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Iain Banks, The Steep Approach to Garbadale

Noch eine wirklich faszinierende Geschichte über ein großes Familienunternehmen oder besser im wahrsten Sinne des Wortes Imperium, in dem einer der Vertreter der dritten Generation bei dem Versuch sich abzukoppeln mehr Skelette im Schrank findet als er verkraften kann. Nachdem ich mich erstmal in die ganzen verzweigten Verhältnisse eingelesen hatte, konnte ich das Buch kaum noch aus der Hand legen.

"..I've spent my life waiting for my life to start. It's as though one needs permission from somebody - parents, God, a committee of one's peers; I don't bloody know - to finally take responsibility for one's own actions, one's own life. Only the permission never comes, and gradually - well, gradually for me, I can't speak for others; maybe their realisation comes in some sort of sudden revelation and a blinding light or whatever - gradually you realise taht it never will come, that the way you've lived your life, stumbling through it, winging it half the time, is all thee really is, all there ever was. I feel cheated because of that. I feel, sometimes, like I've cheated myself though I can't see how I could have done much different. And I have a horrible feeling that even if I had a time machine and could go back to visit my younger self to warn him, or at least advise him about all this, he'd - I'd have no idea what my future self was talking about. I'd think he was an idiot. I'd ignore him. I'd ignore myself."
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Sophie was his religion, he thought, with a kind of shock. He'd built a temple round her image, her idol, her fixed, unchanging, incorruptible icon. The worship of that symbol had become what mattered, rather than the girl as she actually was or the woman she'd become. She represented his faith in his own trueness of spirit, his ability to keep on believing in something. If he could believe in his love for Sophie, he could believe he was a good person, a worthwhile person, a decent man. He was an atheist and a secularist, but now he had to confront his own idiot faith, this slightly mad belief system that he'd carried with him all this time, and accept it for the nonsense it was. Maybe it had been a useful nonsense, in a state of relative ignorance, the way conventional religions could be, but it was still nonsense.
He'd once characterised religions as reason abatement societies. Shit, he hadn't realised with what authority he'd been speaking. Maybe he owed Tom Fromlax an apology.
In his mind, he could feel a particularly non-violent and well-spoken mob politely storming the temple complex that held the graven image of Sophie. He could almost hear the wailing of the priests, the lamentations of the faithful as the great washed, the well-scrubbed crowd of intellectuals - waving scrolls (closely argued, ink still damp) rather than burning torches - defiled the sacred ground with their presence and their doubt and their faithless, argumentative lack of certainty.
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Sometimes it seemed that all that ever went on was each new generation trying to fix the mistakes and problems caused by the previous one - not to mention those accumulated via still earlier forebears. And this never really seemed to be possible, not as a finished result. It always seemed to be required and it certainly was always worth trying, but if you set your heart on fully achieving such a goal, you were bound to be disappointed.
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(Iain Banks, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, 2005)