Dead Air

[inulro]

This week, I read Iain Banks' Dead Air.

I remain unconvinced. The prose is undoubtedly excellent, the funny bits are indeed laugh-out-loud funny, there are a few genuinely clever ideas (his response to the Holocaust deniers, for instance), and the bit near the end is truly edge-of-your-seat suspenseful, but the lack of plot just didn't work for me. It felt like a half decent sub-plot extended to 400 pages, and I kept waiting for the real content to cut in. The main character felt a bit like a re-run of the main character in Complicity (from what me and my 2-second memory can recall).

It didn't suck, and reading it wasn't a waste of time, but it was still a bit disappointing.

I'm also unimpressed by the new edition of Banks's books. Both the cover and the paper are of far inferior quality to the rest of my Banks paperbacks. Buying an Iain (M) Banks book has always been a special event for me, even second hand, so the new cheap and nasty quality is quite a letdown.

Comments

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Oh dear.

The lack of a plot seems to be an increasing occurrence. I'm used to it in the sci-fi, where the technology sort of takes over anyway, but he seems to be running on empty for fiction now.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Oddly enough, I really liked the most recent sci-fi one, Look to Windward and therefore had high hopes for the next non-sci-fi one. I'm also one of the few people who thought The Business was really good stuff.