The Steep Approach To Garbadale - Iain Banks

As any fan of Iain Banks will probably have already gathered from the synopsis, there’s not a great deal new in The Steep Approach To Garbadale. It’s another family saga in the style of The Crow Road - one with hidden secrets, black sheep, unexplained deaths and illicit affairs that are left unspoken and buried in the past. Mixed in with this - since the family in question are the Wopulds whose family business has expanded from the ‘Risk’-like board game ‘Empire!’ to computer game derivations – you get some mild satire of the corporate affairs of The Business.

Alas, although neither The Crow Road nor The Business are the heights of Banks’ output (not even of the non-M variety), if this new novel had even had a fraction of their limited wit and imagination, it wouldn’t be the slog it is. The plot is pedestrian stuff that is centred around the gathering of the Wopuld family at the ancestral home at Garbadale to consider an offer of a buy-out from an American firm, where Alban hopes he will meet his cousin Sophie again – a childhood romance forbidden by his relatives who have kept them apart in the intervening years. This hasn’t prevented Alban carrying a torch for her, endlessly, mushily and tediously in flashback throughout the entire length of the novel.

There are a few wonderful flashes of Banks humour and harmless satire (albeit as toothless as Dead Air) – in the American version of ‘Empire!’, the map is reconfigured to show the USA at the centre and it is renamed ‘Liberty!’. More often and out of the blue however, he goes overboard into loony rant mode on American foreign policy which, directed as it is at an American company executive at a business meeting, is more than a little pointless and misguided. One wishes however that Banks could find a more appropriate novelistic situation for this understandable ire (and Dead Air wasn’t it either), as properly targeted it would be much relevant than this cosy substandard soap-opera nonsense he is currently writing.

The Steep Approach To Garbadale is mostly made up of Alban’s moping over Sophie, a lot of dull family chatter at dinner tables, weak jokes and a “scandal” involving illicit family liaisons whose revelations are so predictable and well-signposted that they will come as no surprise to any reader who makes it through to the rather botched ending. The sad decline continues...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Protos Experiment - Simon Clark

Image
Despite having limited experience in the field of cinema, Simon Clark's idea for The Protos Experiment seemed a natural for it to be developed as a film script. That ambition has come to fruition with the movie directed by Laurence and Brian Avenet-Bradley premiering at Cannes this year. Although not yet on general release, Clark's own novelisation appears to retain much of that cinematic quality, but also some novelistic originality and ambition. Ironically, for something that has such a strong visual presence, the novel opens with a scene in a room of near complete darkness where, after convincing himself that he is not dead and opening his eyes, a man discovers that he is in some kind of chamber divided by plastic sheets (always a worrying sign) where a number of other people who can't see each other are chained up. John discovers that he himself is chained to a deranged monster of a man who is going to kill them all. It's a bold and compelling way to start the nove...
Read more

Blood Crazy: Aten Present (Blood Crazy: Book 3) - Simon Clark

Image
In the spirit of Nick Aten, the protagonist from the first Blood Crazy book who is back again for the third (and final?) installment of the series and isn't afraid to make a pun, mix a metaphor or state the obvious, Blood Crazy: Aten Present starts out in an explosive fashion as Nick meets up with Jack Ranzic from Book Two: Aten in Absentia . It's an appropriate way for the leads of the first two books to meet up and Nick's forthrightness and down-to-earth qualities are appreciated, but otherwise neither of the two young survivors of the crisis that has overwhelmed the planet are in a better place by the time they unite in the third book in the series. Well, the Creosotes weren't going to disappear overnight, were they? Creosotes is the name that the groups of young survivors have given to adults over age of 19 who three years ago all turned overnight into shambling bloodthirsty monsters. It's a constant struggle for survival and despite some theories about the na...
Read more

Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia (Blood Crazy: Book 2) - Simon Clark

Image
At the end of Blood Crazy we were left with the grim acceptance that the situation the world had been plunged into was irresolvable. With the adult population having been altered in a way that would drive them to tear their own children apart, everything had changed and the world wasn't ever going back to the way it was. Without giving away any spoilers, while some interesting theories were proposed to explain what had happened to trigger this apocalyptic situation overnight, it still meant that it would be up to small communities of survivors to rebuild society and find a way of defending themselves from the ever present threat of the “Creosotes”. That doesn't mean that there aren't more stories to tell and new revelations to be told, but it has taken almost 30 years for Simon Clark to get a sequel in print. It's a long time for some fans of the original novel (recently republished by Darkness Visible), but by the end of Blood Crazy: Aten in Absentia , I'm sure fa...
Read more