This was Iain Banks' last book. Started before his cancer was diagnosed, it is coincidentally about a man dying of cancer. He lives in a ramshackle old house with his son, Kit, who is 18, a whiz at online role-playing games with a huge reputation in the fan community, and is firmly on the autistic spectrum (and he knows it). Kit also does not know who his mother is because he was abandoned on his father's doorstep as a baby, and his father has kept the identity of his mother from him. (If he even knows, or remembers, it himself.) The house is perched on the lip of a huge and very symbolic quarry which is eating into the landscape; whether it will fall down of its own accord before the quarry owners exercise their purchase options to claim the land the house stands on is something of a moot point.

In this respect, the book is immediately reminiscent of Banks' remarkable debut novel, 'The Wasp Factory'. Bookending a career with two outwardly similar novels is, of course, sheer coincidence. Other Banksian tropes emerge. The action of the novel takes place over a long weekend when a group of Guy's (the father's) old university friends turn up for a reunion/early wake. But they also have come to look for a lost videotape, which they all fear might damage their current lives or careers due to its embarrassing content.

As in a lot of other Banks novels, the tape is a McGuffin. The description is also a little misleading; these "old university friends" are only from some twenty years before, and so none of them are "old" as such. Of course, Guy isn't going to get much older; whilst Kit harbours lustful thoughts about Holly, the one of the friends who displays any real affection towards him. (Of course, to an 18-year-old, 35+ seems impossibly old and gives him cause for concern over the appropriateness of his feelings...)

The weekend proceeds pretty much as expected; drink and other substances are taken, and there are revelations a-plenty. The main problem for me were the characters; only Kit and Holly are in any way sympathetic; the rest are uniformly dislikeable. Even Guy elicits little genuine sympathy from most of the other characters, and it quickly becomes fairly clear why that is. He was never a nice person; his illness has made him worse.

A secondary problem I have with this book is the setting, a fictional town in the north of England. Banks' mainstream novels have had a variety of settings, quite a few of them fictional - Gallanach in 'The Crow Road', Garbadale in 'The Steep Approach to Garbadale' and the eponymous 'Stonemouth'; but these have all been well-located enough for the reader to have a good idea of where they would be if they really existed. But Bewford, the university city where the friends all met, is described as being in "the Pennines" but the location is really quite vague; and given that Banks' novels are all well located in place, I found this a bit off-putting.

But you don't read Banks for travelogue. What you should expect from a Banks novel is wit and an insight into a set of lives. These things are present in the novel, though like his previous book 'Stonemouth', the wit isn't laugh-out-loud stuff. And although there is plenty of discussion about, and criticism of, the characters' different political persuasions, Iain reserves his shouty speech for the end. By the time he wrote the last chapters of this novel, Banks had been diagnosed, and he puts a chillingly angry speech onto Guy's mouth about his own views on life, death, moving from one to the other and those people and systems who try to tell you that they have the answer to it all. You may guess that this makes uneasy reading for anyone who has beliefs; Banks had none, and was unafraid to say so.

The McGuffin is found, and proves to be truly be a McGuffin (rarely is this device so patently uncovered). The weekend proves life-changing for most of the characters. This book isn't the most tightly-plotted novel, but there is a resolution of sorts for Kit, one which I for one found satisfying. This is not the book I would have wanted Iain Banks to end his career with - he himself said that he would have wished to go out on "a stonking great big Culture romp" - but we must be satisfied with what we have. I shall return to this book, as I shall with all of Iain's novels; but it will be with more sorrow than joy. ( )

Plus a half star for pulling off a decent first person narrative - which I love when it's done well. I missed the action that the author is so good at - even towards the end I was expecting an exciting turn of events to spiral away chaotically - but my expectations are my problem. ( )

Plus a half star for pulling off a decent first person narrative - which I love when it's done well. I missed the action that the author is so good at - even towards the end I was expecting an exciting turn of events to spiral away chaotically - but my expectations are my problem. ( )

