Whereas this was one of the quotes he went with for The Wasp Factory
It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparalleled depravity.
There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it. Irish Times
I keep wanting to think that this is because Banks is trying make a statement about the competency of “normal” people, but I so far have no confidence that this is a purposefully-written conclusion.
all the people who were too square to take a drink left your country and founded mine; your drinking culture was concentrated by their absence, and our drinking culture was stigmatized from jump. fast-forward to today.
I must say, though, I liked the bit when Hol was explaining the idea of “miraculist thinking” being a human flaw. understandable, but a flaw nonetheless.
Dear Penthouse Forum,
I never thought I’d ever be writing here, but…
Did they… read some other book than I read?
Tears? When?
Y’know, that bit resonated for me as well, but coming from a different perspective. She stated a viewpoint to which I used to subscribe wholeheartedly, but largely because I’ve never been addicted to anything, and in fact I’ve never been drunk or even tried any recreational drugs. Not really from any moral objection as such, just was never particularly tempted. And I really can’t stand the taste of alcohol. So it was always really easy for me to assume that mere willpower could be enough for anyone who genuinely wished to stop drinking/smoking/using, since I had absolutely no firsthand experience of what the effects of indulgence were, let alone the effects of addiction. I have since come to the conclusion that I have no business sharing Hol’s opinion, since I “lack standing,” as any federal court of appeals would put it. Even if she’s right (and at least one “recovering alcoholic” I know who currently makes a living as a therapist often dealing with these matters turns out to agree with her, after spending most of a decade in AA meetings himself), I feel it best not to voice an opinion about it in polite company, since how the hell would I know whether addiction is a disease or not? It can be a volatile political question in some circles.
I’m always pretty grateful that I have no chemical addictions, since I would feel awfully ridiculous having to “submit to a higher power” with a straight face. And my buddy who treats addicts tells me that AA ends up being about as effective at getting people sober as… well, deciding to get sober and going it alone. No idea if he’s right; stats are inconsistent everywhere you look.
It still has a noticeable presence in Hollywood… in fact, it turns out to be a disconcertingly successful way of networking. This same buddy of mine kept up with AA for so long in part because of all the famous screenwriters and rock stars he’d encounter at certain Hollywood AA meetings, which kind of undercut the whole “Anonymous” thing. I think it may be fading in popularity in recent years, but there’s still a weekly meeting for “Friends of Bill W.” on the Warner Bros lot that takes place in one of the offices or occasionally one of the empty soundstages.
I don’t think so… no responsible person would do anything but (metaphorically at least) throw cold water on it. The slightest encouragement (and holding his dick and marveling at its size is much, much more than “slight” encouragement) could all-too-easily resonate in his mind, bouncing back and forth off the walls of his skull during the wee small hours, and result in him thinking she wants him after all and just isn’t sure she should. Which, in any other teenage male mind than Kit’s, would lead to him trying it again soon. Holly’s either badly-written, and/or more of a self-centered, clueless twit than we were being led to believe.
That’s an excellent point. Even if I agreed with her point, I’d shut up about it. And doubly so if I were about to do a line of coke.
Again, since I’m not a drinker, I have no informed opinion, but it seems to me that Americans (particularly younger ones) are, on the whole, not very good at moderate drinking. If they enjoy drinking, they seem to do it too much. I do know a few people who enjoy pairing wines or seeking out new microbrews, but I probably know ten times as many people who simply like to occasionally get drunk as a skunk. Is there anything wrong with that? Most of them don’t think so (at least, not at first), but I confess I find it alarming.
Heh… for some reason now I’m thinking of this book as a somewhat darker Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I have read Chapter 6 now, but so far, Kit’s been having a succession of small triumphs. Even his strikeout with Hol goes far better than it should.
“It’s an urgent novel and an important one.” Wow, those are always two adjectives that, when used about novels, never fail to make me back away with utter disdain… but really, that’s usually because those books end up being so overbearingly pompous and stultifying. This book just seems… well, neither remotely urgent nor the least bit important. I still don’t hate it at all, but I know I’m never gonna bother rereading it or recommending it. But still, I really am enjoying the hell out of this discussion!
“Funny”?! When does the funny shit start?
