Feersum Endjinn

Feersum Endjinn is often cited as Iain M. Banks' least accessible and most difficult (sf) novel, so naturally that's the book of his I chose to read first.

This is a very imaginative plot and setting. It contains elements familiar from other works - virtual reality, reincarnation within a computer - but throws them in a cocktail with the iconography of fantasy - castles, courts, kings - to create something, dare I say, original (something very hard to achieve in sf by the 1990s).

The plot is half murder-mystery, half political conspiracy, constructed of multiple but connecting storylines of several characters. By far the most interesting and entertaining to read was that of Bascule, 'the Teller', whose task it is to enter the Crypt (the name of the aforementioned computer network) which has become increasingly unstable. The Crypt is a virtual copy of the outside world where people can be resurrected and take different forms, which is indeed what Bascule does.

The book's notoriety for being challenging comes in part from Bascule's PoV chapters, which are written completely phonetically. I found that reading these parts out loud alleviated the difficulty, and listening to this as an audiobook could, I suspect, bypass the difficulty of these sections entirely. That aside, Bascule is a distinct and endearing character, and his narration contains the majority of the book's humour.

Some of the rules of the world presented in Feersum Endjinn were a little hard to grasp, and I certainly didn't catch everything so I won't pretend otherwise. It's definitely a book I admire, if I didn't understand 100% of the time, but that's something re-reads could resolve. I would say that with its elements of virtual reality, the challenging vocabulary, and its postmodern techniques, it would appeal to fans of works such as Neuromancer.