The Business
by Iain Banks

Contrary to its hubristic titular claim, Iain Banks’s new novel is not the business. It’s not the bee’s, and it’s not the dog’s. It is, sadly, another lazy and half-finished yarn by an author once capable of fearsomely glittering invention (see Complicity and Use of Weapons) who now appears to be in lamentable decline.

The narrator of The Business is a woman, Kathryn Telman. Fortunately, she is a woman who is obsessed with techy gadgets and listens to various, tediously enumerated pop acts (Sheryl Crow, Garbage, Alanis Morrisette), so she is vocally indistinguishable from your average male Banks narrator. The one difference is that she is swimming in money. This is because she is an executive in the Business, a secret global organisation which for a few thousand years has been amassing wealth and influence. Now the Business wants political muscle. To this end it seeks to acquire, wholesale, a state of its own, and hence a seat in the United Nations. Kathryn is dispatched to the fictional Tibetan state of Thulahn to oversee the negotiations for its purchase.

The novel’s one idea is a nice inversion of the historical conspiracy theories so expertly parodied by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum. It’s all true, Banks suggests: there really is a Templar-like society that pulls the puppet-strings of world affairs. Employees of the Business, like the victims of Scientology, are promoted to new “levels” and become privy to higher revelations about its affairs. But the difference is that the aims of the Business seem thoroughly benign. It is perhaps an embryonic form of the Culture, the enlightened galactic society in Banks’s far superior science-fiction novels.

Disappointingly, Banks doesn’t do anything much with this intriguing cabal beyond sketching in a few of its characters and the fast cars they drive. The novel becomes irremediably broken-backed at the halfway mark, when what could still have developed into an exciting techno-thriller suddenly turns into a soppy paean to biodiversity. We are harangued in cod-poetical italics about all the plants and animals that live among the snowy peaks. Kathryn has some boring dreams, her motivations go haywire, and the story careers straight into the most unlikely ending available — simply, it seems, and as the mountaineer once said, because it’s there.

The novel’s very literary mode is self-contradictory. Kathryn at one point asks the reader: “So why have you never heard of us, until now?” This implies directly that after the end of the novel, she somehow makes her story public. But Banks just isn’t interested in the presumably immense problems that would cause to his fictional Business. The only reason for him using a first-person narrator is so that he can get away with fatuous emotional shorthand, such as the entire sentence “Guilt about that”, rather than having to worry at characterisation.

There are other wounding incoherencies. Kathryn’s initial role in the company, for instance, is as overseer of investment opportunities in new technology. But when someone produces a portable video-disc player she responds as if she’s never seen one before, and her constant companion in aeroplanes is a far from cutting-edge Walkman. She is further made to be inconsistently dim about silicon-chip manufacture and telecommunications, just so the author can helicopter in some faceless experts to deliver tracts of expository dialogue.

Iain Banks is not yet completely boring: I counted two quite interesting thoughts in this book. But any writer who can have his supposedly sympathetic heroine say “if I may toot my own tuba a tad”, or even more excruciatingly, “You’re way up ordure inlet with no means of non-manual hydro-kinetic propulsion”, needs a hefty kick from his editor. Perhaps, at the same time, Banks’s publishers might leave off gleefully counting their profits for a moment to suggest gently that he spend more than three months writing his next novel.