The narrative begins with a short prologue detailing the birth, escape, and subsequent pursuit of a Culture Mind in a rare time of war, followed by a particularly grim introduction to our protagonist, Bora Horza Gobuchul, in which he is slowly drowning in a prison cell via sewage and waste created as a result of a banquet held in his “honor”. Iain Banks is an incredibly nuanced, subtle writer, and he accomplished something unique with Consider Phlebas. It’s not without its problems, but what it does well, it does very well and I have to commend it. Only after moving on to The Player of Games and finishing it, did Consider Phlebas start to take form and make a measure of sense to me. I think I didn’t know how to read it exactly, or even what it was. It went way over my head the first time I read it. In Consider Phlebas, his first published novel in the series, he takes this to an extreme, showing us the Culture almost entirely from an antagonistic point of view before giving readers a glimpse of the positives. In my introductory essay on Iain Banks and the Culture, Caledonian Antisyzygy and the Principle of Charity, I mention that he approached fiction with a certain kind of duality, representing and considering ideologies and viewpoints antagonistic with one another.
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