The Quarry by Iain Banks

review by Maryom

Kit is an autistic teenager brought up solely by his father Guy, never knowing who his mother is. Till now they've managed ok living in the old house by the quarry where Guy spent his student years, but time is running out for Guy who is dying of cancer. With this in mind, all Guy's oldest, closest friends from student days have been invited along for the weekend for one last get-together before his time runs out.  His friends though have something else on their minds - a video tape, one of several that were made back when they were film and media students, but one which could prove to be extremely embarrassing if made public. So between the drinking, political arguments and bitchy reveals about who slept with whom, they search, either secretly or as a group, for it.

I've taken a while to get round to reading this last novel by Iain Banks but spotting it on a library shelf I decided it was time to go for it. As I'd half expected from other reviews it isn't his greatest work (for me that will always be The Crow Road) but it feels much more personal. It's difficult not to believe that many of Guy's harangues against life, death and everything in between aren't Banks' own.

It reads well, as you'd expect, and unfolding events pull you in nicely. The whole 'scattered friends meet up for the weekend' concept feels a little bit like an Alan Ayckbourn farce meets Agatha Christie so you're not sure whether to expect laughs or murder - and with Banks it could be either. Sitting on the sidelines, distanced by his age and autism, Kit closely observes events without necessarily catching the undercurrents.  and he's always on the lookout for clues about his mother's identity. There's lots of threads to be unravelled and it was only afterwards that I thought the plot seemed a little thin. For any other writer I'd probably have said it was great, but it's not Iain Banks at his brilliant, mind-blowing best.   

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Abacus
Genre - adult fiction

Other reviews; Women's Prize for Fiction Book Reviews

Stonemouth by Iain Banks

review by Maryom

Stonemouth is a seaside town in the North-east of Scotland with a long sandy beach stretching into the distance, a suspension bridge from which a high number of people fall - or are pushed - and two rather kindly paternalistic mafia-style families in charge.

5 years ago, Stewart Gilmour made a mistake and managed to so offend the Murston family that he had to leave town - in a very speedy, very undignified manner. Now he's been allowed back to attend the funeral of  Joe Murston, but with younger angrier family members around still looking for revenge, Stewart doesn't feel too sure about his own long-term health. Could returning be an even bigger mistake?

Stonemouth is one of Iain Banks' more straightforward stories, told solely from Stewart's point of view with flashbacks to his childhood and teen years - there's none of the alternative personalities or multiple narrators of some of his more complex novels. After years of running away, Stewart needs to face the scene of his crime and the people he offended. The reader is teased along with gradual revelations of the relationship between Stewart and Ellie, the girl he's always loved - with a big build up to why he had to leave in such a hurry. On a first read this should come as a big surprise BUT Iain Banks himself gave it away - well almost. A while ago he came to our almost-local Waterstones as part of the promotion tour for Stonemouth, which is where and when I bought my book, a signed copy!! Anyway, as part of the evening he read an extract from the book and immediately upon getting home I tracked  it down in the book and re-read it.... and a page or two extra - this was the big scene that everything was building up to!! Ok there are more twists and turns to the plot after that but I really shouldn't have read this section first.

It's not as great or as complex as The Crow Road or The Bridge, which are my personal Banks' favourites, and not as convoluted as the last I read, Transition, but it's an entertaining fast-paced read of love, betrayal and revenge. An excellent introduction to Iain Banks if for some mysterious reason you haven't discovered him yet.

Another read to include in Subtle Melodrama's Scottish Summer Reading Challenge.

Maryom's review - 4 stars
Publisher - Little, Brown
Genre - adult fiction

 Buy Stonemouth from Amazon

Iain Banks Reading from Stonemouth

By The Mole

When we heard that Iain Banks was coming to Nottingham Waterstones we decided we would go. I duly phoned for tickets and they had just 2 left. Big Sad Face - we wanted 3 so I wimped and pouted and bought the 2 and she took my phone number and said she would speak to the events manager.

Next day my phone rang - it doesn't do a lot of that and it was a number I didn't recognise. It was the events manager! He explained that he had set a maximum but was sure he could squeeze one more in so everyone was happy. The alternative might have been to camp outside on the windowsill with my ear to the window! A big Thank You to Waterstones.

Iain said he would start the evening by reading from the beginning of Stonemouth explaining, in a very amusing way, the benefit of starting from the beginning - he then started reading from page 196!. I am not the 'first' fan of Iain Banks in our house with that honour going to Maryom (she named 'The Crow Road" as her Top Scottish read when asked by The City of Edinburgh) but none the less I determined that this is one book I intend to read. I have read The Crow Road and The Bridge (hasn't everyone?) and thoroughly enjoyed them. It always has been my intention to read some more of them and last night re-awoke that for me.

