(Another old review. We'll go with Banks this time, since I just finished another of his books, and will be adding that to the book log shortly...)

Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks. I finished this one a couple of weeks ago, and have been half-assedly trying to concoct a coherent review of it ever since. This is more difficult than you might think (certainly more difficult than I thought it would be) because, on reflection, there's really almost no plot to the book.

And yet, I really, really like this book. It's certainly the best science fiction book I've read in quite some time (though that's not saying that much, given that the vast majority of my recent reading has been mystery novels written well before I was born...), and I would happily vote for it for any awards it might be eleigible for, were I the sort of person who voted for awards.

But damn, this is a hard book to describe.

Put it this way: This book was good enough to make me want to read Consider Phlebas again. Well, almost.

Taken as a whole, the book is basically an extended meditation on death and loss. It opens with one of the major characters dying pinned beneath a disabled tank, and really doesn't get any cheerier. The main story line concerns the events on a Culture Orbital which is about to be illuminated by the light of two stars which were destroyed in one of the closing battles of the Idiran War (the connection to Consider Phlebas. I'm not sure if this is a conscious parallel to Brightness Falls from the Air or not). The plot follows the events on the Orbital before, during, and after the arrival of the "light of ancient mistakes," mostly concerning the arrival of a Chelgrian emissary, a member of a species whose first contact with the Culture had disasterous results. His nominal mission is to try to convince Mahrai Ziller, a famous Chelgrian composer living in self-imposed exile, to return to his home world, but it seems clear from the start that his visit has another purpose. There are four major viewpoints/ plot threads, which weave around each other and eventually converge (more or less) for the grand finale.

The plot, were I to choose to spoil it, could be summarized in a fairly short paragraph. It unfolds at a rather leisurely pace, which is not at all the sort of thing I expect from an Iain Banks novel-- this is far and away the least frenetic of his books. And yet, it's never a dull read. Most of the book consists of blatant infordumps, but Banks handles them with an impressively light touch-- copious information about the Culture is provided to the reader through the simple device of having the main characters be outsiders, but it's woven into long stretches of snappy Banksian dialogue (the two-page conversation consisting entirely of cool Culture ship names is priceless), or set against the impressive backdrops available on the Orbital.