Link to a review on my personal website. ( )

A book about resistance to change. It starts with everything stuck: the Wopulds still owners of the family board-game business as they have been for a century, Alban still obsessed with his childhood love for his cousin Sophie, still stuck in self-destructive rebellion, and his mother's suicide when he was two years old still a mystery.

As the book progresses, things slowly begin to change, even though most of the characters fight to keep things the way they are. An American company bids to take over the company, and Alban makes discoveries about his mother. The clues to the resolution of the family issues were, for me, a little too obvious, so that about halfway through I guessed more or less what would happen. But still the ending was well handled and satisfying.

In any case, don't want to give away the resolution of these issues, but the way Iain Banks resolves the more political side is interesting and can be described without giving away too much. Alban has rejected his family and everything they stand for (the board game they're famous for is called "Empire!" and they've partly sold out already to the US company, which Alban associates with US policies of war, extreme capitalism and globalisation). He "cuts off his nose to spite his face" - he is homeless in a Perth council estate, having worked as a forester where he cut off his own finger (accidentally) with a chainsaw. At the end he goes on a walk near Garbadale and, while on the mountaintop, realises that "Some hopes and ambitions were mainfest only as a direction, not as a destination. Maybe the trick was to realise you were involved in a process, not aiming at a completely achievable end result, and accept that, but travel hopefully anyway."

The narrative jumps around abruptly between times and places, progressing in the "present" while also weaving in episodes from Alban's childhood and early adulthood. There's usually no pretence of a reason for the flashback, such as a character remembering - it's just done abruptly, like a cinematic jump cut. Mostly it works, although a couple of times the tenses seem confused - can't find the examples now, of course!

I particularly liked that although most of the story is told from Alban's point of view, he is described at first from the outside, first from his cousin Fielding's perspective, then from that of Tango, the man he is staying with in Perth. It immediately creates the sense of Alban as a slightly mysterious, unknowable character, and this feeling persists through the rest of the book, even as we are told much more about him and given access to his thoughts. It's a clever device, and the book is full of similar effects. If the clues to the ending had been a little less heavy-handed, this would have been an excellent book. ( )

I did feel that this wasn't up to the standard of The Crow Road or Espedair Street but once I got past the first few chapters I started to enjoy it. Iain Banks does the dysfunctional family plot very well, if several times already, and once again he produced a good page turning novel. ( )

That it's not as bad as 'Dead Air', is about the best that can be said of this work. Where, oh where is the Banks that wrote the original 'The Bridge', 'Whit', 'Canal Dreams' and 'The Wasp Factory'.
This rehash of 'The Crow' Road and 'The Business': the tale of an extensive and eccentric Scottish family told from the point of view of a partially disgraced and wayward younger clan-member in love with his cousin. The cousin, this time called Sophie, is the exact same character as the cousin called Verity in 'The Crow Road'. Yawn. Like 'Dead Air's' 9/11 beginning, the novel makes a poor attempt at being current by involving current event, in this case the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami. Yawn x10. ( )

Well, it's not as bad as the teeth-gnashingly bad Dead Air, but a long way below his best work. One Amazon review even retitled it The Steep Decline Towards Garbage. It revisits a lot of old ground: extensive and eccentric Scottish family ruled by a patriarch (as in both Whit and Complicity), and the growing pains of the usual young male protagonist, torn between two loves (also features in Complicity), what seems now to be an obligatory anti-American rant, as in Dead Air (though it is perfectly in character for Alban). Here the protagonist, Alban, is almost thirty, yet he's still mooning over his long-lost cousin Sophie, with whom he had a brief fling aged 15 and has barely seen since. I ended up thinking that it is really time Iain Banks grew up; how old is he now anyway? Maybe the whole thing is supposed to be a reflection on the special relationship between the US and the UK, cousins drifting apart, but if so it isn't very profound.

It has that now trendy structure where the story constantly jumps back and forth in time and you are never sure how each bit relates to the rest. That worked in The House at Riverton, but it doesn't work here; it just seems like a gimmick to mask the absence of plot or suspense. You can see the shock revelation coming miles away. Some passages, including the final chapter, are narrated by an extremely minor character in a rather irritating Scots accent, with greengrocer's apostrophes galore -- why??

The ending is a damp squib, as if Banks just got tired of writing and decided it was long enough already (it could indeed have been cut by 100 pages or so). There is some good writing in places, notably describing two suicides, as always there are some laughs too, and I did finish it. But I was disappointed Banks didn't make more of Alban's girlfriend Verushka, a really strong female character who just disappears from the story until the very end. Nothing I've read has matched up to Whit -- still my favourite. ( )