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8 July 2013

Iain Banks’s clear-eyed unsentimentality is the reason I feel duty-bound to say The Quarry is a stinker

The Quarry comes across as something of a "greatest hits" - I wanted, desperately, for the book to be a final majestic flourish - his rightly deserved swan song. But it isn't. It's a stinker.

By Helen Lewis

The Quarry
Iain Banks
Little Brown, 336pp, £18.99

I come to bury Iain Banks, not to praise him. I wanted, desperately, to like The Quarry, hoped it would be a final majestic flourish to a career that encompassed both space operas and cosy domestic dramas – but it isn’t. Without his name on the cover, it would barely be read at all.

Banks was diagnosed in April with terminal cancer and he died on 9 June, days before The Quarry was released. It is his 29th book – he wrote 14 science-fiction volumes (as Iain M Banks) and 14 literary ones – and probably his worst, although I can muster little enthusiasm for 2002’s Dead Air or 2007’s The Steep Approach to Garbadale (I didn’t even attempt 2012’s Stonemouth). The cover blurb promises “a virtuoso performance whose soaring riffs on the inexhaustible marvel of human perception . . . will stand among Iain Banks’s greatest work”. The cover blurb is lying.

Most gallingly, there is probably a good book inside The Quarry trying to get out. The damp, bleak, setting and the motif of death in the family echoes The Crow Road, the best of Banks’s non-supernatural output, while the naive teenage protagonist, Kit, reminds one of The Wasp Factory’s tortured Frank Cauldhame. Mix in the hatred of religion found in Whit, the hatred of capitalism found in The Business, add a dash of the computer-game references of Complicity, and this had the potential to build triumphantly on themes Banks had explored before. (The puns and word games of previous books can sometimes feel a little forced here, though: at one point, a character says “ate viola”, instead of “et voilà”. I know the person is supposed to be a hideous yuppy but come on, no one’s that much of a monster.)

The Quarry feels like nothing so much as a “greatest hits” and the borrowings don’t just come from the Banks back catalogue: the whole plot seems strangely reminiscent of the film Peter’s Friends. A group who studied together at Bewford University two decades earlier are reunited in a crumbling house, in constant jeopardy of falling down because of the explosions from the quarry next door.

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They want to find a videotape they made together back then, which threatens to ruin their futures if it gets out. Alison, who now works for Google, angrily impresses the importance of this task on Kit by taking side swipes at some of the other house guests: “Look, Kit . . . I’m not running a couple of homes for pensioners stinking of urine, I’m not writing about films nobody watches in magazines nobody reads; I’m on course to have the kind of power that can buy and sell the sort of politician Paul dreams of being.”

At this point, Banks might as well have thrown in a thunderclap and a maniacal laugh. What is Alison’s plan to control the puny minds of the world’s sheeple? Sit in a hollowed-out volcano and fiddle with the search algorithm to make Justin Bieber videos marginally harder to find?

There are also problems with the narrator. We are given to understand that Kit is somewhere on the autistic spectrum by his repeated digressions on how many steps it takes to circumnavigate the garden, or the spectacle of him reciting a piece of film criticism from 20 years ago that he can remember word for word. Kit acknowledges that other people can find him irritating: unfortunately, I did, too.

The book’s dark heart is Kit’s dying father, Guy. It’s curious to think that Banks started The Quarry before his cancer diagnosis, because Guy’s rage and pain are only too believable, as is the honest – but rarely spoken – observation that living with a dying person can be as upsetting and stressful as mourning their death.

Having only months to live doesn’t transform a person into a white-robed, beatific angel, it just makes everyone else feel guilty for noticing their flaws.

And Guy has more than a few minor blemishes. He is selfish, leering and bitter: he swears at Kit, calls him useless, and bitches at his son even as he’s wiping his arse for him. “I am waiting for him to die,” writes Kit. “Apart from anything else, my knowing he doesn’t have very much longer to live helps make it easier to ignore the insults and curses and the general unpleasantness that him being in this state leads to.” Guy eventually exits the novel after telling all his friends that they’re failures, and the world is doomed.

That’s the kind of clear-eyed unsentimentality I expect from Iain Banks; and it’s the reason I feel duty-bound to say this book is a stinker. The Banks I admired would never have wanted the sympathy vote.

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