This was Banks’s last novel and is about a man dying of cancer, so questions about art and life were inevitable after Banks announced he had terminal cancer. The novel is actually narrated from the point of view of the dying man’s son, who has, I think, Asperger’s Syndrome. It is, like most of Banks’s non-M novels, a story based around a family secret, but the secret in this case is actually pretty irrelevant. A group of people who shared a house during their student days have returned to the house, where the oldest of their number now lives, and is in the end stages of terminal cancer. There is mention of a videocassette – the group fancied themselves as avant garde film-makers at university – which none of them want to see the light of day, but neither dying Guy nor his son Kit, know what’s happened to the tape. Meanwhile, a few home truths are aired, a few minor secrets from the past are let out of the bag, and the mystery of the identity of Kit’s mother is occasionally floated past the reader, only for it to be dealt with in passing at the end. The scene where the group view the sought-after videocassette is also pretty much a damp squib. The novel is narrated by Kit, and I don’t know enough about Asperger’s or autism to just how accurately or effectively he is portrayed. Other than that, Banks always wore his politics on his sleeve, and they’re out in full force in The Quarry. It’s far from his best novel, mainstream, science fiction or both, although it does come across as an angrier novel than his earlier ones (except perhaps for Complicity) – but that’s hardly surprising given what the Tories have been doing to the UK since 2010. Banks’s death makes The Quarry a more uncomfortable read than it would have been otherwise – the politics were clearly intended to make for uncomfortable reading for some, but the cancer aspect of the plot, sadly, overshadows it. Still, it’s a Bank novel, so it’s a given that it’s worth reading. ( )

A little redious maybe pretentious ( )

Iain Banks's last novel is a book of echoes. The story is a familiar one to anyone who has read Banks before: a group of old friends gather one more time after years apart; there's a guilty secret and a mystery which must be uncovered; there's a loner protagonist who....well you get the picture. Its a familiar story but there's one twist...one of the characters is dying from cancer, the disease that killed Banks.

But this is no maudlin tale of loss. Banks started this book before he was diagnosed, so it can't necessarily be seen as a response to his cancer. But he did rewrite parts once he had been diagnosed, so you get some idea of the pain and rage he felt as it spews from the mouth of the dying man in this book.

As I said there are echoes here of earlier novels, The Wasp Factory, Garbadale, Stonemouth, even Whit. Kit is a teenager with Aspergers who doesn't know who his mother is. Guy, his father, is dying of cancer and they live in an old tumbledown house at the edge of a quarry. Into this come old friends, from Guy's time on a film making course back in the 90's. Together for one last time to say goodbyes. But there's a tape....what's on it and how that affects everyone's motives is the main thrust of the book, along with Kit's attempts to deal with his father's illness and to just "fit in", which he does with help from one of the friends, Holly.

It's not a hard read. It's superbly written as always and Banks takes potshots at his usual targets: the Tory government; materialism; the lack of purpose in the current generation....but it never holds up the story.

For me it's not quite up there with Espedair Street, Complicity or even Stonemouth. But its a good book and its a crying shame that we have been robbed of any more.

( )

Originally reviewed at almightylewry.wordpress.com

I have recently been trying different authors and picked this one up, I wanted to try Iain Banks but didn’t fancy giving Matter a go, I wanted something more ………manageable. I found some great quotes in it and there was a definitely LOL moment during a few of them:

“I’m not arguing there are no decent people in the Tory party but their like sweetcorn in a turd; technically they kept their integrity but they ‘re still embedded in shit” Pg 25

This was laced with humour throughout. however the humour for me became a little uncomfortable after a while, when one of the characters was joking about his cancer, its not that it wasn’t funny and well written, I just didn’t feel comfortable laughing about the subject.

The story takes place over a long weekend, friends are gathered at a dilapidated house as a kind of last gathering for the inevitable. They are all intrigued and nervous about a tape from all of their past resurfacing, it would, as numerous characters stated have a detrimental effect on their lives in one form or another.

Told from an 18 year old sons perspective, father dying of cancer and he has Aspergers. I imagine it shows a lot of the thought processes someone displays with Aspergers, and Kit was very well developed and thoroughly interesting. All the characters were well developed and had their own quirk’s which played to the humour.

