The Quarry by Iain Banks

Eighteen-year-old Kit and his dad, Guy, live in a house on the edge of an expanding quarry. Kit has Asperger’s; Guy has cancer. It’s quite funny, really. Or, at least, Banks uncovers the hilarity in the midst of the horror. Kit is the unflinching narrator here, applying calm, mathematical precision to defuse any threat of hopelessness or sentimentality.

A group of Guy’s old uni friends descend on the house for the weekend; a pair of corporate bunnies, a media lawyer, a single mother, a stoner, and an acerbic critic. This allows for a rhythmic dialogue interleaved with Kit’s internal observations. He is neither innocent nor naïve, but has all the newness of looking at things in full for the first time.

The prose is quick, brilliant, and surprising; Banks’ control is apparently effortless as he considers cancer from all sides, through all of his characters. And just as the reader settles into the comedy of social interaction on the brink of an ignored abyss, the prose turns translucent, razor-sharp, and we see over the edge: cancer is an unwilled suicide. Banks is often darkly funny, but this is being funny in the darkness of inexorable, too-soon death. [Galen O'Hanlon]