The City at the End of Things

Walking on Glass by Iain Banks (1985): Banks' second quasi-mainstream novel (as opposed to his science-fiction novels as Iain M. Banks) follows three seemingly, initially unconnected narratives through to their conclusive collision.

Or maybe not entirely a collision, because while two of the narratives herein are set in 1983 England, the third is set in some weird, distant future. The possibility exists that this third existence has been imagined by one of the protagonists of the other two narratives, but nothing is clear. The third narrative may simply be the fictional conclusion of the imaginative journey of the second narrative's protagonist. Or not. Elements of surrealism and absurdism occur throughout the third narrative; the other two narratives seem to be relatively straightforward realism.

In any case, Walking on Glass does a fine job of depicting time, place, and various states of mind. While the protagonist of the first narrative finds himself pining for a platonic love, the second protagonist appears to be a paranoid schizophrenic caught within his own self-created delusions of persecution and otherness.

In the third narrative, warriors from opposite sides of some cosmic battle find themselves imprisoned in a Kafkaesque castle until such time as they can correctly answer the question, "What happens when an irresistable force meets an immovable object?"

But to earn the right to answer the question once, they must successfully play and complete a game for which they have no rules: one-dimensional chess and invisible dominoes being two such games that we see, with the successful completion of each allowing for one answer. Should the answer prove wrong, they must start again at a new game. Rinse. Repeat.

While assorted postmodern games abound within the narrative and its metafictional tropes as well, the plights of the various characters are nonetheless compelling and even tragic. One thing that a awful lot of critics seem to have completely missed is the basic importance of the last name of the middle protagonist, Grout.

Like grout, his story binds -- in this case, it binds the other two narratives together; they meet only through his story. Make of that, and an assortment of other peculiarities and oddities, what you will. The last fifty pages or so are quite harrowing, for all the game-playing that has gone on before, and for all the revelations of other games that will come before the end. Highly recommended.

Scottish McBoogerballs

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks (1984): Prolific Banks's first published novel is a doozy -- a first-person narrative with an obsessive-compulsive, sociopathic 16-year-old Scot as the narrator. Our narrator Frank lives with his dotty, obsessive-compulsive father on a small island connected by a landbridge to the nearby mainland. He doesn't go to school and, indeed, believes that he doesn't legally exist as his father has told him that no record of his birth was ever filed with the government.

Frank enjoys making explosives, killing animals, making fetishes out of the dead bodies of animals, building dams, getting drunk with a friendly dwarf and, oh, killing relatives -- three of them, to be exact, from when he was six to when he was about ten. He's a barrel of laughs, our Frank, though his somewhat demented consciousness can sometimes make a reader doubt the veracity of, well, everything in the novel -- the means of Frank's murders are so odd and so baroque and, in one case, so reliant on chance that one really does wonder just how reliable a narrator Frank really is.

Oh, and Frank's external genitalia were torn off in a violent childhood incident. Truly this was the feel-good novel of 1984.

Frank and his father await the return of Frank's institutionalized older brother, who went mad years ago and now, having escaped the institution, is moving inexorably towards home, leaving a trail of fires and dead, partially devoured dogs along the way. Frank consults the oracular rituals that he himself has invented (including the eponymous device, which we don't actually see in operation until very late in the novel), sets up defenses both psychic and real, and repeatedly tries to gain entrance to his father's locked office, in which he believes the answers to all the mysteries of his life reside.

Banks's troubled yet oddly sympathetic teenaged narrator evokes similar highly intelligent, ultra-violent narrators, perhaps most notably John Gardner's Grendel in Grendel and Anthony Burgess's Alex in A Clockwork Orange (though 'Frank' could also be an homage to the equally screwed-up, equally high-intelligence creation of Victor Frankenstein, the original first-person narrative of misanthropic creations and creators).

The violence and graphic horror are shocking, enough so that I ended up musing that this is the novel the kids of South Park thought they'd be getting when they were instead handed the "shocking and controversial" A Catcher in the Rye, which subsequently bored the kids so much that they concocted their own shocking novel, The Tale of Scrotty McBoogerballs. Highly recommended, but certainly not for the squeamish.