Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #140181 in Books
• Published on: 1996-09-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 455 pages

Synopsis
A little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. Innocent in the ways of the world, an ingenue when it comes to pop and fashion, the Elect of God of a small but committed Stirlingshire religious cult: Isis Whit is no ordinary teenager. When her cousin Morag - Guest of Honour at the Luskentyrian's four- yearly Festival of Love - disappears after renouncing her faith, Isis is marked out to venture among the Unsaved and bring the apostate back into the fold. But the road to Babylondon (as Sister Angela puts it) is a treacherous one, particularly when Isis discovers that Morag appears to have embraced the ways of the Unsaved with spectacular abandon. Truth and falsehood; kinship and betrayal; 'herbal' cigarettes and compact discs - Whit is an exploration of the techno-ridden barrenness of modern Britain from a unique perspective.

Customer Reviews

Jolly good stuff
I really enjoyed this book. It had an excellent plot, full of twists and turns. Isis is an endearing main character and parts of it are laugh-out-loud funny. I would recommend it!

Laugh out loud funny
Without doubt the funniest Iain Banks book I have read to date and very different to the others. This is a great twist on the old innocent abroad yarn with the naive yet wise Isis Whit out to save her cousin from the clutches of the corrupt world and resolve the power struggles within her increasingly fractious community. In itself it doesn't sound much but you'll laugh out loud more than once and you'll marvel at another dazzling and beguiling tale from Iain Banks.

Ideal starter for those who are yet to take a trip into the Banks imagination, but also a welcome diversion off the dark path of his other novels for those who are already blooded by The Wasp Factory, Complicity and so on. Female friends of mine who have read his books all seem to rate this one as their favourite as it has a strong female lead and all the blokes are secondary characters and are largely buffoons and stooges for Isis. A cracking read with more than a few twists to keep those pages turning.

PENDICLES OF COLLYMOON
There are far too many novelists and novels in my own opinion. I started this one years ago and quickly gave up. However my curiosity was reawakened when the author came out the victor in not one but two upmarket quiz programmes a few days ago, so I tried again. It was worth it: this book improves as it goes along. I still think there is a certain amount of padding here and there. The reference to Scottish dishes with an Asian flavour - haggis vindaloo, tandoori stovies or some such - was amusing the first time, but the list on p201/2 in this edition is blatant word-spinning. The second paragraph on p176 is the kind of verbiage that articulate people fall into when their concentration is slipping. The incident of the attempted rape near the disused railway bridge is out of context - this part of the story is not about the narrator's experiences but about the locality, and it highlights an interesting aspect of the content of the book.

Banks is obviously fascinated by his (and my) native Scotland. The dilapidated railway bridge near the headquarters of the religious cult that is the central theme of the story was part of a line from Balloch to Stirling, as unlikely a route as was ever laid in the railway mania. I was intensely interested in what Banks told me about it, and to return the favour I can inform him that it made its junction with the line to Perth not at Bridge of Allan but at Stirling itself. I think Banks just loves saying 'Gargunnock' and 'Kippen' to judge by how often he mentions these villages, and he leaves us in no doubt of his fascination with the Pendicles of Collymoon just for its name. The setting is largely rural central Scotland with flashbacks to Western Isles. The narrator also makes an Odyssey to London, Essex and the West Country in pursuit of a renegade cousin, and the patois of Glasgow and Essex, as well as the Texan grandmother's idiom and attitudes, are all reproduced with an acute ear for the way such speakers really sound. The scene-setting is really rather brilliant. Obviously there is no point on looking for realism in a totally fictional religious cult, but it gets more convincing as one becomes used to it. This is a work of imagination, but my attention was well and truly held by the truthfulness of the depiction of the London squat, the vendors of the racist newspaper and the various drivers with whom the narrator hitches a lift, even if there's just a suspicion that Banks is spinning the last of these out.

The book is full of wry humour, and very well put together after the opening chapters. The adolescent narrator gets through a lot of growing up in not many years, but the process is neither ridiculous nor squalid, both of which can be said about what happens to Richard Adams's poor Maia. Some of the writing is very good indeed, like the end of chapter fourteen, and some of the jokes are very good too, like the one about the IRS on p232. It would probably be wrong to pigeonhole this novel into some particular genre, but what it turns into more and more as the narrative progresses is really a detective story. What is really going on in this odd religious sect and what are some of its members really doing? Where did the narrator's grandfather come from originally? These issues are actually more central to the book than the whereabouts and exploits of the elusive cousin, which the story purports to be to start with but which turns into a clever entrée into more interesting sub-plots.

I found it very absorbing and very original as well as very clever and skilful. I read it as entertainment, fairly light in tone rather than 'exploring issues', and I had finished it sooner than I expected to. One side-benefit to me was that it awakened a strong desire to explore a part of my native country that I have seen very little of. The area crossed by the sad little railway from Balloch to Stirling is of outstanding beauty by anyone's reckoning. If anyone reading this notice gets to the Pendicles of Collymoon before I do and can tell me more about it than I have just found out on the internet I shall be more than interested to hear.