184 pages
English language
Published Nov. 22, 1984 by Houghton Mifflin.
Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his father outsIde a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly. Iain Banks' celebrated first novel is a work of extraordinary originality, imagination and horrifying compulsion: horrifying, because it enters a mind whose realities are not our own, whose values of life and death are alien to our society; and compulsive, because the humour and compassion of …
Frank, no ordinary sixteen-year-old, lives with his father outsIde a remote Scottish village. Their life is, to say the least, unconventional. Frank's mother abandoned them years ago: his elder brother Eric is confined to a psychiatric hospital; and his father measures out his eccentricities on an imperial scale. Frank has turned to strange acts of violence to vent his frustrations. In the bizarre daily rituals there is some solace. But when news comes of Eric's escape from the hospital Frank has to prepare the ground for his brother's inevitable return - an event that explodes the mysteries of the past and changes Frank utterly. Iain Banks' celebrated first novel is a work of extraordinary originality, imagination and horrifying compulsion: horrifying, because it enters a mind whose realities are not our own, whose values of life and death are alien to our society; and compulsive, because the humour and compassion of that mind reach out to us all.
Graphic and disturbing with some outdated ideas, Iain Banks’s first novel is nevertheless compelling.
This book is a bit baffling.
Most of it is about a Boy On His Island, Doin' His Thing (I suppose), with the mild obsessions with dead creatures and fire and explosives that is so very Pig-Poking-Prince a la my AP Government teacher from 12th grade in the sticks.
But then... there's the other story. Banks manages to convey the terror of being faced with a mightily irrational personality, one who clearly Has Issues, with such mumblity that it gave me vertigo and chills. The fact that he transmits them through the main character, who has an alarmingly casual attitude towards the murder of younger siblings and other family, well... that's ignorable.
The combination of sexism and nonconsensual gender therapy appear to merely be jimmies of irony sprinkled throughout, despite the fact that they motivate the (reasonably executed) ending.
