Complicity

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An excellent nervy book, both cool and terrifying at its dark centre where the perfect logic of the protagonist is devoid of pity. Banks's muscular style and gruesome imagination make this a fast-moving thriller not to be missed * Daily Telegraph * No such scene exists in the film. This title and cover seem to be one more chapter in the harsh treatment this film has suffered at the hands of distributors.

Cameron Colley is an Edinburgh-based journalist with a habit for speed (both drug and motion), an obsession for computer games, and a highly developed sense of moral outrage. As a journalist, he worships the patron of all gonzos, St. Hunter S. Thompson, and his righteous indignation is expressed in print as exposes on cheap liquor, defense boondoggles, and inept judges. Of course Cameron is not without sin–no self respecting protagonist could be–and his is an adulterous affair and an abuse of substances. But he is a likable enough rogue that it would be hard to suspect him of a string of grisly revenge murders against a host of wealthy capitalists and political powermongers. We, however, get to see the story from his point-of-view, and the police don’t.An extract from the book was published in the Spring 1993 edition of the magazine Granta (#43) Best of Young British Novelists 2, ISBN 0-14-014059-X with the title Under Ice. I like it because Iain B. makes you think. He challenges your preconceptions, delights in startling you and gives you a mental workout. I like it because he invents strong, believable characters and puts them in hideous situations with storylines that are unpredictable and challenging. I like it because his dark and difficult books are clever, engaging and enjoyable to read. They put footprints all over your brain. Still, this controlling aspect of second person can have an advantage. Whereas first-person narrators tell you what they thought and did, second-person narrators tell us what we thought and did.

My body shook, my ears rang, my eyes burned, my throat was raw with the acid-bitter stench of the evaporating crude, but it was as though the very ferocity of the experience unmanned me, unmade me and rendered me incapable of telling it.

Literate, passionate and well-paced, Complicity succeeds as both an absorbing entertainment and a chilling examination of accountability in a morally bankrupt world * San Francisco Chronicle * There can be multiple viewpoints in a book, not all of which have to belong to a single character. Plus, editors’ and authors’ opinions differ as to which approach works best, and what jars and why.

The novel contains large amounts of violence, in and out of the bedroom type violence, as well as scenes of torture. Instead of simply being gratuitous, the violence creates potential for discussion, in the reader and oh, maybe some awesomely twisted book club. I have always been a fan of vigilante, greater good, moral right, and capital punishment debates, and this book at least dabbles with each of these topics, to varrying degrees. I also loved how Banks indulges in concepts like morality, greed & the darker side of human beings. He also explores the socio-economic theories of capitalism & socialism, besides dabbling a bit in political ideologies through discussions among his book's characters. That can create a sense of immediacy, but almost amnesiac dislocation. We have to discover what we think, see, know and do. And if we don’t identify with the ‘you’ – if we feel implicated rather than attached – we can be pulled out of the story rather than brought deeper into it.Point of view (POV) describes whose head we’re in when we read a book ... from whose perspective we discover what’s going on – and the smells, sounds, sights and emotions involved. I'm not a Scottish young male journo with a drug habit; this book is grim, brutal, uncompromising and convoluted ...so why do I like this so much? For that reason, consider the purpose of this narrative style and the extent to which you employ it. It might be better constrained – limited to chapters inhabited by specific viewpoint characters.