This is a fantastic portrayal of the decline cancer causes (if there is such a thing), and the emotions felt by everyone close to the situation came across as candid and varied. Thoroughly enjoyed this and will definitely be pursuing more of Banks’ work in the future. ( )

Sadly The Quarry is the last book Iain Banks ever wrote, and it is certainly a very poignant read. You can imagine him going through the same turmoil as Guy, one of the main characters who is dying of cancer.

It certainly isn’t my most favourite book by Iain (M) Banks, but it works better than some of the other non-SF books that I have read of his.

The basic premise is one of a bunch of university friends gathering for a long weekend at the house they all lived in as students, which backs onto a Quarry – hence the book title. One of their number, Guy, still lives there with his son (who is the POV character for the whole story). Guy is dying from cancer and is nearing his final stages when the gang all arrive for the weekend. The house is similarly falling apart and scheduled for demolition.


Book Review

Kit, the son, is slightly non-functional socially, although coaches well from Hol, one of the uni friends that still visits regularly. Each of those present have their own failures, weaknesses and foibles. As the weekend progresses the clues to these get more obvious. A side plot is the search for a missing tape from when the students (in the film and media studies group) made their own pastiches of well known movies on a hand held video camera almost 20 years ago.

To begin with it is barely mentioned, although there are oblique references that Kit doesn’t quite get. A couple of one to one meetings though begin to shed light on it, and it is clear that it is potentially quite embarrassing. However still low key. The tension builds and more and more is revealed until a full scale hunt for the tape is being made by everyone present.

I thought that The Quarry was fresher than his previous non-SF book Stonemouth. I enjoyed that one too, but it seemed sort of similar in many ways to The Steep Approach to Garbadale and perhaps also to Complicity. There are similarities to some of these in The Quarry also, but I thought that the characters were well worked out. Even though I know that he wrote most of it before he knew he too was dying there is still something about the way Guy is written that comes across as very much how I imagine Iain Banks would have taken it himself. This is especially true of the rants near the end of the book, which I suspect were the bit that was written after Iain Banks knew that he was dying. ( )

It's difficult to review this, or even just read it without the death of the author looming in the background. It feels like a very conventional book in the structure - a nostalgic reunion weekend, where the truth will (maybe) out...Guy's vituperous reaction to his cancer feels real, and some of his rants are viciously funny.
Overall, left with the feeling of "shit happens" ( )

This is a very good book about coming of age, friendship and loss.

Kit is an 18-year-old boy who lives with his father (who has terminal cancer) in a house that sets next to a quarry. The father has only a short while to live, and the house is to be bought by the quarry company. The story takes place over a weekend where Kit's father has invited his (the father's) six college friends for a last party.

Primary to the story is Kit's uncertainty over his prospects, since he stands to lose his home and his family (he was conceived out of wedlock, and has no idea who his mother was). Secondary storylines involve such issues as dependency, friendship, success and failure, dealing with mortality, and vulnerability.

Very heavy stuff fairly effectively dealt with - at least realistically.

An excellent read, very engaging, and well written. ( )

Awesome as always - I can't believe there will be no more books from Mr. Banks. RIP mate. ( )

This is the book Iain Banks wrote just before he died.
This is the story of 6 old Uni friends who get together just before one of them dies.
Guy is dying of cancer the other 5 pay him one last visit,Guy lives with his son Kit in the North of England. All of them spend the weekend drinking and arguing they are also looking for a missing video tape.

Book starts of well but it kind of loses momentum after a while.
Good have been better I think.
Book promises ( )

What a weird book. I must say I really didn't get the whole story, with all the father-son relationship and dying and friendship and supposed mystery of a mother. I was left completely indifferent about all of the characters and couldn't care less what happened to them. I thought I liked Iain Banks? ( )

This was an enjoyable read which I zoomed through in a couple of days, however I found it ultimately a bit disappointing. It's undoubtedly poignant and I'm glad he got it finished, but I was kind of waiting for a more shock revelation about the video tape and more of a satisfying ending. ( )

“The Quarry” is a novel focusing on the slow-paced exploits of an appealing narrator, eighteen-year-old Kit, and seven exasperatingly mean-spirited nincompoop side characters, whose rants and abrasive political views take up a copious amount of the book. Kit, a high-functioning Autistic with an avid video game fandom, lives with his abusive, foul-mouthed (and dying) father Guy in a ramshackle house on the edge of a quarry. The house is scheduled for demolition as soon as Guy kicks it and the government vacates Kit, who is wondering seriously about the probability of supporting himself after his father’s death.

