The final novel by Iain Banks, who died on Sunday, is
a dark satire about old friends, lost dreams and approaching mortality, says
Jake Kerridge.
Iain Banks: His final work is
darkly funny Photo: Chris
Watt
The Telegraph - 11 Jun 2013
As a youth Iain Banks spent most of
his spare time fashioning bombs out of household products. He used to claim that
the only word he wrote on the “interests” section of his university application
form was “explosives”.
There could hardly be a more perfectly Banksian setting for a book, then,
than the one indicated in the title of his 27th and final novel. Just as the
young Banks used to watch in fascination from his bedroom window as engineers
would blast away hills to make way for the Forth Road Bridge, so Kit, the
teenage narrator of The Quarry, relishes
the nearby explosions that rattle the window frames of his house. What most
people would see as a blot on the landscape moves Kit/Banks to something like
poetry, even the quarry’s “tall, gawky structures made of rusting iron” that
“stand like upside-down pyramids on skinny metal legs, while others sprout
wonky-looking conveyor belts that straggle across the ground like fractured
centipedes.”
With Banks, one can’t help feeling that literature’s gain was mining
engineering’s loss. When he stopped making bombs in real life he started blowing
things up in books. The science-fiction novels he wrote with his “Iain M Banks”
hat on gave him plenty of opportunity for inventive combustions, but they recur
in his M-less, mainstream novels too: probably the most famous line he ever
wrote is the opening sentence of The Crow Road (1992) — “It was the day
my grandmother exploded.”
All these explosions are an embodiment of the way Banks blasted on to the
literary scene in the 1980s, letting off firecrackers that made noises like
whoopee cushions while the more staid critics dived for cover. The paperback of
his debut novel The Wasp Factory (1984) proudly displayed outraged
denunciations (“a work of unparalleled depravity" — The Irish Times)
alongside fulsome encomia. Of the other writers who joined Banks on
Granta’s list of Best of Young British Novelists in 1993, only Will Self
has produced comparably outlandish, left-field work.
Appropriately for a swan song, The Quarry echoes its author’s first
novel, in that its first-person narrator is a teenage boy. But in most other
respects it could hardly be more different from the grotesque pathological study
that was The Wasp Factory: there is very little here that a critic would
have objected to even in 1984. Like most of Banks’s more recent novels, it is a
story about ordinary people of the sort that the reader will know well or
possibly be, powered by a solid but not very essential plot.
More
More