Yeah, I know what you mean. Also, when Kit reveals some of the very worst things Guy has done to him, Hol just shakes her head and mildly curses Guy’s name as a complete asshole… but never would it occur to her to actually call Guy out on any of this to his face. We are expected to think that those Seven Emotional Dwarfs actually ever liked or respected each other to remain even casual friends over twenty years, and that their cutting jibes and casual cruelties are nothing more than their kind of friendly banter? If Banks is making a point about these guys, I really find it hard to swallow. They’re all so cartoonishly awful… not, I must clarify, as individuals, but as friends. Taken one by one, they’re all vanilla, garden-variety assholes (except Guy, who’s a relatively rare breed of dickweed), but it beggars belief that they all still consider each other even casual friends (or just tolerable former-friends).
Best to avoid Australia, then. 
If you don’t have a beer in your hand at a barbie, it’s assumed there’s something wrong with you. Not socially wrong and no-one will hold it against you, but you will get people feeling sorry for you or thinking that you’re ill.
One of my favourite NT news items is about the bloke who was pulled on the way back from the bottle-o. His kid was in the back of the car crawling around in the seat-wells, while several slabs of beer were safely seat-belted in.
One of our best-loved Prime Ministers holds a drinking world record.
A previous PM was caught in a strip-club during a UN conference, which caused a mild scandal. His explanation that he was too drunk to see anything also caused some raised eyebrows, not because he was drunk, but because no-one thought that wowser could do anything that human and it was assumed he was lying.
And there was a lot of fuss kicked up when the organisers of one of the largest motor race here limited the amount of beer you could bring in to 36 cans per-person-per-day.
So that’s one side. The others are a bunch of lightweights that assume anything over 5 standard drinks (appx. 2 glasses of wine) in a single session is binge drinking and a sign of alcoholism.
There’s not much in the way of any middle ground between them.
Here’s Cory Doctorow’s review, which he posted about a year ago and then re-posted last month on his tumblr:
When Iain Banks announced in April that he was dying of gall bladder cancer, he said that his forthcoming novel The Quarry would be his last. I’ve just read it, and though I came to it with high expectations, I find that I was still surprised by just how good this novel is, and how it revisits so many of the motifs from Banks’s earlier novels, and what a spectacular blend of emotions it carries.
The Quarry is the story of Kit, an 18-year-old boy on the autistic spectrum who lives in a tumbledown house with his father, Guy, who is dying of cancer. Guy was once a legendary bohemian and nonconformist, the lynchpin of a tight-knit group of friends who all attended film-school with him. Kit has spent his 18 years living with Guy and their housekeeper, in Guy’s family house, which is slowly coming down around their ears, literally shaken to pieces by the regular blasting at the nearby quarry. Soon, Guy will die and Kit will be forced out of the house by the quarry’s expansion.
There’s time for one more reunion, though. One weekend, all of Guy’s old university friends descend upon the house for a final hurrah — a last chance to say goodbye, a kind of Gen-X Big Chill with the corpse present and alive for the wake. They’re there to settle old scores, to say goodbye, and to locate a mysterious and all-consuming video-tape with the only known copy of a student film they made and that must never get out, lest its mysterious contents destroy all their lives.
The scenario plays out with nods to so much of Banks’s best work. Kit is a kind of saner avatar of Frank Cauldhame, the reclusive narrator of Banks’s 1984 debut The Wasp Factory, and like Frank, the circumstances of his parentage and childhood are shrouded in mystery. The country house setting took me back to 1996’s Whit. Kit is an avid — and semi-professional — gamer, a central premise of Complicity, whose cancer subplot was so strong that it took me within inches of quitting smoking in 1993 (I ended up quitting seven years later). There’s even some stage business with mobile phones that took me back to 2002’s Dead Air, the first thriller that made peace with cellular telephony and figured out how to integrate it into suspense plots.
Guy himself is an acerbic, dying mouthpiece for the author, a tragic figure whose unbearable pain and horrible behavior are a sad reminder of Banks’s own final time. He won’t suffer fools, but neither will he turn away from his oldest friends, and there is, shot through all of his acid speeches and disoriented protests, a sense of deep love for the people who he brought to his side in his last days. Banks’s final book isn’t just 325 pages of FUCK CANCER; it’s also a sorrowing and sweet love note to the world and all us poor bastards left in it.
