the cyberspace/afterlife/alternate reality of the Data Crypt; Bascule a professional crypt-surfer with a disorder which causes him to only be able to process language phonetically; Asura, a emissary and power in the form of an enigma wrapped in a mystery; Gadfium scientist, conspirator, and crypt neophyte; and occasionally the King, schemer, spy, and peeping tom.

The setting of the story is a city within a gigantic building in the form of a house tens of kilometers in height, left behind when most of the Earth's population departed for elsewhere. The future of the Earth is threatened by "The Encroachment", apparently a cosmic dust cloud. But solving that problem isn't really what Feersum Endjin is about.

Most of Banks's novels explore some philosophical theme, and about half way through I was asking myself what this one was about, beyond the obvious exploration of someone who can only embrace language phonetically. That part is easy enough to get used to if you're interested in the rest, but struck me as tedious and fairly irrelevant after a couple of chapters. I think "what its about" is an exploration of identity - what it means to be the person you are. Both Sessine and Gadfium interact copies of themselves, that given the nature of the Crypt are no less "real" than they are. Sessine is dead almost from the moment we meet him, and yet he is an active person, critical to the unfolding of events (I almost said "vital", but well, he's dead). Asura is a fully mature being, with no knowledge of who she is or what her role is, but with all the experience of an adult just waiting to be triggered into awareness by experience. Bascule regularly experiences "life" from the position of a chimera - a person inhabiting the real or crypt-space body of a real or mythical animal.

From that viewpoint - an exploration of identity and personness - Gadfium and the King serve as the control cases. And they understandably play a lesser role. Gadfium is the completely vanilla person - alive, aware of herself and her past, but never directly connected to the Crypt, so like any "normal" person. The King is the person with no morals and no scruples, almost not a person at all, just ego - the negative control to Gadfium's positive.

Maybe exploring identity this way isn't so clever or interesting now, years after the invention of cyberpunk, when we've all seen The Matrix, and cyberspace makes some sort of appearance in every fifth SF novel, but 14 years ago, not so old. And it is Ian Banks. You can count on absolutely top-notch writing, interesting and unusual characters, and a fully-realized world for them to inhabit.

As for the Deus-ex-machina of the Feersum Endjinn, I like to think it is his little homage to one of my favorite Alan Dean Foster short stories. ( )