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. ( )

The Count Sessine had died many times, once in an aircraft crash, once in a bathyscape accident, once at the hand of an assassin, once in a duel, once at a hand of a jealous lover, once at the hand of a lover's jealous husband and once of old age. Now, it was twice at the hand of an assassin; a male one this time, for a reason he was unable to determine, and - most distressingly - for the last time. Finally, physically dead, for ever more.

On a future earth about to enter a cosmic dust crowd that will threaten extinction for human civilisation, the ruling consistory do not seem to be taking the threat of the Encroachment seriously. The story is told from four points of view; Count Sessine a recently assassinated member of the aristocracy, Chief Gadfium, the government's chief scientist, Bascule a young man who comes to be mixed up in things seemingly by accident, and Asura, who was created by the crypt to bring out the answer to the problem of the Encroachment. The crypt is a fascinating invention; part afterlife, part collective unconscious, part virtual reality world, part AI system protecting the castle and its people.

An exciting if confusing story, that all comes together at the end. The only problem I had was with the phonetic representation of Bascule's speech, . . . whitch . . . if . . . ur . . . nthin . . . lik . . . me . . . wil . . . 1/2 . . . u . . . reedin . . . 1 . . . wurd . . . @ . . . a . . . time . . . like . . . a . . . smol . . . chyl. ( )

just great and so fun trying to get my head around the txt speak ( )

I have to admit to being disappointed with the storyline to this one, having come at it expecting the usual Banks brilliance. If nothing else, read it for the phonetic sections and marvel at how quickly your brain compensates and allows you to race through it. ( )

This was a truly spectacular Banks book, my favorite so far.
I will admit that the ending was disappointing if one expected a "classical" sort of ending, if one treated the book as a sort of mystery to be unravelled.
But if one simply accepts it for what it is, a truly gripping story taking place in this future world that is never fully explained to us, it works extremely well. ( )

As others have noted, this is not an easy read. But unlike some others (such as Bourdieu about whom someone once noted)it is not the case that "he does not have to write this way" : writing this way is part of why Feersum Endjinn is so great. Perhaps it's because I'm dyslexic. Perhaps because I have an academic interest in language and identity ... but whatever it is, I "get" this book, and it's one of my favourite Banks' novels. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.a... ( )

This Banks book is notorious for a quarter of it being written phonetically. It does aid the characterisation of that narrator and has a somewhat weak in-story reason but otherwise it's a little unnecessary - a bit of a flimsy excuse for a stylistic experiment. Nevertheless it does not adversely affect the reading experience too much, you soon get used to it. Reading some parts aloud helps until you learn the new spellings.
The novel itself is otherwise a bit of a let-down. A future Earth society needs to escape an approaching cosmic disaster but, typically for humans, is spending too much time blamestorming and not enough working out how to use the lifeboat technology left behind by the uplifted/sublimed majority of the human race. The ending is a bit of a deus ex machina - the Feersum Endjinn of the title - but you can't really say you weren't warned. ( )

I'm sorry but the gobbledegook put me off this one. ( )

While the future English is....annoying, the book is enjoyable. ( )

This was a tough read, especially with whole chapters handed over to no-talk mix of Glaswegian-Aberdonian nonesense. ( )

All is not well in the mammoth, multitiered underground city-state of Serehfa, where the king and his clan are waging an inexplicable battle with the engineer clan. Meanwhile, the entire planet anxiously awaits the arrival of a dust cloud headed for the sun--a development called the encroachment that threatens to plunge Earth into a life-extinguishing ice age. Having abandoned long ago the means and expertise to flee into space, humanity's only hope for technological deliverance is the crypt, a ubiquitous computer mainframe that stores all recorded knowledge, including the downloaded minds of the dead, but which has been almost totally corrupted by viral chaos. Defying the king's bewildering lack of concern for the encroachment, a rebel scientist, a dead officer living on in the virtuality of the crypt, and a semiliterate youth try to penetrate the crypt's chaotic levels and retrieve the needed knowledge before it's too late. Banks' skill at high-tech speculation continues to grow. Every page of this, his most ingenious work yet, seems to offer more dazzling, intriguing ideas