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Iain Banks, The Business

Mittlerweile scheint es mir, als wäre Iain Banks besonders gut bei der Beschreibung von Organisationen oder Familien, Mikrokosmen wie Kleinstädten oder Sekten, und dieses Buch über ein im Hintergrund agierendes, aber überaus mächtiges Weltunternehmen, das nur lapidar 'The Business' genannt wird (bei Gelegenheit muss ich mal nachsehen, ob und wie das übersetzt wurde) und im Großen und Ganzen kein schreckenerregender Mogul zu sein scheint wie beispielsweise irgendeiner der gegenwärtigen Top Five sondern eher von rein pragmatischen Geschäftssinn betrieben wird, ist das keine Ausnahme. Und obwohl mir im Nachhinein klar ist, dass die Ich-Erzählerin nur weiblich sein konnte, bin ich Banks doch sehr dankbar für Katie Telmans starken und einnehmenden Charakter. Zum Ende wurde die Geschichte so spannend, dass ich die letzten 30% in einem Rutsch zuende las. Besser geht es nicht. Obwohl - ein paar Bände aus Banks' Oeuvre fehlen mir ja noch.

Turdly, we practise total financial transparency: any company officer may inspect the accounts of any other. This has become much easier technically in recent years, of course, with the advent of computers and electronic mail, but the principle has been around since the first century AD. Its effect is to make corruption as a rule either unachievable or only possible at a trivial scale.
The main downside is complication. This was the case when people had to open up cabinets full of wax tablets for inspection, when they had to unroll papyrus scrolls, when they had to unchain books from counting-room clerks, when they had to order old ledgers from storage, when they had to search through microfiches, and it is certainly the case now with computerised accounts; over two millenia, every technological advance that promised to make the task easier has been closely and seemingly inevitably accompanied by an increase in the complexity of the figures and systems involved.
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'.. I think it is wonderfully romantic to marry for love alone, but I have seen so many people do so and live to regret it. There are some lucky people, no doubt, for whom everything works out just perfectly, but I have never met any. For most people, I think, to marry for love is to marry ... at the summit, as it were. It must be downhill from there on. To marry for other reasons, with one's head and not just one's heart, is to embark on a different sort of journey, uphill, I suppose,' he said, looking embarrassed. 'My goodness, I do not choose my metaphors so well, do I? But it is a journey which offers the hope that things will become gradually better and better between the people concerned.'
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A superstitious person would have thought that somehow the little carving had wanted to stay in Thulahn. A Freudian ... well, never mind what a Freudian would have thought. Luce had asked me once was I a Freudian? I'd told her no, I was a Schadenfreudian.

(Iain Banks, The Business, 1999)