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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)

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Iain Banks, The Bridge

Nicht mehr allzulange, und ich werde wohl alle (regulären, i.e. Nicht SF) Bücher von Iain Banks durchhaben und das ist so ewig schade. Aber noch ist es nicht so weit. Dies ist ein sehr früher Band von 1986, der aber wie sovieles von Banks absolut zeitlos wirkt und sich wohl problemlos in die Gegenwart übertragen ließe. Ziemlich verwirrend am Anfang, obwohl ich von der Synopsis ungefähr wußte worum es ging, und dann komplett faszinierend, allein von den Welten her, die der Erzähler durchirrt während sein anderes, physisches Ich im Koma liegt. Besonders die Passagen mit dem Conan-ähnlichem Barbar taten es mir an mit ihrem tiefschwarzem Humor.

Pain.Circle of pain on chest. Like a brand, a circular impression (am I a figure on a stamp, postmarked? A piece of parchment embossed with 'From the library of ...... ' Please complete:
(a) God, Esq.
(b) Nature (Mrs)
(c) C. Darwin & Sons
(d) K. Marx plc
(e) all of the above)).

Afterwards she took out tarot cards and started to tell his fortune. She was interested in the tarot, in astrology and sun signs and the prophecies of Nostradamus; she didn't believe deeply in them, they just interested her. He thought that was worse than believing in them completely.

I am a lucky bastard, he thought. I have so much, so much around me that is good. Not everything; I still want more, I probably want more than I could handle; in fact I probably want things that would only make me unhappy if I had them. But even that's OK; that's still part of the contentment.
If my life was a film, he thought, I'd roll the credits now; fade on this beatific smile in an empty room, the man on a ladder making things better, renovating, improving. Cut. Print. The End.

Oh god, back to Thatcher's Britain and Reagan's world, back to all the usual bullshit. At least the bridge was predictable in its oddness, at least it was comparatively safe.
Well, maybe not. I don't know.

I know one thing: I don't need the machine to tell me the choice. The choice is not between dream and reality; it is between two different dreams.
One is my own; the bridge and all I made of it. The other is our collective dream, our corporate imaginery. We live the dream; call it American, call it Western, call it Northern or call it just that of all we humans, all life. I was part of one dream, for good or ill, and it was half-nightmare and I almost let it kill me, but it hasn't. Yet anyway.

(Iain Banks, The Bridge, 1986)

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Robert Crais, The Two Minute Rule

Ich brauchte noch ein Buch um die Zeit zwischen 'The Night Fire' und dem neuesten Sword and Sorceress' zu überbrücken, und irgendwie bot sich das Buch als Lückenfüller an, obwohl ich es erst letztes Jahr noch wiedergelesen hatte. Irgendwas an der Story fasziniert mich einfach.

Cecil had gold fever. Men in the joint used to talk about it, trying to make their bad decisions sound romantic by comparing themselves to Old West prospectors; men who got high by draming about the pot-of-gold score taht would set them up. They thought about it until they thought about nothing else; they obsessed on it until it consumed them and they had nothing else in their lives; they became desperate for it until their desperation made them stupid. This idiot was looking at six first-degree murder hits and all he could see was the money. Holman saw his way in. He smiled.

(Robert Crais, The Two Minute Rule, 2006)

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Daniel Defoe, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Diesen absoluten Klassiker wollte ich schon so lange wieder lesen und schob es doch immer wieder vor mir her. Nachdem ich die kostenlose Ausgabe von Public Domain bei Amazon fand, gab es keine Ausrede mehr, und die E-Bookversion liest sich m.E. so viel schneller und bequemer. Ich kann garnicht mehr genau sagen, wann ich das Buch zum letzten Mal las, aber tatsächlich kamen mir beim lesen viele Sachen wieder ins Gedächtnis. Das hat sich auf jeden Fall gelohnt.