I have loved Banks’s writing since I was 13 years old. He was one of my literary heroes. His death was heartbreaking. I would rather he had lived 40 more years and written 20 inferior novels than have had him go at the age of 59 with a brilliant book like The Quarry. But if he had to write a final book, this is the final book I’d have had him write — a goodbye letter to the world and all of its wonder and terror.
The bit about mobile phones I think is what made me interested in reading it when I read this review last year, I guess maybe I should read the other book mentioned (though by this point most writers have figured out that dead battery/no reception isn’t good enough).
(Note: can’t seem to use the quote function while on an iPad.)
The point about Hol not having much of a reaction – especially not to Guy – with regard to how he treated Kit growing up…
Hol has been in somewhat regular contact with them over the years. Was this really the first time she found out that Guy was a horrible parent? I think she would have witnessed his jerkitude many times over the years. So her supposed concern for and support of Kit is just as shallow as every other relationship in the book.
I’d say what we learned in chapter 5 is that Hol isn’t the best of the lot after all. She fits right in with all the other vapid jerks.
Whoa. So many points none of us seem to agree with, so little time.
To start somewhere, I’ll go with the subject of cancer. When readers spend much of their time thinking “when will this jerk die, already?”, they’re not getting the message FUCK CANCER at all.
Other articles on the book note that the first draft was completed before Banks got his diagnosis. So one presumes (as the articles imply) that the whole center-character-dying-of-cancer was in that before-the-verdict draft. Unclear how much the book changed with subsequent drafts. I’m ever so glad I interlibrary loaned this. I’m much happier owning a doorstop like Consider Phlebas.
A sentiment not completely unknown in even in my hemisphere. Let us now turn to Heathers 25:5
“this is ohio, if you don’t have a brewski in your hand you might as well be wearing a dress”
Yeah, that’s part of what rang false to me in this chapter. The way we’re introduced to Holly in the first chapter shows her to be somewhat compassionate and loving toward Kit, and insightful enough to coach him in his dealings with others. But in these later chapters, she’s as self-absorbed and clueless as Haze or Paul. I don’t buy it, but after all, she’s a character in a book, not a real person. I do think Banks must have spent a whole lot of built-up credit from longtime fans like Cory for them to be so forgiving with this book.
Yeah, the point being nailed into my own skull is FUCK GUY AND EVERYBODY WHO LOOKS LIKE HIM. Maybe Banks’ intended point could be that, kind of like they say that people don’t change as they age but merely become more truly themselves, terminal illness doesn’t fundamentally change anyone into a saint. I dunno, I haven’t read past Chapter Six yet, so I don’t know if there’s a Road to Damascus moment coming up for Guy (maybe stashed under his deathbed pillow), but hell, people die every goddamned day, all of us do eventually, often slowly and agonizingly, and it’s kinda dumb to assume at this late date that many of us are ever gonna learn anything from this fact.
(snort) No, there isn’t. Unless it’s in future chapters. Which of course it is, if it’s there at all. So far it’s nothing but unveiled contempt.
So much this - Donald, you have great comments in these discussions, I just want to say. Maybe the sole explanation for how they remained friends is that very stuntedness - they can’t make any others, because they’re not very good friends to begin with?
On reflection, it’s really making me wonder what the book is, really - a last chance for Banks to bluster on about his hobby horses? A love letter - or hate letter - of some kind to some friends he had?
Wait… I can’t even remember there BEING a bit about mobile phones. Um, can someone refresh me?
I think Doctorow hit on it (hat tip to Chris for linking that review)
Looking at it from the lens of Banks revisiting his own favorite works, his old chummy characters, it is a reunion of lifelong friends. And for someone who’s been reading Banks for as long as Doctorow, the familiarity and allusions to those other works probably has a whiff of nostalgic comfort.
It wasn’t my cup of tea, but this was the first I’d ever paid any mind to Banks.
Are you sure you stirred it correctly?
Oh lord, seriously. 
I’m starting to get the impression that Haze ingratiates himself with the rest if the gang because he’s most obviously a total fuckup, which distracts the rest of them from self realisation. He does the party trhicks everyone else is too chicken to do.
There are definitely interesting differences in perception, though I’m not sure how much that translates to actual differences in behavior between the two countries.
