Complicity (2003)

By Iain Banks
I’m not counting this one in my tally of books for the Readathon because frankly I thought it was crap and only got up to about page 50. It starts off alternating between the activities of an unnamed murderer and the activities of a semi-junkie journalist, set somewhere in Scotland. The unnamed murderer (assuming it was all the same guy, I didn’t get far enough to find out) is very busy and had killed two people, several dogs and sexually assaulted another (person) by the time I gave up. The journalist seemed to drive around the countryside a lot getting uptight about the quality of beer in Scotland, smoking, drinking whiskey and sniffing one of those white powders, I forget which, to keep him awake and hanging around in telephone boxes waiting for some secret source to call him about something. By page 50 there was still no apparent connection between the two although obviously there must have been, unless the author was trying to be all post-modern or something.

In the end it was all getting a bit sordid for me – and to top it all off I thought it was pretty badly written, relying way too much on shock value. I won’t be picking up any more Iain Banks books unless they come with a very good recommendation!!

Rating: 0 out of 10