This was Iain Banks' last book. Started before his cancer was diagnosed, it is coincidentally about a man dying of cancer. He lives in a ramshackle old house with his son, Kit, who is 18, a whiz at online role-playing games with a huge reputation in the fan community, and is firmly on the autistic spectrum (and he knows it). Kit also does not know who his mother is because he was abandoned on his father's doorstep as a baby, and his father has kept the identity of his mother from him. (If he even knows, or remembers, it himself.) The house is perched on the lip of a huge and very symbolic quarry which is eating into the landscape; whether it will fall down of its own accord before the quarry owners exercise their purchase options to claim the land the house stands on is something of a moot point.

In this respect, the book is immediately reminiscent of Banks' remarkable debut novel, 'The Wasp Factory'. Bookending a career with two outwardly similar novels is, of course, sheer coincidence. Other Banksian tropes emerge. The action of the novel takes place over a long weekend when a group of Guy's (the father's) old university friends turn up for a reunion/early wake. But they also have come to look for a lost videotape, which they all fear might damage their current lives or careers due to its embarrassing content.

As in a lot of other Banks novels, the tape is a McGuffin. The description is also a little misleading; these "old university friends" are only from some twenty years before, and so none of them are "old" as such. Of course, Guy isn't going to get much older; whilst Kit harbours lustful thoughts about Holly, the one of the friends who displays any real affection towards him. (Of course, to an 18-year-old, 35+ seems impossibly old and gives him cause for concern over the appropriateness of his feelings...)

The weekend proceeds pretty much as expected; drink and other substances are taken, and there are revelations a-plenty. The main problem for me were the characters; only Kit and Holly are in any way sympathetic; the rest are uniformly dislikeable. Even Guy elicits little genuine sympathy from most of the other characters, and it quickly becomes fairly clear why that is. He was never a nice person; his illness has made him worse.

A secondary problem I have with this book is the setting, a fictional town in the north of England. Banks' mainstream novels have had a variety of settings, quite a few of them fictional - Gallanach in 'The Crow Road', Garbadale in 'The Steep Approach to Garbadale' and the eponymous 'Stonemouth'; but these have all been well-located enough for the reader to have a good idea of where they would be if they really existed. But Bewford, the university city where the friends all met, is described as being in "the Pennines" but the location is really quite vague; and given that Banks' novels are all well located in place, I found this a bit off-putting.

But you don't read Banks for travelogue. What you should expect from a Banks novel is wit and an insight into a set of lives. These things are present in the novel, though like his previous book 'Stonemouth', the wit isn't laugh-out-loud stuff. And although there is plenty of discussion about, and criticism of, the characters' different political persuasions, Iain reserves his shouty speech for the end. By the time he wrote the last chapters of this novel, Banks had been diagnosed, and he puts a chillingly angry speech onto Guy's mouth about his own views on life, death, moving from one to the other and those people and systems who try to tell you that they have the answer to it all. You may guess that this makes uneasy reading for anyone who has beliefs; Banks had none, and was unafraid to say so.

The McGuffin is found, and proves to be truly be a McGuffin (rarely is this device so patently uncovered). The weekend proves life-changing for most of the characters. This book isn't the most tightly-plotted novel, but there is a resolution of sorts for Kit, one which I for one found satisfying. This is not the book I would have wanted Iain Banks to end his career with - he himself said that he would have wished to go out on "a stonking great big Culture romp" - but we must be satisfied with what we have. I shall return to this book, as I shall with all of Iain's novels; but it will be with more sorrow than joy. ( )

Plus a half star for pulling off a decent first person narrative - which I love when it's done well. I missed the action that the author is so good at - even towards the end I was expecting an exciting turn of events to spiral away chaotically - but my expectations are my problem. ( )

Plus a half star for pulling off a decent first person narrative - which I love when it's done well. I missed the action that the author is so good at - even towards the end I was expecting an exciting turn of events to spiral away chaotically - but my expectations are my problem. ( )

This was Banks’s last novel and is about a man dying of cancer, so questions about art and life were inevitable after Banks announced he had terminal cancer. The novel is actually narrated from the point of view of the dying man’s son, who has, I think, Asperger’s Syndrome. It is, like most of Banks’s non-M novels, a story based around a family secret, but the secret in this case is actually pretty irrelevant. A group of people who shared a house during their student days have returned to the house, where the oldest of their number now lives, and is in the end stages of terminal cancer. There is mention of a videocassette – the group fancied themselves as avant garde film-makers at university – which none of them want to see the light of day, but neither dying Guy nor his son Kit, know what’s happened to the tape. Meanwhile, a few home truths are aired, a few minor secrets from the past are let out of the bag, and the mystery of the identity of Kit’s mother is occasionally floated past the reader, only for it to be dealt with in passing at the end. The scene where the group view the sought-after videocassette is also pretty much a damp squib. The novel is narrated by Kit, and I don’t know enough about Asperger’s or autism to just how accurately or effectively he is portrayed. Other than that, Banks always wore his politics on his sleeve, and they’re out in full force in The Quarry. It’s far from his best novel, mainstream, science fiction or both, although it does come across as an angrier novel than his earlier ones (except perhaps for Complicity) – but that’s hardly surprising given what the Tories have been doing to the UK since 2010. Banks’s death makes The Quarry a more uncomfortable read than it would have been otherwise – the politics were clearly intended to make for uncomfortable reading for some, but the cancer aspect of the plot, sadly, overshadows it. Still, it’s a Bank novel, so it’s a given that it’s worth reading. ( )

A little redious maybe pretentious ( )