Product Description

'Her eyes were black, wide as though with some sustained surprise, the skin from their outer corners to her small ears taut. Her lips were pale, and nearly too full for her small mouth, like something bled but bruised. He had never seen anyone or anything quite so beautiful in his life.' Graham Park is in love. But Sara Fitch is an enigma to him, a creature of almost perverse mystery. Steven Grout is paranoid - and with justice. He knows that They are out to get him. They are. Quiss, insecure in his fabulous if ramshackle castle, is forced to play interminable impossible games. The solution to the oldest of all paradoxical riddles will release him. But he must find an answer before he knows the question. Park, Grout, Quiss - no trio could be further apart. But their separate courses are set for collision.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20374 in Books
• Published on: 1992-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
'Inexorably powerful . sinister manipulations and magnetic ambiguities' - Observer 'The author's powerful imagination is displayed here every bit as vividly as in his debut' - Financial Times 'Establishes beyond doubt that Iain Banks is a novelist of remarkable talents' Daily Telegraph

Financial Times
'The author's powerful imagination is displayed here every bit as vividly as in his debut'

Daily Telegraph
'Establishes beyond doubt that Iain Banks is a novelist of remarkable talents'

Customer Reviews

Gormenghast meets Being John Malkovich
The synopsis doesn't begin to do justice to this outstanding book.

Some guy is in love. There's another guy who's rather paranoid. And a third guy who's trapped in a castle. So what?

But trust me, from these seemingly unremarkable scenarios a staggeringly imaginative story emerges. You'll start by laughing at crazy world of the paranoid Grout, then meet Quiss in the next chapter, and suddenly Grout doesn't seem as crazy. It's a mastery piece of storytelling, and that's just the first chapter.

And then there's the highlight of the book: the weirdly surreal neo-gothic castle that Quiss inhabits. It's as if Mervyn Peake had written Gormenghast after watching the film Being John Malkovich. Fans of Banks' sci-fi novels will not be disappointed.

Read this book or regret it forever.

Intrigues, yet tries too hard.
As I am not very keen on the Sci-Fi element of Iain Banks' writing, i suppose it is fair to say that this novel would obviously not appeal instantly to me. After the controversial story of his debut novel, 'The Wasp Factory', Banks follows with this, a strange Fiction/ Sci-fi hybrid story, which is a genuinely intriguing read. Banks merges the three plots together expertly and cleverly creates three sub plots that all suck in the reader and keep them in suspense.

However, the book is a little too abstract for my tastes, and the final controversy of Graham's story just seems to be a feeble attempt to recreate the dramatic ending of 'The wasp factory'. It is too hard to see how the plots all directly relate to each other, even with several rereads of the book. This book is an interesting purchase, and a must for any Banks fan, but he has written many better novels than this.

Bewildering but beguiling
In truth this isn't so much a novel, but a trio of short stories that kind of come together at the end and some of the stories are more appealing and easier to digest than others. In truth, the story of the game players in the glass prison left me bewildered at times, but I kept chugging along thanks to the humour and intrigue. The other stories were easier going but maybe not as engaging.

I finished this book feeling a bit let down but impressed nonetheless by the quality of the writing. I'd say it possibly the most intellectual Iain Banks book I've read so far, but that doesn't make it the best. Worth a read, but not the best starting point for people new to Iain Banks as I suspect it would put many off from reading his other (and better, in my opinion) books. I think it would have to be a very generous person to give this book anything more than three stars.