The telos of the back cover

I can imagine no more frustrating a reading experience than the one I just had with Iain M. Banks' Excession.  Is it a great novel? 

I don't know. 

Is it a good novel? 

I don't know. 

Why don't I know?

Because I didn't—because I couldn't—read the novel on its own terms.  I spent the entire time awaiting the arrival of a plot that never materialized.  Why did I do that? 

Because of the back cover:

[Diplomat Byr Genar-Hofoen has been selected by the Culture to undertake a delicate and dangerous mission. The Department of Special Circumstances—the Culture's espionage and dirty tricks section—has sent him off to investigate a 2,500-year-old mystery: the sudden disappearance of a star fifty times older than the universe itself. But in seeking the secret of the lost sun, Byr risks losing himself.  There is only one way to break the silence of millennia: steal the soul of the long-dead starship captain who first encountered the star, and convince her to be reborn. And in accepting this mission, Byr will be swept into a vast conspiracy that could lead the universe into an age of peace . . . or to the brink of annihilation. ]

It should go without saying by now that none of that actually happens in the novel.  There is a conspiracy and the name is correct—although it refers to only one of the novel's many characters—but the plot points on the back cover all refer to a single dream that character had on pp. 389-391.  In retrospect, I find it difficult not to filter the events of the novel back through that short passage, and it almost works: the consciousness of a character (Zreyn Tramow) who witnessed the disappearance of that sun 2,500 years ago is slipped into Byr Genar-Hofoen's dream by a Mind (Grey Area) that plans to make contact with an "Outside Context Problem" (the titular "excession") similar to the disappearance of that sun, and at the end of the novel Tramow herself is awakened from storage shortly after the Grey Area enters the excession, but these are minor plot points unworthy of even being labeled as spoilers.* 

Because of the teleology imposed upon the novel by the back cover, however, every other element of the novel is subsumed by this bit of narrative driftwood.  That is not to say this subplot is unimportant, merely that it is the equivalent of this:

 

Not that there might not be value to doing that—countless classic novels could be made greater by misdirection of this sort—but this mode of false advertising utterly alters the experience of reading the novel.  Were you to read the version of Gravity's Rainbow above, you would spend the whole second half of the novel awaiting the return of the beach-terrorizing octopuses.  The back-cover plot summary is as critical a heuristic as the title: we all remember that Introduction to Literature exercise in which the instructor asks you to imagine that the title of the book is Ahab or The Demure Daisy. 

The back cover functions similarly, only more powerfully, because (if the book is unfamiliar) it is the reader's first encounter with the narrative skeins, and (even if the book is familiar) is something the reader will process almost every other time he or she handles the book.  You may not read the words on the back cover every time you pick the book up, but you see and hazily remember them.  The fact that they are pre-critical—that they guide the way we read the novel without us noticing them the way we notice titles—compels me to think that they are more responsible for our evaluative responses to literature than we would like to admit.  Is this yet another factor we need to take into account when assigning books?  Does anyone prefer the Dover to the Norton Critical edition of whatever because its plot summary leads to more wide-ranging class discussions?

(x-posted.)
   

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*I'm aware that that summary makes no sense to someone unfamiliar with Banks' Culture novels.

Comments

[Karl Steel]

Ulysses -- a breathtaking thriller in which our heroes, several middleaged Irishmen, are stalked by a mysterious man in a McIntosh, who may or may not share a name with his coat.

[Adam Roberts]

Tonight at the Comedy Club: Macbeth's porter in three hours of stunning comedy monologue.

[The Modesto Kid]

Second time I read GR, I quit towards the end of part II when I realized there weren't going to be any more beach-terrorizing octopusses. (First time I read it, I quit towards the end of part I, grossed out by Col. Pudding's prediliction.)

[SEK]

But you have finished it, right TMK? Isn't your nom de blog a play on "the Kenosha Kid," or have I been wrong all this time?

Adam and Karl, I tried to do a bunch of them, turn it into a parlor game, but my head was mush this morning. Others are more than welcome to play along, though.

[Ahistoricality]

Lord of the Rings: The adventures of Tom Bombadil!

Catch-22: Who promoted Major Major?

Anyway, I run into a version of this all the time with the shorter historical documents that I assign. There's almost always an introductory header and some "focus questions" which invariably get incorporated into students' essays. I dropped a book of sources once because the introductory material was so badly done and I got tired of correcting the same misconceptions over and over, and of students writing essays that weren't actually on the questions I'd assigned.

[Gas]

I never read the back cover.

The above is, of course, a lie, but seriously, I try to avoid them. More often than not, I suceed.

[The Modesto Kid]

Yeah I finished it, it took 7 years and four times of starting to read it -- more effort than I've put into reading any other book that I've finished, though if I ever end up making it through Ulysses, that will take the title. My handle turned into a play on Kenosha Kid although it was originally suggested by John Emerson in a context unrelated to GR.

[Karl Steel]

Others are more than welcome to play along, though.
Imagine what could be done with Tristram Shandy. Wow. No point in going on.

[StevenAttewell]

I've had the same problem with front covers of fantasy novels, which are often done by artists hired by the company to paint something that has nothing to do with the plot. For example, I recently read a quite enjoyable fantasy detective novel (junk, but entertaining) called the Sword-Edged Blonde.

One problem. Here's the cover:

The scene of the scruffy rogue dude fighting back to back with the giant red-headed dude in a burning building? Never happens. Spent the whole novel waiting for it.

[SeanH]

Forgive the necropost, but I just dug up my copy of Excession - published by Orbit in the UK in 1997 - and the back cover blurb is much better:

Two and a half millennia ago, the artifact appeared in a remote corner of space, beside a trillion-year-old dying sun from a different universe. It was a perfect black-body sphere, and it did nothing. Then it disappeared. Now it is back.

In stark contrast to the blurb on SEK's copy, that is, in fact, what the book is about.