Banks’ swan song of context,
context, context (5/5)
While I’ve been an avid fan of
Banks’ science fiction novels and, having collected and enjoyed all them, I
moved on to his standard fiction—a literary foray into the many cerebral folds
that make a complicated man a complicated author. However, these cross-genre
dalliances have been a mere sampling of a third of his bibliography of fiction:
Wasp Factory (1984), Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge
(1986), The Business (1999), and Dead Air (2002). The recent
passing of Iain Banks sent a tide of sadness through this year’s reading
experience; Jack Vance and Frederik Pohl’s deaths this year didn’t affect me
nearly as much as Iain Banks.
Aside from the new paperback
edition of Hydrogen Sonata (2012), his fiction novels Complicity
(1993) and A Song of Stone (1997) are still to-be-read on my shelves.
Inside flap synopsis:
“Eighteen-year-old Kit is weird: big, strange, odd, socially
disabled, on a spectrum that stretches from ‘highly gifted’ at one end, to
‘nutter’ at the other. At least Kit knows who his father is; he and Guy live
together in a decaying country house on the unstable brink of a vast quarry.
His mother's identity is another matter. Now, though, his father's dying, and
old friends are gathering for one last time.
‘Uncle’ Paul's a media lawyer now; Rob and Ali are upwardly mobile corporate bunnies; pretty, hopeful Pris is a single mother; Haze is still living up to his drug-inspired name twenty years on; and fierce, protective Hol is a gifted if acerbic critic. As young film students they lived at Willoughtree House with Guy, and they've all come back because they want something. Kit, too, has his own ulterior motives. Before his father dies he wants to know who his mother is, and what's on the mysterious tape they're all looking for. But most of all he wants to stop time and keep his father alive.”
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The isolated estate of
Willoughtree House borders a lonely stone quarry. Dilapidated and rickety, the
house sits on land which the quarry wishes to buy in order to expand its
operation, but Guy Hyndersley and his son Kitchener (Kit) still live in the
rather unkempt house. In his late thirties, Guy is slowing dying of cancer yet
remains a bitter man, “somebody with the reputation of a wastrel of legendary
proportions” (138), and even his so-called friends call him a “feckless waster”
(215); bitter about his awkward son, bitter about the attention and
benedictions, bitter about the ramshackle house, he’s mostly bitter about the
way his life is falling apart:
Maybe there’s always been something in Guy’s life
that was falling apart. Until finally, as well as the house and the car and
whatever else, the thing falling apart ended up being himself. Not that cancer
makes you fall apart so much … as add bits on. Cancer makes bits of you grow
that are supposed to have stopped growing … crowding out the bits you need to
keep on living … (128)
Painted with disappoint in nearly
all aspects of his life, the one ledge which Guy clings to is his keen
intelligence, which he unfortunately brandishes with vindictiveness and
degradation. His socially inept son absorbs the frequent squalls of bitterness
directed at him, yet still cares for his father by cooking for him, checking
his medications, and cleaning up after his bowel movements. Staunch of
succumbing to the worst of his ailment, Guy simply feels numb, “yet to break
down, yet to cry properly, yet to feel any terror or impending sense of doom”
(44).
This acceptance of circumstance fails
to penetrate Guy’s veil of hatred for all things progressive as his own body
regresses, a cancer which is “entirely, perfectly personalized … a kind of
unwilled suicide, where, initially at least, one small part of the body has
taken a decision that will lead to the death of the rest. Cancer feels like a
betrayal” (137). Where cancer is a betrayal, friendship stands on firm ground
as his university friends from decades ago come to visit him, but their arrival
is tainted by their personal histories and expectations. Their younger days,
spent in the same house, was a time “full of hope, hash and hormones” (130) and
a time where seven of them forged a friendship which they had thought would
last forever. Even with Guy’s imminent demise, this broken group of petty
iconoclasts, middling has-beens, and coke fiends is not squarely facing this
fading reality of eternal longevity.
