{"id":736,"date":"2013-08-26T12:09:32","date_gmt":"2013-08-26T20:09:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=736"},"modified":"2013-08-26T12:09:32","modified_gmt":"2013-08-26T20:09:32","slug":"review-the-quarry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/08\/26\/review-the-quarry\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Quarry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>
\n The Quarry<\/a> by Iain Banks<\/a>
\n My rating: 4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

Kit has Asperger\u2019s, we\u2019re led to believe, and outright told at one point, but it comes across merely as a device for narration, not an actual useful character description. Kit\u2019s being called \u201csomewhere between a genius and an utter\u201d only allows for a kind of commentary on commentary\u2014a character who gets to say why he says the things he says\u2014 using words and phrases that do not contribute to a conversation, but just keep it flowing. The end result is a first-person narrator who comes across as a third-person narrator.<\/p>\n

Well, so what, right? Here\u2019s a novel called <The Quarry<\/i>, about a weekend in the last few months of man dying of cancer, surrounded by visiting friends, old mates from their college dates. A crumbling house on the edge of a gigantic hole, a lot of booze, and a search for a missing tape with \u201cembarrassing.\u201d contents. Have you got enough symbols to play with yet?<\/p>\n

I just got the feeling, reading this, that Banks throws out all these ham-handed symbols just so the reader could grapple onto them, leaving him free to explore, without agenda, a deeper, less cut-and-dried story. What it means to be faced with one\u2019s own mortality, fallibility, the inconsequence of existence. It\u2019s not merely that the universe is hostile and indifferent, it\u2019s that the universe is shitty and at the same time pointless. <\/p>\n

And the only way to narrate this exploration (not discovery) is via a matter-of-fact voice. But a third-person narration makes the author himself susceptible to being judged as having a moral point of view, so make the narrator a first person, someone who experiences and is effected by the action, and who, being autistic, does not judge.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve only ever read one other book by Banks, ages ago, so I am probably completely off the mark here. But I\u2019ll say this: 300+ pages, set mostly in one house over the course of a weekend, where, more or less, nothing really happens, and I do not regret reading it.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Quarry by Iain Banks My rating: 4 of 5 stars Kit has Asperger\u2019s, we\u2019re led to believe, and outright told at one point, but it comes across merely as a device for narration, not an actual useful character description. Kit\u2019s being called \u201csomewhere between a genius and an utter\u201d only allows for a kind … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: The Quarry”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-bS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":737,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions\/737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}