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The Business

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Some of my worst experiences as a reader come from reading the work of best-selling authors; a banal subsistance of writers whose qualifying attributes arise from their ability to blandly appeal to a wide variety of consumers. Being mostly into the Avant-Garde, it is not surprising I find acute tedium in the realms of the best-sellers, but I do occasionally subject myself to their creative renderings out of intrigue and perhaps from a kind of self torture. Four chapters in on The Business by Iain Banks I am struck by how trite the characters are, how banal and wooden they are, how they are basically cliches ranging from posh toffs who like cars to Americans who like guns. They are like rejects from a BBC drama characters from a BBC drama; characters one has seen before, not new, original, interesting characters, just recycled archetypes: mediocre characters; the type you'd expect to find in a best-selling novel who are just bland enough (and I am assuming supposedly likea