Guy has cancer and isn’t expected to make it much longer. To accompany Guy in his final days- or drive him to an early grave, the more likely outcome (with friends like these, who needs enemies?) a group of Guy’s university friends come over to the water-damaged wreck of a house. I won’t go into great detail describing them for you; suffice to say they are horrible people, intellectual wannabes/ vacuous losers who aren’t really there for Guy at all.

No, what these self-righteous pricks want has nothing to do with altruism- they have their sights set on a missing videotape that allegedly contains shocking footage that nobody wants found. I was initially sucked in by the mystery of the tape, but the resolution of this plot thread was disappointing to say the least. I hate to say bad things about this novel- writer Iain Banks was dying when he wrote it and it was obviously a very personal project to him. Indeed, “The Quarry” has some very good qualities- just not enough.

You’ve got Kit’s story for starters. If you focused on Kit and cut out all the extraneous bullshit (i.e. the side character’s political crap,) you’d have one hell of book. Kit has a unique way of seeing the world due to his condition, and for every moment he was self-absorbed and painfully immature, there was another where he was charming and likable. And that’s as it should be- people with disabilities aren’t saints, and pretending they are is nothing less than careful, calculated nonsense. I’ll never look at traffic jams the same way again after hearing Kit’s wonderfully quirky take on their spiritual dimension.

Sadly, about 25% percent of “The Quarry” is simply unnecessary- long, pointless tirades haranguing the bureaucratic bullshit of just about everything. None of the characters besides Kit are remotely likable, and even the only one who serves as a friend to Kit, film critic Holly, ends up betraying him in the end. Kit wants to believe in Holly, and convinces himself she cares about him and has his best interests at heart. That’s not the point. We don’t believe in Holly. If anything, we believe she should get her free-loading ass out of Kit’s house.

The creepiness of Kit’s indecent interest in mom-figure Hol didn’t even bother me. I just found parts of the book terribly dry and didactic. The character’s scathing monologues are more exhausting and annoying than affecting- does anyone actually talk like that? And do we really want to have anything to do with these terrible, and more to the point, completely uninteresting people?

Iain Banks’ first novel, “The Wasp Factory,” was great, and there really are moments that shine in “The Quarry.” I like Kit’s way of dissecting the fine points of the everyday niceties that don’t come naturally to him, although sometimes he seemed more socially intuitive than most neurotypical people. I just see a lot of filler that would be better off in the writer’s paper wastebasket. It’s a shame that he didn’t write a better book with his last time on earth. ( )

My brother, while dying of brain cancer, mentioned this book that is, in part, about a man dying of cancer. I say in part because it seems more about the speaker of the book, the cancerous man's son, who appears to be in late hi teens or early twenties, very obese and slightly autistic. I read the book to read a book that my brother who was dying of cancer was reading. Sort of a vicariously shared experience. So I don't know that I can say much more about it than that. There was at least one good scene with the son cleaning up the father and the awkwardness and awfulness of that. But mostly it was not about dying of cancer, but about lost youth, and living, symbolically as it were, on the edge of that great quarry into which we shall fall. When I asked my brother what he thought of the book, he didn't seem to remember much. But brain cancer does that to you.

strongly reminiscent of 'The Big Chill', with a group of once were university friends gathering for a weekend of secrets and reveals. Some textural differences - rather than a dead friend, there is a near-to death one; the youngster who is the lens through whom the story is framed is offsrping, not a lover; much stronger sense of politics and place. And yet, full of a sense of frustration, of confusion - all that energy they had as students, and here the world is a darker, grimmer, place.