The questions were the kind that he must have been asked a thousand times before "Which book is your favourite?", "Why do you write the two different styles, 'mainstream' and 'sci-fi'?", "Which is your least favourite?", "How and when do you write?" but his answers felt new and just for us. The humour was consistently there and although there was a little swearing it was in context and he explained that there was only one book he had written without swearing in (to please his Mum) and it wasn't his biggest seller. We had taken our 14 year old and I'm sure she hears worse in breaks at school.

Afterwards there was the inevitable book signing and I left Maryom three quarters of the way round the room (almost three quarters of the way down the queue! - Yes the queue went round all four walls) and I went to buy a copy of Stonemouth. While at the till I also managed to get one of the World Book Nights copies of The Player of Games. Maryom  took along her Iain Banks books and he kindly signed them all - including the WBN copy!

Favourite Scottish Reads - as seen on Twitter

A brief post provoked by a question from @EdinCityofLit on Twitter earlier this week about favourite Scottish reads. Now, on Twitter you've got about 10 seconds to think of something clever or amusing, or even preferably both, to say. So briefly hunting round my brain I picked

The Crow Road by Iain Banks
All Fun and Games until Somebody Loses an Eye by Christopher Brookmyre
Bloodstone by Gillian Philip

and then watched as everyone else came up with more sensible ideas - Kate Atkinson's Case Histories series, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, anything by Alexander McCall Smith....

Anyway, I thought I'd defend myself .....

The Crow Road - yes, it opens with an attention grabbing sentence about the narrator's grandmother exploding but what makes this book stand out for me is the almost fictional landscape that Iain Banks creates. Some authors set their books in places recognisable to their readers; some create a totally imaginary setting: in The Crow Road the two meet. Many of the places are real and the fictional ones wrap round, under and over them (mirroring the relationship between life and fiction). Go to Crinan (a place I knew before reading the book) and you can visualise where Gallanach must be - you can imagine a viaduct crossing Loch Fyne at Minard - and heading back towards Glasgow, you'll drive carefully in case that fatal litter bin is still there! Stand at Crinanferry and you can visualise an alternative world where Upper Loch Crinan is a deep water port rather than mud-flats barely covered at high tide, where a bustling town with docks and glass works grew up on its banks, maybe peopled by folk just like Prentice McHoan and his exploding grandma!
People often ask about novels that have impacted on readers lives and in an immensely trivial way this has - every time we drive on the motorway, I encourage my husband to try Ashley's trick of crossing from one lane to the next without hitting the cat's eyes!



All Fun And Games Until Somebody Loses An Eye - an action-packed comic escapade that I happened when talking about it recently to liken to Charlie's Angels. So why put it up there in favourite reads? Because of the heroine, Jane Fleming - who's led a life of dull propriety until she suddenly finds herself plunged into a world of fast cars, designer clothing and international espionage worthy of a Bond girl. But Jane is no young bimbo - she's a 46 yr old granny! After years trapped in dull routine, she has the chance to break out of the mould her family have cast her in, to live the life she always wanted and prove that age is no barrier to having fun!





Bloodstone - cheating a bit to include this as it's not published till August. I've recently read a proof copy and found some of its passages the most harrowing I've ever read. Gillian Philip is not an author to let her characters, or her reader, off lightly and there's no pulling of punches when it comes to making them suffer. When you think the characters have all the emotional and physical turmoil they can stand - there's more to come! I'm not a person to sob my way through any sad parts and tear-jerkers don't normally work on me, but at a certain point while reading, I called a temporary halt - put the book in the freezer for a while, as Joey from Friends does - because it didn't seem right and proper to carry on without a pause, so much was I involved with the characters, their pain and grief.


So, there we go, my favourite three Scottish reads - certainly the three that sprang to mind quickest.

What would you pick?





This originally appeared on Maryom's personal blog 19/07/11

Transition by Iain Banks * * * *

Imagine a million Earths existing in different dimensions and a team of specially trained assassins who flit from one unsuspecting body to another between these Earths. This is the background to Transition, as the organisation behind this team seek to change all the worlds to their ideal and one specially gifted man tries to stop them.
A complex interwoven plot told by a variety of characters at different times and locations across the multiverse. Iain Banks has written this kind of novel before, although in simpler form with fewer narrators - The Bridge and Walking on Glass - this one is rather more convoluted. It was rather hard to keep track of events and timelines on a first reading which is why, for now, I've only given it 4 stars. I think it will improve with rereading as the way in which the various narratives relate to each other becomes clearer.