I'm awake! I'm awake!
Yes I am! I didn't sleep late today, no I did not. Honest. O_O
Well, actually I didn't. Technically didn't. I woke up at 6am, I just didn't move until 9am. Oh the bliss of being able to lay in bed for 3 hours without having to listen to screaming children, my mother bitching, my brothers arguing over the net connection or the neighbours drilling holes in things. Ah yes, and now I've said that all hell is about to break loose.
Anyway, I've been threatening you al with it for the past couple of days, but here it is
Whit
or,
Isis amongst the Unsaved
The book started, as most do, with words. Lots, and lots, and lots of words which made me think "Great, this is going to be another Banks book I can't read more than a chapter of at a time". I suppose anyone who reads Banks gets that same feeling with some of his works, they're so thick with descriptive text and twists that to begin with (at least, and occasionally all the way through the book) it seems quite a task to actually begin reading, let alone contemplate finishing the novel. This one, I feel, didn't start well. If I wasn't on a train in the middle of nowhere with some rather smelly person next to me who I was trying to ignore I may have given up after the first paragraph. But I was trapped, with nothing but this book, so I forged on.
It starts rather blandly, a simple description of someone reading a book, which I feel has far too much description and felt strangely like a over-enthusiastically written fan-fic. To put it shortly : It felt like something I would write when in one of my moods to layer on description after useless description. It's the kind of start I would have consigned to the bin to be honest, but to be more honest, it is a good a start as any other and I am far too fussy. ((It's a Virgo thing. Go figure.))
Then comes the fox. I shan't tell you what happened to the fox, or what was done to the fox ((I bet you all have some strange mental images now!)) but it was the first thing which made me perk up and wonder if my original observations had been entirely inaccurate. And I was only halfway down the first page.
But that's entirely my point of praise for this novel: every time you think you have the answers, you don't. It twists and turns, challenges your original perceptions and in doing that makes you questions things that you may never have questioned before.
Take Isis, ((or, more correctly, Gaia-Marie Isis Saraswati Minerva Mirza Whit of Luskentyre, Beloved Elect of God III,)) like so many of Banks other characters she is on a journey of self discovery through the entire book. I fell entirely in love with this character - and being an atheist with a chip on her shoulder about religions and people just like Isis it's not something that usually happens. She goes out into the world after having being brought up in a religious cult, sheltered from the outside world, all it's technologies and believing vehemently in her way as the only true way, in her religions value above all else, and in the purity of her commune and her fellow Luskentyrians. By the time you have read about a third of the novel you agree with her.
I won't reveal more about what happens, as I think you ought to read this book and find out yourself, but the entire book is somewhat reminiscent of the journey into adulthood we all make, of discovering all the things you were protect from as a child, of dealing with them, and of coming out the other side a stronger and wiser person.
Go, read, now.
xx
Fe