There are some very uncomfortable scenes - one which momentarily feels like it is about to turn into a rape scene in particular - but this has a lot to do with the subject matter. While ostensibly the friends who have come to visit are all motivated by finding a video recording that they all feel has the potential to destroy them, they are also navigating the minefield of dealing with a dying man who has never pulled his verbal punches, and has less motivation to do so now.

The story reads almost as a polemic. The viewpoint character struggles to understand the implicit rules of social interaction as a general rule, and there is much in the internal monologue about identification of various conversational gambits, giving much opportunity for a frustration at the duplicity of people to come out. And the speeches (rants) of the dying individual, peppered throughout, about the horror that is our world, and the people within. There is a poignant scene where he talks about suicide, but his inability to do so in a way that didn't traumatise innocent bystanders, which is possibly one of the better discussions on a sensitive topic that I've seen.

Hard going in places, because the majority of characters aren't particularly likeable - that little bit too much 'true to life', such that their flaws are so much more apparent than anything else. And the ending is rushed, the payoff for the effort of negotiating the unpleasantness not quite satisfying. The major plot point of the missing item is resolved, but in a way that makes it feel that the author had had enough of it already, and just wanted it over and done with. ( )

Slightly disappointed. The plot didn't really go anywhere and the characters were not believable. ( )

At the start, I wasn't sure if I was going to like any of the characters, apart from Kit, but gradually, each of the characters became more fleshed out and human, as you found out more about them. Quite a gripping read and I thought that the ending was rather wonderful. ( )

couldnt get past the first few chapters , didint read it was very dissaponted .

Kind of like the Big Chill only it takes place in England and happens before the person they are all gathering for has died. A quirky British comedy with I sites into what really matters, when summoning up what you have done with your life. ( )

The final novel in the late Iain Banks's illustrious 30 year career.

The irony of The Quarry is that it is a novel about cancer written by a man who only found out he had the disease part way through its creation. One hopes, however, there isn't much of the author in the character with the cancer, Guy. He isn't a plucky fighter, he's indignant, misanthropic, angry and bitter and swears a lot to prove it, although one suspects he might be like this even without his disease. He's the father of Kit, the novel's narrator, a hulking teenager with some form of autistic spectrum disorder, from whom he has kept the identity of his mother for no immediately obvious reason. They live together in a dilapidated, rambling house on the edge of a quarry in some unspecified part of north Yorkshire.

Kit's mental condition allows him to view dispassionately a weekend reunion of Guy with some fellow film students from the fictional Bewford University. They're a diverse bunch, with little in common beyond their shared past. There's Hol, now a struggling film critic, who has taken Kit under her wing to try to teach him some social skills. There are Ali and Rob, an increasingly fractious couple prone to spouting corporate gobbledygook, Paul, rising star of New Labour, serial monogamist Pris and inveterate stoner Haze. All are concerned about the whereabouts of a compromising videotape they made together as students and thought to be somewhere in the crumbling house.

The videotape, and for that matter, the cancer, are something of a diversion from a novel that is really an examination of this diverse group, some of whom have clung to youthful ideals, and suffer for it, some of whom have abandoned them and aren't much better off. All are flawed and very humnan. The titular quarry, too, plays a less than central role for most of the novel except, one supposes, as a metaphor for death.

This falls into the same area of Banks's oeuvre as The Crow Road. It's hugely entertaining and by turns funny, angry, geeky and bemused much, as one imagines, Banks himself was. Where he exploded onto the literary scene in the early 1980s with The Wasp Factory, The Quarry provides a less controversial exit that showcases much of what was great about his writing. Newcomers could just as well start with Iain Banks's last novel as his first; its one of his best. ( )

Gosh what an alcohol and drug soaked life these characters lead! It has some fantastic rants about modern life, from a variety of viewpoints - Hol, the Marxist, Guy, the embittered cynical misanthropist, and Rob, the corporate man who is so fed up with put those rejecting change.
The voice of the novel is given to Kit, the young son and carer of dying Guy. His Aspy behaviour and perceptions are the most powerful and compelling features of the novel . He is definitely a most appealing character. The way Kit internalises Hol's teachings about how to interact appropriately in conversations is priceless, we certainly learn a lot about ourselves from this novel.
Adding intrigue to the plot of a reunion of friends around the terminally ill Guy is the thread of the search for a missing video, made by the group in their uni student days.
This is a brilliant novel, to be consumed in a gulp. ( )

