Complicity

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My body shook, my ears rang, my eyes burned, my throat was raw with the acid-bitter stench of the evaporating crude, but it was as though the very ferocity of the experience unmanned me, unmade me and rendered me incapable of telling it. Banks claimed in an interview that Complicity is "[a] bit like The Wasp Factory except without the happy ending and redeeming air of cheerfulness". [1] Banks met his wife Annie in London, before the release of his first book. They married in Hawaii in 1982. However, he announced in early 2007 that, after 25 years together, they had separated. He lived most recently in North Queensferry, a town on the north side of the Firth of Forth near the Forth Bridge and the Forth Road Bridge.

The book was unpredicatble. I was meerly guessing until approximately two-thirds through, rather far into the book when compared to what I am used to. And when I thought about the story after finishing, everything felt complete, with that wonderful deceptively-simple quality and an ending I approved of.Banks's father was an officer in the Admiralty and his mother was once a professional ice skater. Iain Banks was educated at the University of Stirling where he studied English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology. He moved to London and lived in the south of England until 1988 when he returned to Scotland, living in Edinburgh and then Fife. Otherwise, the film is technically good. Casting and acting is very good, with one crucial exception: IMHO, Cameron is too young, far too cheerful and devoid of air of impeding doom around him.

Colley is a " Gonzo journalist" with an amphetamine habit, living in Edinburgh. He also smokes cigarettes and cannabis, drinks copious amounts of alcohol, plays computer games, and has adventurous sex with a married woman, Yvonne. He regrets his addictions and misdemeanours and occasionally tries (admittedly half-heartedly) to give them up. I won't make this lengthier than it needs to be. It's blindingly obvious that Banks was extraordinarily talented. Here, he portrays a journalist with a complex and messy life, who inadvertently gets embroiled in some grisly murders of high-profile people. He gets stitched up for them, and has to try and figure out who is responsible.This witnessing adds a level of reliability (even if we don’t like it). And readers aren’t daft. They know they’re not really the you-character, which means authors could use it as a tool to create surprise when the ‘you’ is unveiled later in the book. Iain Banks is simply brilliant, with and without the M. His books steal a bit of headspace and never really leave you. Literate, passionate and well-paced, Complicity succeeds as both an absorbing entertainment and a chilling examination of accountability in a morally bankrupt world * San Francisco Chronicle * There are scenes in the book telling of the main character's time at university, which is named to be Stirling University, where Iain Banks was himself a student.

An excellent nervy book, both cool and terrifying at its dark centre where the perfect logic of the protagonist is devoid of pity. Banks's muscular style and gruesome imagination make this a fast-moving thriller not to be missed * Daily Telegraph * Iain Banks's Complicity: A Reader's Guide, Cairns Craig, Continuum International Publishing Group 2002, ISBN 0-8264-5247-7 We follow Cameron Colley, a journalist with a mild drug, drink and gaming habit. He doesn't actually seem to do much work, but runs around after an anonymous source called Archer, who is hinting at links between the deaths of Nuclear scientists and associated people. But what is going on is far more sinister. There's a series of brutal murders across the country and suddenly Cameron is arrested. He knows he didn't do them, but can he be sure he's not complicit in the crimes! Its two main characters are Cameron Colley, a journalist on a Scottish newspaper called The Caledonian (which resembles The Scotsman), and a serial murderer whose identity is a mystery. The passages dealing with the journalist are written in the first person, and those dealing with the murderer in the second person, so the novel presents, in alternate chapters, an unusual example of an unreliable narrator. The events take place mostly in and around Edinburgh.Banks doesn’t present the novel fully in second person; these sections fall between those of a first-person viewpoint character, journalist Cameron Colley. As such, readers are confronted by a juxtaposition of Cameron’s version of events and what was witnessed by the narrator. It is about hopes and disappointments, unrequited love, bravery and cowardice. Technically, it’s a quintessentially modern English novel. There are two stories travelling at once. Neither of them is told chronologically – heaven forbid we should start at the beginning and end at the end, too passe. We do indeed have exposed sex, unexpurgated violence and a Thatcherite setting. But as well as this:

And I’m there, in the one place I’ve hidden from myself’ not that cold day by the hole in the ice or the other day in the sunlit woods near the hole in the hill – days deniable because I was then not yet the me I have become – but just eighteen months ago; the time of my failure and my simple, shaming incapacity to reap and work the obvious power of what I was observing; the place that exposed my incompetence, my hopeless inability to witness. Under suspicion by the police, Colley finds himself involved doubly in the bizarre murders when the killer is revealed. At the end of the book, Colley is diagnosed with lung cancer (a downbeat ending omitted in the film adaptation).We have Cameron, our doomed hero, who freezes whenever he shouldn’t, runs when he should stand and fight; Cameron who dreams every night of what he sees as his failings and yet, horrific as they are, he doesn’t face the one that hurts him most. The one where he finally gets sent to the Middle East to be a real reporter and yet again he freezes. He is completely unable to tell his readers what he sees. That can create a sense of immediacy, but almost amnesiac dislocation. We have to discover what we think, see, know and do. And if we don’t identify with the ‘you’ – if we feel implicated rather than attached – we can be pulled out of the story rather than brought deeper into it. iain banks' sci-fi is fabulously complex and his thrillers can feel almost ostentatiously stripped-down. this is one of the latter. rather good, although rather junior league joyce carol oates as well. specifically j.c. oates under her thriller pseudonym, rosamund smith... he shares the same interest in doubles and obsessions and two characters who reflect each other's passions and weaknesses. there are also some unsurprisingly sharp critiques of materialism and various other classic and modern evils... the victims are a veritable Who's Who of Assholes Deserving Slaughter... the killer, demented as he may be, is something of a robin hood, taken to the next level (down). my main issue with the novel, besides the rather rote use of doubling, is that the lead character becomes somewhat tedious, at least to this reader. still, the writing is solid and the narrative is often riveting. A stylishly executed and well produced study in fear, loathing and victimisation which moves towards doom in measured steps * Observer * This is only the second Banks novel I've read - I'm late to the party here. A friend of mine recently sent me "The Crow Road" as a gift, and I really enjoyed it, so when I spotted this in a charity shop, I thought I'd give it a go.