I've just started "Transition". So far, this is pretty different for Iain Banks (well, Iain M. Banks). I'd say, different in a diffused, non-coalescing kind of way. I've liked other works of his better; I'm a pretty uncritical fan of his "Culture" series, and I'd give "Raw Spirits" a rave review. However, since I am generally a big fan of his work, I shall give Transition a chance.

It is always intriguing, in books that feature alternate realities, to try and guess when the author is writing about our own. Or, rather, his or her own, as they record their perception of your reality (an alternate reality within alternative realities).

It tells you a lot about the author whether they attempt to define our reality as something physical, be it a property unique to human evolution in this reality - like humans being able to play the trombone, or something cultural, like the ability to produce televised talent shows that top the ratings.

Things get even livelier when the author starts to describe alternative realities. There are realities where an alternative history has unfolded (history being written by the losers on those worlds), or realities where there are physical differences thanks to a successful detour on the path of evolution (worlds ruled by dinosaurs, worlds ruled by owls, that sort of thing) or where God not only exists but takes an active interest in the day to day goings on of the planet.

Then there’s alien invasions.

Banks has great fun with the various alternative realities, and those people who flit between them, and it would seem that he has identified the Unique Selling Point for the reality where you are reading his book as the world of banking – hedge funds in particular – and Chernoyble, both examples of human folly and both excellent examples of meltdown.

The existence of alternative realities is the backdrop to an examination of the lives and motives of those that can flit between the realities. Of course, being a novel, the sort of people who do this do not do it with the aim of visiting every KFC franchise on every alternative Earth everywhere, oh no; they are a band of super-assassins and covert operatives who use their power, and occasionally knives, guns and explosives, to nudge selected realities in the direction of their choosing.

The reason for this is never fully explained, but one suspects it’s because in doing so they can influence cultural or scientific development in a way that has not happened on their own world and import the benefit or idea. So, for instance, from our reality they would import say, iPods, or soft loo roll.

This being Banks, there are plenty of gadgets, from the fantastic image of a pressurised train crossing a high pass in the Himalayas, to the pill dispenser that dispenses the pill that allows selected people to jump across realities.

(Rather than physically jump they jump into existing bodies, the character and memories of which they retain, but who they control, while retaining their own consciousness. This allows them to jump into a body, do a quick assassination, then jump out and leave the poor sod they inhabited holding a bloody knife and facing a lot of quite cross people. Like a sort of evil ‘Quantum Leap’. In fact the one flaw in the novel was that those who travel between realities can recognise one another and so you have strangers stopping and interacting with one another. That many of them are English in temperament, and are happy and comfortable talking to apparent strangers, stretches credibility more than the idea of dimensional travel.)

It’s an intriguing novel, with a good twist at the end. Each chapter is told from one of the principle character’s point of view, the storylines meshing and overlapping at the end, and it would be interesting to re-read it one character at a time rather than in the linear for the book is presented in.

Most of all, it’s a book of ideas, and alternative realities are a great way fro Banks to give his imagination free reign. Most of us can only visit alternate realities by means of several pints of lager. This allows you, for instance, to inhabit the reality where you are a good dancer (reality: you are not), the reality where you are a raconteur (reality: you have been babbling incoherently for the last twenty minutes) and of course the reality where your ex-girlfriend wants to hear from you at three in the morning (reality: her husband is not happy to speak to you. At all.) ( )

So, here's the thing.

I feel - because, essentially, we are similar people- a connection to Iain Banks. He writes stuff which touch on my interests and obsessions; he writes properly intelligent SF (the only kind worth bothering with), and he's defying stereotype by shifting ever more leftward as he ages. Which is all good.

The one thing everyone knows about him, of course, is that he's really two authors: the nice, safe, mainstream one (a little edgy at times, increasingly political, but his characters are almost always redeemed by love in the end), and the odd, cerebral SF one, who you don't have to bother with if you don't like your fiction to have spaceships in it. Oddly, though, the SF one (the one with the M in the middle) is the really interesting one. When freed of the shackles of earth-bound plotting, Banks can really let his imagination go, and often makes some serious philosophical points alongside the odd aliens, and the standard tropes of the genre ('everyone wants to live forever and have superpowers' just about sums it up.)

Anyway, alongside my '4 Pink Floyds' theory (remind me to tell you about my '4 Pink Floyds' theory someday), I posit that there are 4 Iain Bankses - the literary fiction Banks, the Airport novel Banks, the Culture/fantasy Banks, and the SF Banks - and it's this last one who actually has the interesting things to say.