There are a couple excellent summaries and reviews here on LT that cover this novel very well. This is the last book we will receive from Iain Banks. I'll just note that I really liked Kit, the son of the man who owns and lives in the house set on the edge of the encroaching quarry. His unique character is very well developed. Kit's father Guy is fairly well done also as a secondary character but he is also somewhat despicable and mean. A largish cast of other secondary characters slowly came to life for me.

Overall I did like the book and I liked how it ended, but it certainly is not a must read. Quite a few references in here are lost on me as an American. ( )

Treasure hunts on rainy days to entertain children invariably take place indoors, with attics and dark corners providing possible hiding places for whatever is being sought. The problem with looking in places like that is that you might find something hidden that you weren’t expecting at all.

‘The Quarry’ is a tremendously enjoyable but somehow slight novel – not that there’s anything wrong with a novel being slight, except here the theme is impending mortality and so perhaps one is expecting more. Also, and let’s get this out of the way up front, one of the central characters is so very bloody irritating that you actually feel that by reading all of his bile and bad behaviour, you as a reader should at least be rewarded with the secret of eternal happiness, or something.

(Actually the message in the book about the secret of eternal happiness appears to be that it comes in bottled or canned form and can be obtained at any supermarket or off-license).

There is a literal quarry, a sodding huge hole in the ground that is slowly eating its way towards the family home of a cancer-ridden dying father and his aspergers-lite son/carer. There is, additionally, another quarry, in the sense that it’s the subject of a hunt. Somewhere in the huge, rambling, crumbling house sitting on what is fast becoming the lip of the quarry there’s a VHS tape that the visitors to the house are anxious to find. The visitors in question are friends (or more precisely used-to-be-friends) of Guy, the cancer guy, and they have turned up essentially for a wake while Guy is still alive, and to look for the tape.

The hunt for the tape is not straightforward. Like Guy, the house is decaying. Like Guy, it is very good at keeping its secrets. Attic rooms and outhouses reveal this to be the home of a hoarder. Rooms contain back-issues of local newspapers, yellow like the skin of an ill person. The VHS tape with its mystery contents (sex tape, right wing ranting, doing something appalling to a badger with a whisk? The exact contents are something of a mystery except everyone has a reason to want that tape and everyone would have a different reason to be embarrassed if the contents ever became public) is not the only secret being hunted.

In a twist that, in fairness, Banks pulls off with aplomb, Kit, Guy’s son, knows who his father is but does not know who his mother is. Guy, being something of a bastard, refuses to tell the poor kid. Some secrets are harder to unearth than an old VHS tape. Any of the women visiting that weekend could be Kit’s mother and subtle investigation follows.

The characters are Bank’s mouthpieces, so they can mouth off about politics and the state of the nation, they can be witty and wordy or they can play computer games. In this case it’s Guy’s son who plays ‘Heroquest’, a lot. He also applies a rigid set of rules and procedures to his own life, or at least tries to; the shopping trip that he and another character take is one of the best examples of why OCD doesn’t work in real life that I’ve ever read.

Everyone has their quirks. Some funny, especially those who take themselves too seriously and are now proper grown ups, yet who dread the discovery of the VHS tape.

Guy’s quirk is being cantankerous. Banks has actually possibly pulled off something of a literary coup with this character. He’s bloody miserable. He completely fails to conform to the noble sufferer role that people might assign to somebody with a terminal illness. About halfway through the book you realise he’s a bastard. He may be a bastard in a wheel chair, but he’s a bastard none the less. Once you feel free to dislike him it’s oddly liberating.

He’s in good company. All of those gathered are, to a greater or lesser degree, damaged. Nobody, it would appear, gets away with life without being marked by it.

The doomed house is the perfect setting for a tale of a group confronting a lost youth. There is true treasure here. ( )