Though the Puritan influence is definitely clear in some parts of the country, that’s not the whole story. I think it can largely be attributed to Hollywood; two movies in particular - The Lost Weekend and Days of Wine and Roses. Both great movies actually, and among the first widely popular films to treat alcohol addiction as a real and serious topic (it’s the primary focus of both movies - and they both involve AA eventually, The Lost Weekend in particular basically starting that now-ubiquitous trope in film and TV).
After that, the more classic and “British-like” alcohol culture (at least, what you see in British film and TV) which had been a huge part of Hollywood movies (e.g. The Thin Man series) even after the production code was enacted mostly disappeared from screen.
Nowadays, very few people in the US have liquor around all the time. Well, at least if they do, they don’t automatically offer it to everyone all the time (“can I get you a drink?” mostly means water or soda now). It obviously varies a lot but to me and I think to most people I associate with, it would seem very odd to do that, though it was perfectly normal in the 60s and earlier (and even though the people I associate with are people who enjoy nicely made cocktails, craft beer, all that stuff; although I rarely drink myself - like Donald, the taste just doesn’t work for me).
But, many, many Americans are crazy for alcohol. It seems to me that popular perception is if you mainly drink beer you’re not really an alcoholic. That, along with this:
might both have to do with the drinking age of 21 here, which seems to me to encourage binge drinking and other bad habits in young people (which they then keep later), and the kind of low-brow sports etc. culture (which is obviously very similar in the UK, just with a different kind of football).
Another factor might be the societal safety net, which is much more robust and useful in the UK (I know it’s not perfect, but at least it exists), including health care.
Australia has some of the best slang, especially alcohol-related (no surprise) - I like to jokingly refer to cans of beer as “ice-cold tubes” of beer sometimes, which I heard in an Australian movie. “Slabs” is great too.
Well, it certainly hasn’t happened up to chapter 5, but I haven’t read ahead. There was a significant amount of setup I think in chapter 1 regarding Kit having a smartphone that Guy doesn’t know about, so I’d be surprised if it doesn’t come into play at all later.
@Raita (that quote was in reply to you) - I read this scene as odd and improbable as written, but I took it as having something to do with them both being rather inebriated - they both definitely took coke, and I’ll assume they both smoked some of the weed too, and I assume alcohol (I don’t remember if it said explicitly whether they were drinking or not). They were clearly in the coming-down phase, but with alcohol and with weed especially the effects can last longer than you might think. We also have to remember here that Kit is the narrator, and he’s proven unreliable in certain ways. His perception of what happened - especially if he was high - is likely not that realistic, and may mostly play off of his fantasy of what he wish happened. Like Elusis wrote earlier:
Kit knows they didn’t have sex, but might not be 100% sure of what actually happened, so he filled in the blanks from his fantasy.
I’ve heard drug/alcohol addiction called something you just have. I think actually this is part of the AA/NA “teachings” - an explanation for why total abstinence is necessary, the thinking being that if you have just one drink, you’re inevitably going to finish the bottle because you’re an alcoholic and there’s nothing you can do about it except abstain. That sort of behavior gets frequently depicted in TV and movies (including the movies I mentioned earlier in this very long comment, and very often in political dramas for some reason).
I don’t speak from personal experience but that kind of all-or-nothing thinking seems dangerous in light of this kind of addiction. I could be wildly wrong, but it seems like learning moderation and working on willpower (which I recognize is very, very difficult) might be more effective. I don’t believe that you can just choose not to have the problem any more as Hol does, depending on the person I guess.
But anyway I wanted to point out that the way they consider addiction to be a “disease” is not really what you think of as a disease, but is more like a brain disorder where an addict’s brain is simply wired differently… which should sound familiar. I’m willing to believe that’s true (though I don’t know if the science actually backs that up), but I think if so, it shouldn’t be called a disease. The way you treat a disease is relatively short-term, and the disease goes away. If it’s permanent (like autism), you’re not really treating anything, you’re learning to cope with the symptoms.
There’s obviously a huge problem with misperceptions surrounding addiction (just as there is with autism) and I think the sort of understanding and philosophy that has permeated throughout popular perception stemming from AA (and movie/TV writers who latched on to it not understanding its ineffectiveness) is largely to blame. And I think that calling it a “disease” might even affect popular perception of other things, including autism, which many do consider to be a disease.
