Not far into Iain Banks’s new novel, The Business, his heroine, Kate Telman, visits her colleague, “Uncle Freddy”, at Blysecrag, a stately pile, “begun in the early eighteen hundreds by the local duke…. The estate was purchased by Hieronymous Cowle, an eccentric…. [and] boasted three hundred rooms, eighteen towers, two miles of cellars, five lifts, thirty dumb waiter shafts, a similar number of laundry-delivery elevators disguised as wardrobes, a water-powered funicular linking the house to its own railway branch line, a six-hundred seat underground theatre with a hydraulically driven revolving stage, numerous fountains and a mile-long reflecting lake.”
This renovated Gothic will come as no surprise to Banks’s regular readers; almost every novel he has written has contained the standard ingredients of that genre. From the island in The Wasp Factory, to the Gothic folly of St Jute’s in Espedair Street to Gaineamh Castle in The Crow Road, we have been given the archetypal architecture; and, with legacies, incest, secrets and murders, we have generally had the furniture as well. Banks takes these time-honoured elements and puts a New-British spin on them, setting them in a recognizably modern world, more often than not in Scotland.
It has worked in the past, because the Gothic trappings push the right buttons, but Banks is just as interested in the modern, and in a different form of button-pushing. His work has always found room for pop culture and the accoutrements of new technology; many of his wealthier characters spend their money on toys and gadgets. Here, Kate Telman, who confesses to “an interest in gadgets, technology and future trends”, is always on the move, flying from country to country, being driven from meeting to meeting, and this allows Banks to remind us of the sort of labour-saving, life-enhancing consumer durables that money can buy in 1998. Like Uncle Freddy’s promising country house, these do not in the end fulfil any purpose; they are purely ornamental and slightly fetishistic.
Banks’s love of architecture and engineering found its most complicated form of expression in one of his earliest novels, The Bridge, in which the chapters and linking sections imitate the structure of the Forth Bridge. His science-fiction novels allow him to invent his own vehicles, buildings and weapons (The Use of Weapons and The Player of Games are, in retrospect, inevitable Banks titles), although his straight novels also contain his own inventions. Despot, in Complicity, is a video game based on Civilization, only better. As a bricoleur of genre, however – the horror tale, the sci-fi opera, the rock biog, the thriller, the murder mystery, the serial-killer chiller – he has always been a romantic. Early assessments of his work categorized him as a writer with a nasty imagination and a dark edge, but, in fact, many of his fictions provide cutely happy conclusions for their ladettes and geeky boys, and the good characters, who wise-crack so smartly throughout, whose hearts are anti-Thatcher but whose lusts are straightforwardly chemical and ordinary, generally triumph.
This soft-heartedness disables The Business. The heroine, Kate, is frankly unbelievable; she is smart and cynical enough to be a successful businesswoman, a radical socialist in conversation, a gritty fighter in a tight corner, a sentimentalist when it comes to friends and family, a modern girl in the sack and a sitcom girlfriend when phoning her mate. She could be the novelistic equivalent of Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft. She works for an organization which is centuries old, a perfect multinational enterprise with fingers in every pie, so rich that it is attempting to buy a country in order to gain a seat at the UN. This organization is also (like the Culture in Banks’s sci-fi novels) unnaturally benign, democratically structured and self-regulating, and employs its own rules of good conduct. Ignoring the political capital that might be made of such an organization, Banks doesn’t criticize; instead, he offers it as another fantasy of benign omnipotence. Similarly, his heroine can do no wrong; by the end, she wins through without ever being in much danger or difficulty. Indeed, one is barely aware of the plot until shortly before its resolution.
In the absence of much narrative tension, one is tempted to focus on the political leanings to be discovered in the text, which, unsurprisingly, are unrevolutionary, nineteenth-century liberal, technocratic, European. For all his fascination with difficulty and disorder, and the anti-Thatcher rhetoric in his 1980s work, Banks’s books – especially Song of Stone and Complicity – have a clear anti-revolutionary message. Complicity only plays with the idea of revenge fantasies; it was perhaps popular because it enacted violent left-wing hatreds, without frightening any horses. The current political climate is cooler; Thatcher has been out of power for some time and a Scottish Parliament has been born. And The Business does not even attempt any political demolition; it trusts to self-regulation and international liberal capitalism, as if, having seen democracy fail in the 1980s, Banks prefers to place his trust in an Enlightenment-driven benign despotism.
Kate is being courted by the ruler of the little country that the Business wishes to buy. She falls in love with the place and its happy people, worrying only that capitalism might change them; she thinks the plan can be improved rather than abandoned; ameliorative touches rather than radical changes are the order of the day. Indeed, Kate, adopted as a Glaswegian child by a woman who works in the Business is – deus ex machina – abstracted from her unpromising family origins and given a meritocratic chance. Scotland, like many nation states, ceases to be significant in the brave new world the Business offers us nowadays. The country is merely one of a number of backdrops which, once stocked with creature comforts, are interchangeable. Kate’s most frequent comments on her surroundings relate to the facilities on offer.
Banks has often appeared to be more interested in iconography and set pieces than narrative drive, but in the past – with the darkling moods of The Wasp Factory and Complicity, or with the engaging warmth of the romances in The Crow Road and Espedair Street – he has given us characters and human dramas which have been compelling in themselves. The Business, while it is decently written and sometimes amusing, is nowhere near as entrancing; in this novel, sadly, Banks seems to have lost the plot.