A review by mav_ka
The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

4.0

we start with gurgeh. gurgeh is having a mid-life crisis. gurgeh lives in the Culture, a sort of a utopia. he is free to pursue what he wants, his days are filled with relaxing activities that are typical of what an average person might get up to on a long weekend, except gurgeh gets to do this all day, every day. he gets to play games, write research papers about games, hike in the most beautiful natural scenery, and host friends over for social gatherings whenever he wants.

and he. is. not. happy. what went wrong?

what is happiness for gurgeh? his bubbly friend yay (yup, that's the name) might offer some insight into gurgeh's emotional state. she is constantly coming up with bonkers creative ideas, hanging out with people and enjoying dating people left and right. if gurgeh was the definition of misery at the start of the book, yay would be anti-misery. anti-gurgeh. they are so different yet they've been friends for the longest time. in the beginning, we literally see gurgeh try to follow in yay's footsteps to borrow some of her happiness, try to understand why she is so happy in their utopian world and he isn't. he plays a game with yay -- it doesn't attract him (it's not intellectual enough for him). he invites her friends over for a social gathering -- yay leaves with someone to spend the night; gurgeh attemps to hook up with someone too. it's almost like he's asking himself, "what would yay do?", and following up on that. yet it only lasts for a night. in the morning, he is back into his shell, wanting some time alone, and his date gets offended by the lack of affection and leaves. 

yay is clearly not a solution to gurgeh's misery. so what is?

"What weather." She tossed her drink back. "No wonder you live by yourself, Gurgeh."
"Oh, that isn't the rain, Yay," Gurgeh said. "That's me. Nobody can stand to live with me for long."
"He means," Chamlis said, "that he couldn't stand to live for long with anybody."
"I'd believe either."

the first time gurgeh feels something is when a fellow player suspects him of cheating. that momentous, sinking feeling would lead some to get embarrassed, but not gurgeh. he feels thrilled. why? maybe it's a change in a routine. change is good. this is something unexpected.

the second time gurgeh feels happiness is when he's competing against the wunderkind girl (she has a name, i just don't remember it). but gurgeh's happiness is not truly happiness; it's the absence of sorrow. he is so concentrated on the game that he forgets to eat. he loses track of time. the concentration, the obsession is what makes him forget he is supposed to be brooding and unhappy. this is his happiness. as close to happiness as he can get. 

his happiness clearly revolves around games, so what can he do to catch this feeling and make it last? well, that's what the rest of the book is about. in a way. the book is actually about a lot of things, but i am always more interested in dissecting the emotional journeys than the physical ones, hence my bias in this entire review. in fact, this is not even a review. this is just me putting my thoughts down on paper. if you want a review, this is not it.

gurgeh's obsession during his game with the wunderkind girl leads him to make a misguided choice in the intermission, which kickstarts the events of the book.

Why had he done it? Why couldn't it just not have happened? Why didn't they have time-travel, why couldn't he go back and stop it happening? Ships that could circumnavigate the galaxy in a few years, and count every cell in your body from light-years off, but he wasn't able to go back one miserable day and alter one tiny, stupid, idiotic, shameful decision...

THIS is where the book got truly interesting to me. it took me weeks to get through the first half of part 1. it only took me a few days to get through the rest of the book (a book club deadline helped, of course, but it wasn't a slog anymore. i sprouted wings and was flying through the pages)

the real essence of the story starts when gurgeh accepts the offer to go play a game in a far corner of the galaxy. sounds boring, but there is a catch.
1) Culture has kept this particular game secret for seven years, to the point where even Gurgeh, the famous player, has not heard anything about it.
2) The game is used to decide on who becomes the next Emperor, and it also dictates other important government positions. The game is literally an election. Some might even say a rigged one.

the game might be rigged to serve the benefits of the people who play it, but to gurgeh, it's just a game. there are no stakes for him except his personal enjoyment. which makes his final game so interesting to me. in a way, it mirrors his obsession at the start of the book, where he was playing the game with the wunderkind girl, but on a much larger scale. he forgets to eat. he has to be told to sleep. he even has to be reminded to urinate! what a guy. but he is truly happy. or at least, his version of happiness. the absence of sorrow. meanwhile, his opponent has bet everything on this game. when they finally get to talk about it, gurgeh is almost in love; he talks about it like a delicate, intimate dance that nobody else could understand. his opponent, though, strikes him and yells at him in frustration. he can't enjoy the game the same way gurgeh did. while gurgeh was just trying to find a way out of the pit of mid-life crisis, his opponent was trying to prove his superiority over the entire Culture, the place from which gurgeh came from.

the book is so good. i dont tend to enjoy sci-fi as much for some reason, but this one? this one was so worth it. it had:
- a slightly slower start that might get you to put down the book if you are not immediately sucked into it (but keep going until you finish chapter 1 and then decide whether you are going to DNF the book)
- an absolutely insane writing style (i say, affectionately). i literally fell in love with some passages. give this a try.
- what a PLOT. at first it's heading nowhere, but when it picks up, it picks up. like. not much i can say. even when i predicted some moments, the writing style and the personal journey of the characters getting there made it such an enjoyable read. 

strong 4 gurgehs out of 5 unpronounceable names. what a read.

my favorite out-of-context quote that is not gonna tell you anything but will maybe show you why i fell in love with the writing style:

Gurgeh watched the screen.
Flere-Imsaho watched Gurgeh.
The man's eyes glittered in the screen-light, unused photons reflecting from the halo of iris. The pupils widened at first, then shrank, became pinpoints. The drone waited to the wide, staring eyes to fill with moisture, for the tiny muscles around the eyes to flinch and the eyelids to close and the man to shake his head and turn away, but nothing of the sort happened. The screen held his gaze, as though the infinitesimal pressure of light it spent upon the room had somehow reversed, and so sucked the watching man forward, to hold him, teetering before the fall, fixed and steady and pointed at the flickering surface like some long-stilled moon.

and another one:

There was a strange metallic taste in his mouth, and at first he thought it was the implant, rejecting, surfacing, for some reason reappearing, but then he knew that it wasn't, and realized, for the first time in his life, that fear really did have a taste.