Kit feels the occasional tinge of
regret for his father’s pending death, but his detached demeanor is unable to
properly put circumstances into perspective. Holly is one of Guy’s friends who
has taken Kit under her wing so that he can be more socially apt; her
suggestions and criticisms of his verbal, facial, and bodily expressions are
duly noted by Kit, who constantly reminds himself of the littlest social
nuances, such as nodding in acknowledgement, filling gaps in conversation with
“Ah”, and smiling at silence. For the most part, Kit simply stays home and
lives a life of secrecy behind his father’s back.
Not wealthy by any monetary
measure, Guy and Kit live with the bare essentials in their lean-to
multi-storey house. Kit, in his secretive, almost shameful, manner, takes a very
active role in an online game named HeroQuest. Once a mere hobby, his
meticulousness spawned an obsession with note taking which resulted in
something close to perfection in gaming—he has a legendary status among gamers
and takes on challenges unfit for anyone lesser. From his skills, he has earned
thousands of pounds sterling selling virtual goods in HeroSpace. This money is
managed by Holly yet remains secret from Guy, as is Kit’s internet connection
and smartphone.
But there’s one secret being kept
from Kit—the mysterious content of an S-VHS-C camcorder tape. Everyone is at
the Willoughtree House on the long weekend with that mission in mind: find,
watch, and destroy the troubling tape. The seven friends maintain that the
material would be embarrassing to all, but the evasive attitude of the group is
having Kit simply guess that it must be a sex tape, an accusation which they continually
deny. Being the domain of meticulous Kit, they allow Kit to organize a search
party through the house, garage, and outhouses. Given the age and dereliction
of the house, surely the rooms are full of random boxes, stacks of paper,
shelves of miscellany, and drawers of doodads; all bases must be covered so
that the tape can be found.
Imbibing in alcohol as a lesser
vice to their later marijuana and cocaine, the dysfunctional septet relive
their bygone younger years while letting Kit participate, though his social
maturity flounders when exposed to group situations and seemingly intimate
one-on-one circumstances. The hulking shape of the man-boy sits dourly with
knees at chest level, straining to put into context the traffic of
conversation, the mix of facial expression, and the barrage of body language. A
much simpler world awaits him while playing HeroQuest or walking through the
garden.
Beyond the garden’s wall is the
void of the quarry, an ever-growing expanse of waste yet still churning our
tons of rock for commercial use. Like Guy’s internal cancer eating through his
tissue, the void is also a slowly advancing abyss of which there is no return;
as Guy’s cancer will claim his life, so too will the quarry claim the house—Kit
is naively unprepared for both inevitable circumstances.
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Context. If it weren’t for Iain
Banks’ untimely death, The Quarry would not have packed the wallop of
emotion packed into the morbid scenes of Guy’s slow, cancerous demise. Largely,
The Quarry has very little plot direction; the entire novel is set over
the period of three days and doesn’t build much steam toward any purpose. The
span of time, in one sense, does point toward the eventual finding of the
S-VHS-C camcorder tape, but this quest is secondary to the main thrust of the
novel: relationships.
The Quarry isn’t so much a plot-based novel as a character
based foray-cum-sympathetic voyage; the reader should have come for the frisson
of relationship but, admittedly, the reader has come for Iain Banks’ swan song.
Being objective about your favorite author’s last book is too difficult for
this reviewer… so take this into consideration: context plays a huge role when
reading The Quarry. Going beyond the traditional “text with the text” or
“text around the text”, The Quarry’s context lays in the circumstances
surrounding the text; not only is the book relevant to the author’s untimely
fate, the book also reflects life in the year 2013. The pang of timeliness may
bestow a “period piece” denouncement upon the novel, but as the author’s last
novel it seems all too fitting.
