The Player of Games.

As usual, I think one of you recommended Iain Banks’ Culture novels to me, and in particular recommended The Player of Games ($2.99 on Kindle right now), for what I would say is a rather obvious reason: The main character is a board gamer, although Banks simply refers to these as “games,” in a utopian society where games are taken rather seriously and the main character is considered one of the best game players in the world. It’s one of the more unusual concepts for a novel I’ve seen in a while, although the execution is limited in a few ways, including the opacity of that main character.

Jernau Morat Gurgeh is the player from the book’s title, living on the orbital station Chiark, where he dominates nearly all game-play, often attempting to challenge himself by breaking scoring records or achieving perfect scores because he so seldom loses. He’s given an opportunity in one game to gain an illicit advantage, which leads to an extortion attempt that puts him in the clutches of a government mission to the Empire of Azad, a vicious, despotic regime where a complex game, also called Azad, determines everything from social status to the identity of the next Emperor. Gurgeh is supposed to simply go and play the game as a guest, but studies and learns the game well enough to play competitively, which upsets the delicate hierarchy on Azad and helps create a broader conflict that spins beyond Gurgeh’s control.

The story does move incredibly well, even through periods of elliptical descriptions of game play, as Banks seems to have had a good knack for pacing (although it would have been great if he’d had a similar knack for chapter breaks). One problem he dances around, not entirely successfully, is the game of Azad itself. He didn’t actually make up a game, which would itself be as massive a task as writing a novel, but endeavors to describe the game’s components, mechanics, and strategy without ever telling us what the game is. (Maybe he invented the game in his head, but chose not to get too specific in the book, which would probably be smart because people would nitpick the game to death … people like me, I suppose.) On the other hand, the lack of specifics about the game made it hard for me to envision what was happening or to follow when Gurgeh pulled off strategic master strokes to win games he was supposed to lose or stage a massive comeback against multiple opponents working in concert to eliminate him – the latter of which reminded me at least a little bit of the strategy in the game Diplomacy.

The second issue that I had with the book was Gurgeh himself, who is as vague as the game he’s playing. He’s not two-dimensional, as Banks does try to get into the personality and ego of someone who is at the top of his field, used to winning, in search of challenges, and perhaps unable to see when he’s being played. However, he’s also drawn without much detail beyond his gamer persona – Banks gives us a very good idea of who Gurgeh is while playing Azad, or thinking about between sessions, but very little sense of his character beyond the game. The book hasn’t been adapted for TV or film – depicting Azad the game would be difficult, and I would actually try to completely rewrite the game play rather than convert Banks’ framework to the screen – but if it were, Gurgeh would need more depth to his personality beyond the games. He’s probably a bit of a conceited ass, which just barely pokes through the surface in the game (such as when he talks to the drone that accompanies him to Azad), but one who’s enjoyable to watch.

Where The Player of Games does succeed is in the crafting of the overall story of how the Culture wants to interact with Azad, which doesn’t get a full explanation until the very last page of the epilogue. It’s a game within the novel, Banks playing with the reader’s expectations by revealing bits of information over a long period before tying everything together at the end. That made it a fun read even with my criticisms of the main character and the game at the heart of the story – enough so that I’ll probably check out something else in the Culture series, since I don’t think Gurgeh recurs in any other novel.

Next up: I’m just about done with Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens.