Against A Dark Background: Iain M. Banks

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When I read it, I had all number of problems with it, but fortunately time has turned my memory of this book hazy. A cult is responsible for the death of Sharrow's mother and the contract on Sharrow's life, while many other cults with strange beliefs and practices are encountered during the novel.

It's a book that begins like a light-hearted sci-fi actioner (albeit salted with darkness from the memorable prologue onward) and ends in a nihilistic explosion of death, loss, and recrimination. And the ending is almost as poignant, if a bit bleak, as some of my favorite parts of the Culture (almost, anyway). I think this is a bit hasty, because as a Buddhist his point is really more that given the lack of a self, there's no fundamental distinction between self and the world.

For some reason this just feels disjointed and I've found myself having to rewind parts because I feel like I've missed something.

Banks wrote an epilogue to the book that did not appear with the published text, but is available separately online. Bookends: The online epilogue puts us back on a cable car, just like the one Sharrow's mother died on. It’s so much of a stand alone, in fact, that in one scene, a character looks up into the night sky to note that the closest star is a million light years away. The central character of Against a Dark Background is Sharrow, a noble in a distant future star system. Certainly, there is far more death and destruction than seems necessary, but hey: more than one person is alive at the end, which seems positively upbeat from Mr.True Companions: Sharrow gets the band back together to track down the Lazy Gun and get the Huhsz off her family's back once and for all. The book has long since turned to dust, but the case contains a quotation that is also inscribed on Gorko's tomb. Banks makes up worlds, concepts, laws, forms of life, cultures and societies, he gives them all names and it all seems so natural.