How strange a chequer-work of Providence is the life of man! and by what secret different springs are the affections hurried about, as different circumstances present! To-day we love what to-morrow we hate; to-day we seek what to-morrow we shun; to-day we desire what to-morrow we fear, nay even tremble at the apprehensions of. This was exemplified in me, at this time, in the most lively manner imaginable; for I, whose only affliction was that I seemed banished from human socienty, that I was alone, circumscribed by the boundless ocean, cut off from mankind, and condemned to what I call silent life; that I was as one whom Heaven thought not worthy to be numbered among the living, or to appear among the rest of His creatures; that to have seen one of my own species would have seemed to me a raising me from death to life, and the greatest blessing that Heaven itself, next to the supreme blessing of salvation, could bestow; I say, that I should now tremble at the very apprehensions of seeing a man, and was ready to sink into the ground at but the shadow or silent appearenace of a man having set his foot in the island.

It put me upon reflecting how little repining there would be among mankind at any condition of life if people would rather compare their condition with those that were worse, in order to be thankful, than be always comparing them with those which are better, to assist their murmurings and complainings.

(Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719)

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Iain Banks, Stonemouth

Das vorletzte (nicht SF) Buch von Banks erwies sich wieder als hochgradig faszinierend, so dass es mir wirklich leidtat als ich zum Ende kam, obwohl das Drama am Schluß natürlich wieder entsetzlich spannend war. Gerade bei der Beschreibung von solchen Mikrokosmen wie hier die Kleinstadt an der schottischen Küste in der zwei Familienclans den Ton angeben war Banks so außerordentlich, dass mir der Gedanke, was er noch alles hätte schreiben können mir immer wieder fast unerträglich ist.

"Everybody says kids are what it's all about, don't they? But then that just means you have kids so they can have kids and then those kids can have kids too, and so on and so on ad infinitum, and you have to stop at some point and think, Hold on, shouldn't some of it be about me, or, well, about any of the people from any of those generations? Shouldn't we have something else apart from just being a link in this chain of procreation for the sake of it?" She sighed again, arranged Hannah's hair just so. "Not as though the human race is in any danger of dying out. And we have choice now."
"No time machines, though."
"No, no time machines," she agreed. Her smile was still as beautiful as it had been.
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I suspect we all sort of secretly think our lives are like these very long movies, with ourselves as the principal characters, obviously. Only very occasionally does it occur to any one of us that all these supporting actors, cameo turns, bit players and extras around us might actually be in some sense real, just as real as we are, and that they might think that the Big Movie is really all about them, not us; that each one of them has their own film unreeling inside their own head and we are just part of the supporting cast in their story.
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I still have a vague feeling that there might be more to existence than can be experienced with our surface senses, so technically I guess I'm an agnostic, but nothing's more guaranteed to bring out my inner atheist than listening to the witterings of a holy man who thinks all the answers are already there in some book, whether it was written millenia ago or last week.
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(Iain Banks, Stonemouth, 2012)

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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)

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Iain Banks, Dead Air

Endlich wieder ein Banks - schon bei den ersten Kapiteln merkte ich wie sehr ich den Autor vermisst habe. Und dieses Buch erwies sich als noch viel besser - und vor allem spannender - als ich gedacht hatte. Vor allem im letzten Viertel, als der Radiomoderator Kenneth in so unglaublich vertrackte und haarsträubende Schwierigkeiten gerät, dass ein Happy End unmöglich erscheint, konnte ich mich kaum davon losreißen. Der nächste Banks steht schon auf dem Paperwhite bereit.

Faith is fine for poetry, for images and metaphors and art and for telling us who we are, who we've been. But when faith tries to describe the world, describe the universe, it just plain gets it wrong. Which wouldn't matter if it admitted it was wrong, but it can't, because all it's got is its unwavering certainty in its own infallibilty; the rest is smoke and mirrors, and admitting imperfection brings the whole lot tumbling down. There are no crystal spheres, and the planets are not the result of some sky god's wet dream. If that is supposed to be taken literally, the it's a lie, plain and simple. If it's a metaphor, then it has bugger all to do with the way things really work.
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'I was thinking,' she said, 'of bishops on opposing sides, and of different colours as well. Just the two of them there on the chess board, with no other pieces present.'
I nodded. I saw, now, what she meant.
'They could never connect,' I said. 'They could slide past each other for ever, but never affect. They appear to inhabit the same board, but really they don't. Not at all.'
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(Iain Banks, Dead Air, 2002)