The accumulation of tension
doesn’t arise from the ambient plot; rather, the frail Guy drags along an air
of discontent which gathers momentum in the last quarter of the novel. Bitter
as may be and as insincere as he may come across, Guy still maintains a very
human element of regret, though his protracted sense of regret is a tad
depressing; the mental depression is understandable given his morbid physical
state—a transference of morbidity from body to mind. This calls to mind John
Updike’s Toward the End of Time (1991) where a similar cancer-ridden
“anti-protagonist” (Ben Turnbull) faces his death with a similar sense of loath
and regret: “We are herders of our
bodies, which are beasts as dumb and bald and repugnant as cattle” (Updike,
1991, p.51). Both, Bank’s Guy and Updike’s Ben, cherish the capacity and
brilliance of their mind yet lash out in antisocial regret when succumbing to
age, idleness, and sickness.
It’s difficult to
sympathize with embittered Guy (perhaps you’re not supposed to like him). He’s
rarely passionate for anything other than denouncing the government or making
snide remarks aimed at his son. His one element of comfort is the medication he’s
on, a now necessary drug-state as opposed to his once recreational drug
binges… but even when these opiates are failing: “Bit of a buzz off, that
[opiates]. Though it doesn’t feel like a vice when it’s medicinal. Fucking
cancer … Even takes the fun out of opiates” (123). His son measures Guy’s
dosages so he can’t overdose and his friends doubt Guy’s will to live and keep
a watchful eye on his location so he can’t suicide. When Guy does find a minute
to contemplate alone outside the house, his precious time left on Earth is interrupted.
He probably looks forward to the solitude of coma and death.
Compared to Guy’s
acerbic remarks and foul language, his son kit is a blessed saint. Though a bit
dull in terms of emotion and charm, Kit, behind his towering façade and
unresponsive face, is an intellectual coming to terms with his social
inadequacies. Because of his disconnectedness, Kit makes an excellent observer;
from the perfect method for stirring tea,
The trick is to contra-rotate …. count eight rotations
clockwise, then a brief pause, the seven the other way …. There’s less
undissolved sugar to stir into the tea by now …. Then you can do surface
stirring …. That’s when you’ve put too much milk in your tea and there’s hardly
room even to put the teaspoon in … you need to blow across to one side … to get
a bit of circulation going. (184-186),
to the nebulousness of
saying “okay”,
[W]e all have our own definitions what ‘okay’ means,
and we each might have several different definitions, depending on context.
Which allows a lot of room for ambiguity and even misunderstanding. I sort of
disapprove of such terminological inexactitude and laxity, but … this sort of
leeway is exactly what people are looking for, especially in a situation where
they hope to be reassured. (244),
Kit attempts to make
sense of a world that isn’t aware of itself. He prefers clear, cut and dry
situations in which language doesn’t use parisology or polysemy; a single word
for a single object, a concise part of speech which dictates, without runaround
or vagueness, exactly what it is trying to convey. The flexibility of language
stymies Kit’s attempts at integrating himself in social circles, be it at his
old school or with his father’s friends. Due to the circumstances, however, Kit
is forced to confront his social awkwardness while the six friends stay at the Willoughtree House. This taxes his inexperience of
applying his fine sense of observation and recollection; for the most part he
simply observes, being unable to juggle the salvos of dialogue or the erratic
undulations of facial expressions—it’s his nature to read into all of this.
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Without the context of Iain Banks’
own death, this novel would have simply been a funny and acerbic three-star
read; however, the accidental and circumstantial context of Guy’s cancer and
Iain’s cancer is too large to ignore and, thus, plays a major role when reading
the novel. If you’re not a fan of Banks, if you don’t love everything he wrote
or if you don’t know about the man himself, this novel’s message, wit, charm,
and draw would probably be lost on you. But as Iain Banks’ swan song, this is a
fitting last novel having brought together most of the author’s reoccurring
themes: Scotland, drug use, bitterness, castles, and regret. Because of the
context, The Quarry offers more to think about than two of the author’s
other great “ponder on this” books: The Bridge and Walking on Glass.
In all of this, I still find comfort and joy.
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