"If I'd known it was going to be my last book, I'd have been quite disappointed that I'm going out with a relatively minor piece."
The Quarry is about somebody dying. The terrible irony is that when he was writing this book, Iain Banks did not know that he was dying. In the event he died soon after publication, after writing close to 30 novels, some literary, some science-fiction and some gothic. His many admirers will miss him; perhaps they will agree that this is a relatively minor piece compared, say, with the sublime The Crow Road and The Wasp Factory.
While, by all accounts, Banks died with great courage and dignity, the central character, Guy, seen by his autistic son, Kit, is raging against the dying of the light. He is not just raging, he is voluble, vicious and foul-mouthed. His anger and his contempt are sprayed without discrimination on his friends on popular culture, even on his son.
The book centres on a long weekend at Guy's dilapidated house, soon to be sold to the adjoining quarry, convened by his friends as a farewell. These friends were all together at Bewford University, a fictional version of Durham. They represent a cross section of university graduates, but they seem to be emblematic rather than fully drawn. Their conversations quickly become tedious.
As Guy rants, his dutiful if odd – his own description – son is wonderfully solicitous towards him, even to the extent of wiping his bottom for him. The description of the final stages of his cancer are harrowing and unflinching, even unbearable.
The problem with the novel is that the friends from uni are not clearly differentiated, and their dialogue on this awful weekend doesn't ring true; it's relentlessly declamatory, aggressive and critical. As the weekend lurches on, the friends also attack one another woundingly, and, late in the book, literally. At times it's a sort of provincial Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Now in their mid-40s, they are all hellbent on recreating their halcyon student days; they drink huge amounts and they snort cocaine and light joints when they aren't drinking.
At university the friends made short films – one of them has gone on to be an impoverished freelance film critic – but their lives have not gone well. As one of them says, none of them would have chosen the lives they are now leading. They know that somewhere in Guy's house is an old video which they want to find because it contains some very compromising material, possibly pornographic. Paul, the most successful of the friends, gives Kit money to encourage him to find this tape. He is an aspirant politician, so he is particularly keen to have it destroyed.
Eighteen-year-old Kit is autistic; autism is perhaps a rather overdone device in contemporary fiction. Anyway, Kit plays war games on his computer constantly, has extremely rigorous routines around the house and is flustered – for example – if the front door bell rings more than once. has never told him who his mother is, and he suspects that one of the women present might be that mother. A virgin, Kit makes some awkward, and rebuffed, advances on one of the women. In fact as the voice of the novel, he is improbably articulate and his accounts of the weekend are numbingly prolix. Although this is some way from being in the first rank of of his books, Banks's many admirers will undoubtedly be grateful for the book and its occasional flashes of brilliance.