The presence or otherwise of the middle M is a red herring, something which I think even he's beginning to realise; perhaps he should reserve it for just the Culture books in future, and let everyone else take their chances. For example, two of his most effective 'non-M' books are essentially SF books in disguise - The Bridge and Song of Stone. I know otherwise rational people who dislike 'Song of Stone', mainly because it doesn't make sense until you understand that it's actually not set on this planet.

The LitFic Banks is more or less in remission these days - 'Dead Air' really didn't work (I think it was meant to be a sub-Martin Amis rant about modern society, but it was just too grating, and not really true to itself), but the airport novel Banks just keeps churning them out - the most recent, 'The Steep Approach to Garbadale', was a sweeping family saga with the inevitable Banks twist (and an awful lot of ranting about Americans; our Iain really didn't like the last US president.)

This one, however, is a real oddity. It's published in the UK as a non-M book, but on this side of the Atlantic it has an M in it - presumably so that it doesn't frighten the horses. This is prudent, for it is as SF as anything he's ever written, and perhaps more so. The story is told from multiple points of view (so far, so Banks), but it is clear from the beginning that these are not ordinary narrators - in the first sentence, the first narrator we meet tells us with added capitals that he is an Unreliable Narrator. None of what follows is true, kids, and don't you forget it!

This has the curious effect of causing the reader not to particularly care about the characters, although once you work out that some of them are the same person, seen at different points in their personal timeframe (I have to be careful here, since keeping track of time is one of the key issues with the story), and that some of them are in different universes, the whole thing actually starts to make some kind of sense.

As a piece of narrative, I'd say it works very well; as a critique of modern Western society, slightly less well (the faux-East End wideboy drug dealer / bonds trader character is just pure caricature), but as a novel it has (for me, anyway) two critical faults.

The first is that it proclaims early on, and repeatedly maintains that there are an infinite (I went back and checked; he does say infinite) number of universes. Logically, then, the actions of all the characters, given what they know, and what the author knows, are literally pointless. Why does any of what happens matter, if there is another universe where it doesn't happen? Secondly, there are two competing political factions in the story, each populated by amoral figures. We are instructed by the author to care that one of them succeeds and the other fails, but there is never any compelling evidence given as to why this should be. It seems that (particularly given the parallel universes thing) either side could win without much changing, except that Banks would have less room to make some political points.

In short (because no-one's going to be bothered reading all that), if you liked 'The Crow Road', 'The Business', and 'Garbadale', and you're hoping for another sprawling story about a zany Scottish family and their dotty elderly relatives, you'll be perplexed and baffled by this. If you approach it as a SF book, and keep a completely open mind about the physics of it all, you may well be entertained. If you're a nit-picking old curmudgeon like me, however, you'll turn the final page muttering "yes, but..." This may or may not be a good thing. ( )

I quite enjoyed this book, as I do most of Iain M Banks' stuff; however I really struggled with the ending. It seemed to happen too fast and left too many questions unanswered. To be honest, I was a bit confused by it all and in parts it seemed like he took the easy way out.

An enjoyable read though. I hope that you have better luck with the ending. ( )

The prologue to Transition, by the first of many narrators, explains that the story takes place in “that golden age which nobody noticed… at the time”: between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on the World Trade Center. The narrator then provides a teasing series of possible starting-points before he’s joined by other narrators - and we’re suddenly plunged into that old sci-fi favourite, a multiverse, where all possible versions of the world coexist in an infinite number of parallel dimensions.
These worlds exist under the guidance of The Concern, a 1000 year old secret organisation. Directed by a melevolent force, The Concern has become decadent and amoral, with members willing to use their powers to torture adversaries and achieve sexual gratification. The power of The Concern is based on its monopoly control of the means of transitioning between different realities. This shift can only be undertaken by an elite few, and then only with the assistance of a drug called septus, which is manufactured by The Concern. Once the drug has been consumed, something as small as a sneeze can propel a person into a new body in a new reality.

The book started out well – with the possibility of a dark thriller. But, by the end, I felt cheated that most of the starting points from the prologue weren’t actually starting points at all. Loose ends abound and many of the plot lines are set up only to remain undeveloped - or abandoned. The parts about Christian terrorists, for example, might work better if we knew what they were fighting for, or which world they were fighting in. As things stand, they just seem like an idea that Banks came up with, couldn’t quite decide what to do with - but threw in anyhow. It felt almost as though this book was simply a compilation of ideas with a concocted thread tying them together.

The missing middle initial M in Banks’s name indicates this is being sold as one of his literary novels, rather than his sci-fi ouvre which is marketed under the name Iain M Banks. I’ve read (and enjoyed) much of his work – the exception being his last novel The Business. Until now. Even when I could work out what was going on in this dense and confusing novel, I simply could not empathise with any of the largely un-named characters. I’ll be cautious before sitting down with another of his works. ( )