Book Review

Have you seen my teeth?

The Business by Iain Banks
Little Brown £16.99, pp393

MATT THORNE

Fans of Iain Banks will need no encouragement to buy his latest novel. Non-believers, however, should know that Banks is on decent form this time round, and that the book is closer in quality to Complicity or The Crow Road rather than the slightly disappointing Whit or Song of Stone.

It has a doozy of an opening, deploying the familiar Banksian technique of destabilising the reader with peculiar violence and stylistic quirks. Mike Daniels wakes up having gone home with a strange woman and discovers that he is missing half his teeth. In a dialogue-driven prologue, he calls up Kathryn Telman, senior executive in The Business, a commercial organisation older than the Christian Church. Her response is taciturn, reminding him of his business meeting in Tokyo the following morning and recommending that he see a dentist before breakfast.

Previous interviews have made much of Banks's politics and it is clear that the jet-setting in this novel is supposed to be taken ironically, but it is enjoyable in a Louise Bagshawe sort of way, loaded with well-written descriptions of conspicuous consumption. It can be hard to write well about extremely rich people, but Banks makes Kathryn Telman's opulent lifestyle sound completely realistic. He is good on technology, especially futuristic weapons and the space-race, and packs in contemporary references to South Park, Catatonia, Pinochet, Garbage and stuff that you only find in the back of computer magazines. It is impressive to find a British writer with such evident range.

But the final third becomes less interesting. Until this point, the voice of Banks's narrator is pitch-perfect. Kathryn, his narrator, is initially convincing, psychologically well-rounded with a compelling set of motivations. Towards the end, her voice slips. The bad puns become more frequent, and even her musical taste begins to blur with that of previous Banks protagonists. He proves himself as a storyteller, drawing together the disparate elements into one central mystery, but loses the ambiguous atmosphere too rapidly. It is at this point that the novel dissolves into mere techno-thriller, instead of the interesting hybrid Banks had maintained before.

The final chapter is the weakest, prefacing the plot's disappointing final twist with the assertion: 'We're all the same species, the same assemblage of cells, with the same unarguable needs for food, water and shelter.’

That's as may be. But judging Banks by the high standards he deserves, this seems a limp conclusion to an otherwise intellectually exhilarating book.

The Guardian