Binarisms

John Sutherland

  • Complicity by Iain Banks
    Little, Brown, 313 pp, £15.99, September 1993, ISBN 0 316 90688 3
  • Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks
    Orbit, 496 pp, £8.99, January 1994, ISBN 1 85723 185 6

Say ‘Iain Banks’ and the person you are talking to will say ‘The Wasp Factory.’ Banks may have as much trouble getting out from under the success of his first novel as did William Golding. It was a memorable debut. The Wasp Factory provoked a moral panic in 1984. The TLS critic called it the ‘literary equivalent of the nastiest kind of juvenile delinquency’; Margaret Forster thought it less a novel than the script for a video nasty. Young male novelists routinely seek to give maximum offence. Martin Amis did so in 1975 by calling a novel Dead Babies. In The Wasp Factory Banks recounted acts of child-on-child sadism in a deadpan. Holden Caulfield monologue which suggested that serial killing was a minor rite of passage, as insignificant in adult retrospect as squeezing pimples or playing conkers:

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