This is a book about arrogance. The arrogance of going up against a culture (indeed, THE Culture) that can do anything, of going up against the certainty of faith, of going it alone, of reliance on technology or the rejection of it. I spent a while thinking about what this book is "about" after its unusual conclusion. I think it's ultimately about how very important it is to work together, to be together. A culture that destroys individualism so thoroughly that each person is ultimately disconnected from every other is as bad as a religious community that rejects common ground with other communities, which is itself as bad as a man who is driven only to accomplish his own ends. Every bad thing that happens to an individual is either the result of working alone--even with the best intentions--or of an uncaring, random universe inflicting itself on people left unprotected.

This is not a happy story. But it's not nihilistic either. Ultimately it's irritated, as if to say "come on, you have everything you need to do anything if you can just get it together!" Banks has chosen some fairly pulpy science fiction to convey this message. The tropes and images Banks uses in most of the story are not complex, literary science fiction. But there are moments, among which the most obvious is the brief aside when the Culture erases a structure from reality, when you glimpse the raw, profound power that is available to these people, power to shape reality, to do incredible things, if they'd get out of their own heads and stop having pulp fiction gunfights with three-legged aliens.

Of course, that leaves me wondering if Consider Phlebas is a talented writer's criticism of a genre that lets you explore literally anything under the stars but spends its time on gunfights with beasties. It seems like something Banks would do. Because, again, this is a book about arrogance, and maybe he's aware that his own might result in a difficult book that doesn't please people as much as it might.

Anyway, this is my second run through Banks' SF books, this time in order. I'm one story in and already sad that he's gone all over again.