Garbadale
Posted 6 July 09 by Scott AndrewsFinished The Steep Approach To Garbadale yesterday. Hard to disagree with most of my colleague Mr Guerrier’s review except in one respect.
I’ve mentioned how Si dislikes Dead Air for its perceived rantiness, and in Garbadale he takes Banks to task for “glib bits of politics that come not from the mouths of the characters but feel like the author ranting”.
He then quotes one of my fave passages from the book and laments its inclusion.
He’s not wrong – the authorial voice does break through sometimes but, unlike Simon, I like it when that happens. I don’t necessarily always want an author to retain a cool distance from his work.
Those of Banks’ books where he does most explicitly so – Inversions springs to mind, as does Look To Windward – seem to me to be his most unsatisfying, bloodless tomes. I want a bit of perhaps ill considered passion to seep through in the writing, it reminds me I’m reading a piece of work by a person of strong principles.
“In fact, some of Banks’s best work is where he tells a story from a point of view he doesn’t agree with,” adds Si, and he’s right. But even then the very act of forcing himself to write from an opposing viewpoint is revealing of Banks’ feelings.
It’s those books where he just relates the facts and doesn’t either strongly agree or disagree with his protaganist that he seems to me to be most detached and unengaging – which brings us back to Inversions and Windward and, even The Business to an extent.
Anyway, Garbadale doesn’t see Banks breaking new ground – far from it – but it’s touching, clever and heartfelt, at one point so brilliantly funny I laughed out loud on the train, and written with such seemingly effortless facility that it marks a highpoint for Banks’ literary technique if nothing else.
Canal Dreams nestles in my bag now. I’ve not read it in over a decade and remember being underwhelmed by it. I seem to recall it’s basically Die Hard with a cellist on a cruise liner. But that can’t be right, can it?
I toyed with Kavalier and Clay this morning; it’s hugeness put me off somewhat, but its day will come.
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Took a break to listen to the first of the three new Torchwood Radio 4 plays on the way in this morning. Asylum is a bizarre fusion – neither wholly Torchwood or wholly Radio 4 afternoon play.
Radio 4 listeners are accustomed to troubled young women internally narrating their struggles with racism, prejudice and abuse at 2:15 on weekday afternoons – but quite how that fits with Torchwood’s mission statement to be brash, shooty and priapic is unclear.
It lacked the big twist that would have made it work as sci-fi, but it was by no means bad or ill-conceived, just a bit underwhelming. The performances were spot on though, and it was nice to hear more of PC Andy.
Oh, and the person who read the end credits had such melifluous tones… who could the silk-voiced charmer be!?!?
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