Post by Bartwald on Mar 29, 2004 2:11:35 GMT -5
Iain Banks [shadow=red,left,300]Walking On Glass[/shadow] (1985) *
I've got a serious problem with Iain Banks - each book of his I read is worse than the previous one. This begins to discourage me, to be honest.
And it all started so promisingly with the Kafka-esque, mind-crunching novel The Bridge. Then I decided to check out Banks' more s-f side and read The Use of Weapons; well, it had some good and original ideas, plus it was quite funny, but if someone labelled it as 'a bit boring' I would not fight too fiercely in its defence. Here, in Walking On Glass - my third attempt at deciding if Banks really is an undiscovered genius - he seems to make all the wrong steps and this 'boring' label gets hugely enlarged with the lettering changed to bright red.
What is wrong with this book? Well, we've got three 'linked' stories in it and none of them is close to 'gripping':
1. A story of a young man falling in love with a young woman (now, don't knock it down so fast - this one's the most interesting of all three, even if it really is a bit banal; has a twist at the end but it's still nothing as shockingly surprising as we'd like it to).
2. A story of two old people locked somewhere and playing some illogical and seemingly endless games - like Spotless Dominoes (a 'philosophical' part of the book, this; questions - Will they find a way to finish their games successfully? Will they manage to answer the, uhh, Ultimate Question? Will they, please, finally die?!).
3. A middle-aged guy is suspicious about the people around him (yeah, I know it sounds like a lot of fun - so, he's like a guy cut out of a Philip K. thingy's novel who thinks that everyone's invigilating him and who has some ideas about a sort of a Great Conspiracy, but since he's not able to talk to us about all these things, we just can't start caring about his problems).
A reader's task is to look for a link between these three stories but... if you don't care about the characters, you don't care about the link either, do you? And as for me... I'll probably try to read Banks' one more novel - Wasp Factory - and if it doesn't work for me I'll give up. A fair deal, isn't it?
I've got a serious problem with Iain Banks - each book of his I read is worse than the previous one. This begins to discourage me, to be honest.
And it all started so promisingly with the Kafka-esque, mind-crunching novel The Bridge. Then I decided to check out Banks' more s-f side and read The Use of Weapons; well, it had some good and original ideas, plus it was quite funny, but if someone labelled it as 'a bit boring' I would not fight too fiercely in its defence. Here, in Walking On Glass - my third attempt at deciding if Banks really is an undiscovered genius - he seems to make all the wrong steps and this 'boring' label gets hugely enlarged with the lettering changed to bright red.
What is wrong with this book? Well, we've got three 'linked' stories in it and none of them is close to 'gripping':
1. A story of a young man falling in love with a young woman (now, don't knock it down so fast - this one's the most interesting of all three, even if it really is a bit banal; has a twist at the end but it's still nothing as shockingly surprising as we'd like it to).
2. A story of two old people locked somewhere and playing some illogical and seemingly endless games - like Spotless Dominoes (a 'philosophical' part of the book, this; questions - Will they find a way to finish their games successfully? Will they manage to answer the, uhh, Ultimate Question? Will they, please, finally die?!).
3. A middle-aged guy is suspicious about the people around him (yeah, I know it sounds like a lot of fun - so, he's like a guy cut out of a Philip K. thingy's novel who thinks that everyone's invigilating him and who has some ideas about a sort of a Great Conspiracy, but since he's not able to talk to us about all these things, we just can't start caring about his problems).
A reader's task is to look for a link between these three stories but... if you don't care about the characters, you don't care about the link either, do you? And as for me... I'll probably try to read Banks' one more novel - Wasp Factory - and if it doesn't work for me I'll give up. A fair deal, isn't it?
