Final novel resonates with wit, compassion
Iain Banks infallibly entertaining
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 than the quarry 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 hills to make way for the Forth Road Bridge, so Kit, the teenage narrator of The Quarry, relishes the nearby explosions that rattle 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.
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 Eighties, letting off firecrackers while 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”).
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 work.
Appropriately for a swansong, The Quarry echoes its author’s first novel, in that its narrator is a teenage boy. But in most other respects it could hardly be more different from the pathological study that was The Wasp Factory: there is very little here that critics would have objected to even in 1984.
Like most of Banks’s recent novels, it is a story about ordinary people, powered by a solid but not essential plot.
The novel has two MacGuffins. The first is the identity of Kit’s mother, a secret kept from him by his cantankerous father, Guy, with whom he lives in a decrepit house on the edge of the quarry. Kit’s efforts to winkle out her name are acquiring an increasing urgency, as Guy is dying of cancer.
The second is the problem of the whereabouts of a compromising video, made by Guy and some fellow students 20 years previously, that has the potential to knock careers off course: the Nineties equivalent of indiscreet Facebook photos still floating around in cyberspace when your school years are long over.
So a deputation arrives at Willoughtree House, where they all stayed for a period while studying at the nearby university, deter- mined to find and destroy the tape.
Really it’s an excuse for Banks to engineer one of his favourite situations: people returning to a place where they spent their youth and finding themselves forced to assess what they have become in the years since.
Soon the house is filled with thirtysomethings trying to displace their own unease by pointing out how the others have failed to live up to their ideals. Among them are prospective Tory parliamentary candidate Paul, film critic Holly and married couple Rob and Ali, spin doctors for a search engine company.
So the scene is set for a near-continuous stream of barbed chat, sporadically punctuated by action scenes set in the quarry. As always with Banks, the dialogue is a sheer delight, whether it be baleful drink-and-drug fuelled reminiscence or bickering oneupmanship. (Holly to Paul: “decent people in the Tory Party … they’re like bits of sweet corn in a turd.”)
It is the central characterizations that give the novel its power. Kit is a pedantically reliable narrator, being afflicted with an Asperger-like condition that makes it hard for him to understand the concept of lying.
But Banks’s masterstroke is the creation of the monstrously selfish Guy, who, enfeebled by cancer, tells his son that he regrets the time he wasted bringing him up. Of course he is in a pitiable condition and there are many passages in which Banks gives expression to the hatred that so many feel toward cancer, with rare eloquence:
But cancer is never presented as an excuse for Guy’s behaviour. Just as Banks’s qualities of bravery and kindliness were magnified by the ordeal he suffered, so the more we learn about Guy, the clearer it is that his illness has exacerbated a lifelong tendency toward gittishness, a determination to live life as “his own tribute band.”
Despite his cruelty, most readers will adore Guy. It helps that his expletivefilled jeremiads comprise some of the funniest writing Banks has ever produced (on being told to tackle his illness with positive thinking: “You might as well walk into a burning building and try to put out the fire through the medium of modern dance.”)
But then for 29 years, starting with the possibly homicidal Frank in The Wasp Factory, Banks has made it his business to inspire sympathy for monsters. He wants us to view characters that might be described as human blots on the landscape in the same way that he wants us to look at quarries: to consider that they are worth thinking about and might even contain something beautiful.
It may be this element of compassion that accounts for why so many readers are now experiencing a keen grief for the loss of a writer who has the rare gift of being infallibly entertaining.