The Business
Posted 1 July 09 by Scott AndrewsI just made a passing reference to Celia Johnson in an email and got sucked in to twenty minutes of wiki browsing.
Did you know Celia Johnson married Peter Fleming, Ian Fleming’s travel writing bro (who by total co-incidence I wikid the other day, and whose books sound like an absolute hoot) and their daughter is Lucy Fleming, of Survivors, who’s married to Chunky Gilmore from Remembrance of the Daleks?
God, the net just sucks time, doesn’t it?!
Also: every wiki browse ultimately leads to Doctor Who. It’s a fact, honest.
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Picked up a book the other day and started reading. Long time since I did that. It was strange to rediscover it, almost, and remind myself why, until relatively recently, I read at minimum a book a week every week. Reading’s fun, isn’t it?
In all the rush to write I’d forgotten to read. Bad Scott.
William Gibson doesn’t read fiction at all any more, finds it interferes with his muse. But may I be presumptious and suggest his lack of reading may explain why he produces so few books? I found reading again was a huge relief and an inspiration to get to work.
Anyway, the book in question was Iain Banks’ The Business. I first read it five or six years ago in a single afternoon and was wholly underwhelmed by the experience. But Simon Guerrier urged me to give it a second chance and told me to read it as a prequel to the Culture books, whereupon it makes much more sense.
And do you know, he’s right. It’s a bloody Culture book in disguise. Or at least, it takes as its premise – how could something like the Culture come about, and what kind of choices and moral framework could inspire it?
It lacks the grand guignol of his more gruesome tales, the broad comedy of Espedair Street, or the emotional power of The Crow Road. It’s a minor Banks. But it’s still a damn good read, with a likeable and well realised central character, a few of Banks’ trademark eccentrics, some interesting ideas well explored, and moments that made me smile or think.
The thriller plot is underused – too tenuous to follow initially, and then too poorly explained at the end. I’d have made more of that, it could have given the book a sense of urgency which it would have benefitted from greatly.
But Banks is a safe pair of hands, and even a less than stellar performance from him is well worth the time.
Coming after Song of Stone – the only Banks book I genuinely dislike – I felt at the time that maybe his powers were beginning to wane. But then he followed The Business with Dead Air, which Simon dislikes, thinking it too ranty.
For me, however, Dead Air was a breath of fresh air, and Banks’ rediscovery of his fury and moral outrage reinvigorated his writing in all sorts of fun ways. Dead Air is focused and pacey, laugh out loud funny and genuinely gripping. You can tell that he wrote it in a single frantic rush, carried away by the story and his passion for it, unlike its more measured, considered and slightly bloodless predecessor.
Plus, it has an entire chapter that consists solely of ‘Oh, shit.’ Which is a perverse form of genius.
I’ve now dived into his latest non-sci-fi tome, The Steep Approach To Garbadale. Two chapters in and it’s brilliantly written, shifting viewpoints and time frames with a practiced, masterful ease that’s deeply enviable, and drawing the reader into a story that so far feels perhaps a tad too reminiscent of The Crow Road, but which I’m sure will prove to be more than a retread of past glories.
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All this to distract from blogging about a really exciting commission I got yesterday, which I’m dying to shout about, but can’t. Soon though :-)
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