15, WG14, NG1, M12, E14, / NG1, F3, MF0, D1, Frz0, B1, NA0, C0

Iain Banks, Dead Air

Auch dieses Buch über den zugleich zynischen und doch verletzlichen, großmäuligen RJ in der Zeit kurz nach 9-11 in London, der es am Ende schafft, sich aus einer haarsträubenden Situation herauszuwinden, wollte schon länger wiedergelesen werden. Jetzt endlich war es soweit und das Wiederlesen war wieder ein Fest, vor allem am Ende. Wunderbar auch die reinen Dialogabschnitte, die trotzdem so klar sind, und die Radioszenen, immer wieder faszinierend.

25, WG18, M13, E23 / NG6, F12, D2, B1, NA0, C0

Iain Banks, The Quarry

Nach sieben Jahren wurde es wirklich Zeit, Iain Banks' letztes Buch wiederzulesen. Abgesehen von dem sich ständig aufdrängendem Gedanken, dass dies sein letztes Buch war mit der ewigen Spekulation wieviel aus eigener Erfahrung verwendet wurde, die ich einfach nicht unterdrücken kann, war es wieder ein faszinierendes und vor allem gegen Ende hin, als Kit das Video endlich findet, spannendes Lesen. Und einmal mehr fand ich es erstaunlich, wie sympathisch und liebenswert der Icherzähler hier wirkt, trotz - oder gerade wegen? seines Aspergersyndroms.
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Lastly, it has occurred to me that the person who initiates a random jam probably never knows what chaos they've caused behind them. I've seen six random jams over the last eight years - three in the last eighteen months as I've adjusted the times of my walks to make witnessing them more likely - and it took me a while before I realised that they might stand as a symbol for life in general; trivial actions leading to proliferating consequences that affect hundreds of others, but which we never know about.
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'Who fucking does want to die?' he says, staring up at me. 'Until something in your life gets so bad you feel it's the only thing that'll stop the fucking awfulness?' He looks away, into the darkness at the far end of the room. 'I'm scared to fucking death, Kit. Not of anything; not of hell or any bollocks like that; just at the thought of not fucking being any more. It shouldn't be frightening - it's just returning to the state you were in before you were born, before you were even conceived - but it is, whether you like it or not, like your brain can't accept it's not the most important thing in the whole fucking world, the whole fucking universe, and it's terrified that when it goes, everything does.'
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'Everything,' Hol say, '- print, radio, television, computers, digitalisation, the internet - makes a difference, but nothing makes all the difference. We build better lives and a better world slowly, painstakenly, and there are no short cuts, just lots of improvements; most small, a few greater, none ... decisive.'

(Iain Banks, The Quarry, 2013)

20, NG5, M10, E19 / WG15, F10, D1, B1, NA0, C0

Iain Banks, Walking on Glass

Dies war der letzte mir unbekannte (Nicht-SF) Band von Iain Banks und vielleicht der, der sich am schwierigsten erschloss. Aber spätestens im zweiten Drittel begannen die drei so unterschiedlichen Handlungsstränge mich zu faszinieren, vor allem der dritte mit dem seltsamen Schloss am Ende der Welt mit den zwei einsamen Spielern. Rätselhaft, absurd und tragisch - und am Schluss auch etwas beklemmend.

19, WG15, M9, E18 / NG4, F10, D1, B1, NA0, C0

Iain Banks, The Crow Road

Eigentlich konnte ich mich bei diesem Buch nur an den Anfang und den Schluß erinnern - die Szene mit dem einzigartigem Morsecode wird wohl immer meine Lieblingsszene bleiben - aber das machte das Wiederlesen noch schöner. Ich fand es erstaunlich, wie liebenswert Prentice trotz all seinem albernen Anspruchsdenken und jugendlicher Unreife durch das Buch bleibt.

'Why?' Kenneth said, trying not to sound angry. 'Just because we feel that way? One wee daft species, on one wee daft planet circling one wee daft star in one wee daft galaxy; us? Barely capable of crawling into space yet; capable of feeding everybody but ... nyaa, can't be bothered? Just because we think there must be something more and a few crazy desert cults infect the world with their cruel ideas; that's what makes the soul a certainty and heaven a must?'
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God, what did any of it matter, in the end? You lived; you died. You were as indistinguishable from a distance as one of these blades of grass, and who was to say more important? Growing, surrounded by your kin, you out-living some, some out-living you. You didn't have to adjust the scale much, either, to reduce us to the sort of distant irrelevance of this bedraggled field. The grass was lucky if it grew, was shone upon and rained upon, and was not burned, and was not pulled up by the roots, or poisoned, or buried when the ground was turned over, and some bits just happened to be on a line that humans wanted to walk on, and so got trampled, broken, pressed flat, with no malice; just effect.
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Somehow all her dreams had disappeared. It seemed to her now that all she had ever had had been the dream of having dreams; the goal of having goals one day, once she had made her mind up what it was she wanted.
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I suppose we all want to pass on our beliefs; they seem even more our own than the genes we transmit ... but maybe they are largely inherited too, even if sometimes what you inherit is the exact opposite - the reversed image of what was intended.
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There was no such continuation; it just didn't work that way, and there should even be a sort of relief in the comprehension that it didn't. We continue in our children, and in our works and in the memories of others; we continue in our dust and ash. To want more was not just childish, but cowardly, and somehow constipatory, too. Death was change; it led to new chances, new vacancies, new niches and opportunities; it was not all loss.
The belief that we somehow moved on to something else - whether still recognisably ourselves, or quite thoroughly changed - might be a tribute to our evolutionary tenacity and our animal thirst for life, but not to our wisdom. That saw a value beyond itself; in intelligence, knowledge and wit as concepts - wherever and by whoever expressed - not jsut in its own personal manifestation of those qualities, and so could contemplate its own annihilation with equanimity, and suffer it with grace; it was only a sort of sad selfishness that demanded the continuation of the individual spirit in the vanity and frivolity of a heaven.
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(Iain Banks, The Crow Road, 1992)

