The Quarry by Iain Banks
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Kit has Asperger’s, we’re led to believe, and outright told at one point, but it comes across merely as a device for narration, not an actual useful character description. Kit’s being called “somewhere between a genius and an utter” only allows for a kind of commentary on commentary—a character who gets to say why he says the things he says— using words and phrases that do not contribute to a conversation, but just keep it flowing. The end result is a first-person narrator who comes across as a third-person narrator.
Well, so what, right? Here’s a novel called <The Quarry, about a weekend in the last few months of man dying of cancer, surrounded by visiting friends, old mates from their college dates. A crumbling house on the edge of a gigantic hole, a lot of booze, and a search for a missing tape with “embarrassing.” contents. Have you got enough symbols to play with yet?
I just got the feeling, reading this, that Banks throws out all these ham-handed symbols just so the reader could grapple onto them, leaving him free to explore, without agenda, a deeper, less cut-and-dried story. What it means to be faced with one’s own mortality, fallibility, the inconsequence of existence. It’s not merely that the universe is hostile and indifferent, it’s that the universe is shitty and at the same time pointless.
And the only way to narrate this exploration (not discovery) is via a matter-of-fact voice. But a third-person narration makes the author himself susceptible to being judged as having a moral point of view, so make the narrator a first person, someone who experiences and is effected by the action, and who, being autistic, does not judge.
I’ve only ever read one other book by Banks, ages ago, so I am probably completely off the mark here. But I’ll say this: 300+ pages, set mostly in one house over the course of a weekend, where, more or less, nothing really happens, and I do not regret reading it.