The Business

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 likeable enough) for the average person to say 'Hey, I like him/her, he/she's just like me!'

The main character, Kate, is basically a male character with a woman's name. She is some high-up corporate woman who is a little too self-aware of her corporate ruthlessness to be a credible ruthless corporate employee. It would not surprise me to discover most corporate workers are apathetic and money obsessed but it would surprise me to discover them to be conscious of these qualities. As well as unrealistic this self-awareness for the main character comes across like a lazy cliché, almost like an ironic acknowledgement of how the business person is supposed to be, a kind of joke character, and it leaves me in a psychic limbo, unable to know if the author is pro-corporations or savagely critiquing them. If I were to read on, I might have a better understanding of this, but this far in it feels like the former option, or at least the author is non-committal in his stance on excessively powerful companies who encroach upon what little democracy we have.

Most of the characters feel like clichés and much of the language used feels like he is addressing a simpleton. An English toff – who I assume is supposed to be one of the more likeable characters – is described as 'waving a shepherd's crook with the thoughtless abandon of one brought up all his life under extravagantly high ceilings,' and as far as I'm concerned it might as well read 'he grew up rich in a big house.' It surprises me just how amateurish the writing style is since Banks is a real, best-selling, proper-type of professional author. The novel is too mainstream and too simplistic, forfeiting realism for the sake of easy comprehension for the average idiot.

There is a section in a plant that makes microchips, which I know to be also called integrated circuits although the main character refers to them as 'chips', and it's this use of the word chip that again feels like simpleton language used primarily for the everyday reader. For all I know, people in that industry might call them chips all the time but it feels like a writer writing about a subject they have researched rather than something you might think was experienced first hand. This feeling is enhanced by the clean room suits being described as 'not far off a spacesuit', and because the main character is pretending to be a woman she does not take kindly to wearing this spacesuit, being deeply averse to looking unstylish for half an hour or so next to people dressed the same way. However the sadness she feels having to remove her expensive designer suit is soon assuaged when she realises the clean room suit is much more expensive than the suit she just took off.

Unsurprisingly for a best seller, the book is crammed full of banal back story; the kind of prose written in generalised tones which serve only the desire to make the book look thicker on the bookshelf rather than for any narrative, creative or structural value. It is a style of writing I loathe: boring, unnecessary, unpleasingly written, just quick cheap and easy. It comes across to me like a detailed synopsis rather than a demonstration of skilled creative writing. I picked up this book interested in the corporation central to the story, interested in how it operated; but much of the sections about the corporation are so generalised, they do not demonstrate the nuances I was looking for.

Four chapters in, so bored of waiting for the story to begin proper, I found myself skipping paragraphs – which is a sign I will not finish the book. There was some dialogue where the main character expresses quasi-socialist attitudes and I do wander if the author genuinely wanted to create a kind, compassionate corporate employee with more charitable leanings rather than ruthless corporate vampirism; but being too fed up of the tedious characters – who are just plain banal more than anything – I could not follow the words well enough to understand the author's true intentions. There was also a section about the corporation being particularly democratic in its workings and again I am not sure if this is a deluded fantasy of a corporation or nasty propaganda to make corporations seem mostly nice. I will never find out because I have stopped reading the book.

Someone on the book's cover alludes to Banks' supposed great story telling, yet being one third into the book with no sign of a story beginning, I fail to see this greatness. The book starts very well with a phone call from a man explaining how someone has stolen half of his teeth, but this plot line is instantly dropped (I predict to be picked up later at some dramatic surprise moment). From then on the book merely introduces non-characters and describes what they get up to in their work which isn't actually work at all and isn't really all that interesting. It is just a tedious book that I could not see improving the more I read, a BBC drama of a book

Over and out for now, guys!

xxx