Book: The steep approach to Garbadale
Nov. 10th, 2010 06:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livAuthor: Iain Banks
Details: (c) Iain Banks 2007; Pub Little, Brown 1007; ISBN 978-0-316-73105-8
Verdict: The steep approach to Garbadale is a surprisingly moving portrait of a family.
Reasons for reading it: I am a bit unsure about Iain Banks-without-the-M's mimetic stuff, but I sort of felt in the mood for this, and indeed I was pleasantly surprised, it's rather better than many of his others.
How it came into my hands: Library.
The steep approach to Garbadale is sort of about a family deciding whether to sell the family business to a large American corporation, but it's really a coming of stage story where the protagonist, Alban comes to terms with mysteries in his past and deals with the fallout from a very intense youthful relationship with his cousin. The story is related in a rather non-linear way, but it's a lot less confusing than the incredibly baroque narrative structures Banks often uses in his SF. In fact, this jumping about does a very good job of establishing character; I really cared about almost everybody mentioned, even many of the peripheral cast. At some points I thought the story was going to drop into romance cliches, but in fact it took the central love affair and its emotional consequences very seriously, but remained realistic about how much True Love can affect the real world on a practical level. And I definitely approved of the resolution of the romance arc.
The background was particularly interesting to me because my mother's family went through a similar experience a couple of years ago, when they sold what had been a family firm for several generations. The scale is much smaller, of course, we're talking a few people making hundreds of thousands of pounds, not dozens of multi-millionnaires. So I recognized some of the context, where selling out is the right thing to do (given there's no-one in the current generation who really wants to take over the firm, in addition to the financial arguments), but there's still a sentimental attachment to a long established family tradition. And the loss of the connection where even distant cousins keep in touch because they see eachother at shareholders' meetings.
The other thing I really really like about tSAtG was the character of VG, because you almost never have a female character in a novel who gets the chance to be deeply in love without wanting to get married and buy a house and have children with her beloved. And she doesn't even "come round" in the end, she knows what she wants in life and continues wanting it as her relationship develops, yay! She's not really like me, even though she's a mid-career academic, because she's thin and beautiful and sporty and survived the tsunami through sheer force of wonderful awesomeness, but it's still a very good start.
There were only a few things that annoyed me. The major one is that Banks has these slightly annoying vaguely lefty views which he seems to treat as if they were absolute truth (or at least as if he can naturally assume that the reader will completely share his politics). tSAtG has slightly too many rousing leftist speeches put into the mouths of characters, and all the likeable ones share the exact same political values as every other likeable Banks character. There were times when I started to feel as if Alban were annoyingly perfect, but I think on balance he works well as an admirable but well-rounded character. I found the denouement a bit over-the-top. I enjoyed the hints and the gradual pace of revealing the back story, but when Alban finally discovers the skeletons in his family closet the truth is so outlandish that it broke my suspension of disbelief.
So even if the plotting isn't perfect, the characterization in tSAtG is really top-notch, and I very much enjoyed the book as a result.
Details: (c) Iain Banks 2007; Pub Little, Brown 1007; ISBN 978-0-316-73105-8
Verdict: The steep approach to Garbadale is a surprisingly moving portrait of a family.
Reasons for reading it: I am a bit unsure about Iain Banks-without-the-M's mimetic stuff, but I sort of felt in the mood for this, and indeed I was pleasantly surprised, it's rather better than many of his others.
How it came into my hands: Library.
The steep approach to Garbadale is sort of about a family deciding whether to sell the family business to a large American corporation, but it's really a coming of stage story where the protagonist, Alban comes to terms with mysteries in his past and deals with the fallout from a very intense youthful relationship with his cousin. The story is related in a rather non-linear way, but it's a lot less confusing than the incredibly baroque narrative structures Banks often uses in his SF. In fact, this jumping about does a very good job of establishing character; I really cared about almost everybody mentioned, even many of the peripheral cast. At some points I thought the story was going to drop into romance cliches, but in fact it took the central love affair and its emotional consequences very seriously, but remained realistic about how much True Love can affect the real world on a practical level. And I definitely approved of the resolution of the romance arc.
The background was particularly interesting to me because my mother's family went through a similar experience a couple of years ago, when they sold what had been a family firm for several generations. The scale is much smaller, of course, we're talking a few people making hundreds of thousands of pounds, not dozens of multi-millionnaires. So I recognized some of the context, where selling out is the right thing to do (given there's no-one in the current generation who really wants to take over the firm, in addition to the financial arguments), but there's still a sentimental attachment to a long established family tradition. And the loss of the connection where even distant cousins keep in touch because they see eachother at shareholders' meetings.
The other thing I really really like about tSAtG was the character of VG, because you almost never have a female character in a novel who gets the chance to be deeply in love without wanting to get married and buy a house and have children with her beloved. And she doesn't even "come round" in the end, she knows what she wants in life and continues wanting it as her relationship develops, yay! She's not really like me, even though she's a mid-career academic, because she's thin and beautiful and sporty and survived the tsunami through sheer force of wonderful awesomeness, but it's still a very good start.
There were only a few things that annoyed me. The major one is that Banks has these slightly annoying vaguely lefty views which he seems to treat as if they were absolute truth (or at least as if he can naturally assume that the reader will completely share his politics). tSAtG has slightly too many rousing leftist speeches put into the mouths of characters, and all the likeable ones share the exact same political values as every other likeable Banks character. There were times when I started to feel as if Alban were annoyingly perfect, but I think on balance he works well as an admirable but well-rounded character. I found the denouement a bit over-the-top. I enjoyed the hints and the gradual pace of revealing the back story, but when Alban finally discovers the skeletons in his family closet the truth is so outlandish that it broke my suspension of disbelief.
So even if the plotting isn't perfect, the characterization in tSAtG is really top-notch, and I very much enjoyed the book as a result.
