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...

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