16, NG3, M7, E16 / WG13, F9, D0, NA0, B0, C0

Iain Banks, Canal Dreams

Das ist der vorletzte von Iain Banks' Fiction-Bänden, die ich noch nicht gelesen hatte. Jetzt fehlt nur noch 'Walking on Glass', das ich mir wohl demnächst zulege, oder auch aufspare, mal sehen. Bei diesem Buch fand ich es etwas schwierig hineinzukommen, aber spätestens nach der Mitte packte es mich. Besonders Hisakos Vergangenheit und die Geschichte des Cellos und sein bestürzendes Ende, und der erbarmungslose beinahe automatische Rachefeldzug am Schluß hielten mich in Bann.

15, WG13, M6, E15 / NG2, F9, D0, NA0, B0, C0

Iain Banks, Espedair Street

Irgendwie dachte ich, es wäre noch nicht so lange her, dass ich dieses Buch über einen schottischen Rockstar und Songwriter in den 70ern zum ersten Mal las, aber tatsächlich ist es fast auf den Tag genau 10 Jahre her - mymy. Auf jeden Fall machte Daniel "Weird" Weirs Geschichte genausoviel Spaß, wenn nicht mehr, und ging mir genauso so nahe. Dies könnte, neben 'Dead Air' sogar mein Lieblingsbuch von ihm sein.
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Maybe I used up allmy dreams in my songs so that I had none left for myself. That would be ironic, almost tragic, because at the time I thought I had perfect control; I thought I was being clever, using my songs, using my dreams, to find out more about myself ... a shame, really, that what I found out just wasn't worth the finding.
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'My heart bleeds for you,' I told him. 'My bladder leaks for you; my pituitary secretes for you.'
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There's this sloth in the jungle walking from one tree to another, and it's mugged by a gang of snails, and when the police ask the sloth if it could identify any of its attackers, it says, 'I don't know; it all happened so quickly...'
And that's the way I feel. Everything seems to take about the right amount of time at the time, but later ... Jeez, where did it all go? You look back, and sometimes you think, Did I really do all that?, and other times you think, Is that all there is? Is that all I managed to get done?
We are never satisfied. Don't even know the meaning of the word.
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We join armies, we enter monasteries or nunneries, we adopt the party line, we believe what we read in ancient books or shit newspapers or what we're told by plastic politicians, and all we're ever trying to do is give somebody else the responsibility for thinking. Let us enter this order, obey that one; never mind we end up being told to massacre or torture or simply believe the most absurd thing we've ever heard; at least it's not all our fault.
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(Iain Banks, Espedair Street, 1987)

Neu gelesen: (als E-Book)

Iain Banks, A Song of Stone

Ich brauchte ein bißchen länger für das Buch, weil mir über die Feiertage einfach die Zeit fehlte und darüber hinaus der größtenteils der zweiten Person gehaltene Erzählstil mehr Aufmerksamkeit erforderte. Und ich konnte einfach das Gefühl es schon einmal gelesen zu haben nicht abschütteln, obwohl es keine Passage gab, die mir definitiv vertraut war. Aber obwohl oft sehr bedrückend ist es ein faszinierendes Buch, wie alles von Banks.

I am cells; no more, I think. This present assemblage - bones, flesh and blood - is more complicated than most such gatherings to be found on the world's rude surface, and my quorum of sense-holding plasm may be greater than other animals can muster, but the principle's the same, and all our extra wisdom does is let us know the truth of our own insignificance more fully. My body, my whole dazed being, seems like little more than a pile of autumn leaves, blown and bunched by a swirling wind and trapped, coralled by a chance of ancillary geography into a localised drift. Of what greater consequence am I than that temporary heap of leaves, that collection of cells, collectively dead or dying? How much more do any of us signify?
Yet still we do ascribe a greater pain and joy and weight of import to ourselves than to any mere clump of matter, and feel it too. We seduce ourselves with our own images, perhaps. The leaf dryly tumbling along the road is not really like a refugee.

(Iain Banks, A Song of Stone, 1997)