Complicity

Paperback

1st

Alternating Person

Fiction

313

13

2018-06-26 15:55:40

Anyone who has experienced an Iain Banks novel knows what kind of territory we are entering into long before those first few vital sentences grab us like the piercing jaws of hell; refusing to let us go until that final, writhing moment, when the clues (and the body count) add up, and the world of the story comes tumbling in on it’s self in a spectacularly, jaw-dropping fashion. The worlds he is able to create are bleak... filled with stark elements of reality and the kind of horrors ripped from the headlines. There’s humour too, albeit, darker than anything you can image; though it is the snaking, ever-shifting plot, the attention to character, and the terrifying situations we are thrown into that mark out books like The Wasp Factory, The Bridge and this, as the classics they are... which, really, can’t help but leave us coming back for more.
Complicity is probably Banks’ most disturbing work... giving us a portrait of the everyman thrown into circumstances that go beyond the realms of mere explicitness, as the writer gives us one of his most wince-inducing modern-horrors, coupled with possibly his greatest character, that of self-proclaimed gonzo-journalist Cameron Colley. In Banks’ world, Colley is a man fairly content to live his life in the fast-lane... cruising from one-story to the next on a tidal-wave of drugs, drink, video-games & adulterous sex. However, when a series of seemingly random, and increasingly graphic murders and assaults begin to occur throughout the politically-immoral England of the early-nineties, Cameron finds himself hot-on-the trail of an exceedingly stealthy and disturbed serial-killer who may, or may not, be closer than he thinks...
By the end of the book Banks has succeeded in putting his characters through all manner of physical and emotional degradation - as ghosts from the past and (literal) skeletons from the closet begin tumbling out of every available hidey-hole... - thus, the author is now able to shift the focus away from the killer theatrics of the preceding chapters to create an emotional dénouement that looks specifically at notions of constancy and morality. This is a deeply atmospheric work, with Banks alternating between the passive narrative voice in order to set-up situations that act as a self-aware red herring for the reader. As others have mentioned... this isn’t a book for the faint-hearted, or those easily offended. Banks cuts right to the point with all the guile and precision of knife-wielding mad man, but is able to lift his story out of the mire of pulp-exploitation through the use of inventive scenarios, 3D characterisations and an undeniable way with words.
Complicity is one of those great books that draw you in from the first page and never let you go... leading everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, whilst leaving you gasping with anticipation to find out just what will happen next. It’s the kind of book you’ll complete after a couple of days... emerging from the winding, writhing narrative, shocked by the horrors you have witnessed, but, at the same time, desperate to go back and re-analyse those all important clues.

Quality Paper Backs Direct

0349105715

St. Ives, England.

1993-06-01

1

English

London, England.

en_GB@rg=auzzzz 474

2024-04-07

2018-06-26 15:55:40