A huge loss. I’m not going to try to add to the many tributes that have been written about him, except to say that his work has meant a great deal to me over the years and I feel his passing at a very personal level. Goodbye, Iain Banks. Grace and peace.
When I read he was sick in April, I picked up Consider Phlebas for a second read. I finished it just two days before the news that he had passed. My mind is full of his characters and ideas.
That’s one of my favorite Cultiure novels. Use of Weapons, too, and Look To Windward. It’d been many years since I’d read Eliot’s The Waste Land; it left bits of astonishing verse floating around in my head, their connection to source material pretty much gone. Then, some of Banks’ novel titles triggered some synapses to fire, and I found this:
IV. Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Now, better students of the language than I would have recognized these right away — like, duh, Daniel, of course — but it was a delightful little discovery for me.