There is a scene midway through Iain Banks's new novel so brilliantly written that it has a detrimental effect on the novel as a whole. A woman chooses a heavy coat from the cloakroom of a gloomy old Scottish manor. She walks outside and down the river path, 'listening to the waters roar and shush', wondering why people on the estate call the river a 'burn'. She picks up stones as she goes and places them in the coat's poacher's pockets. Only slowly do we realise that this woman is intending to drown herself in the loch.
As she steps into the freezing water, her thoughts and fears seep into the narrative until 'she walks off the hidden underwater cliff with a tiny surprised cry, bitten off, and vanishes immediately under the brown waves'. The woman is the mother of Alban McGill, the novel's central character. The shockwaves of her suicide, which occurred when Alban was two, can be felt throughout the story, but nothing else in the book comes close to equalling the lyrical force of this one short scene.
Alban is now 35. He has severed all links with his extensive, troublesome, wealthy family, the Wopulds, 'the games family, the people with their name plastered all over the board of Empire! (still the UK's bestselling board game, by some margin)'. He is shacked up with a bunch of amiable junkies in a squalid Perth flat when his cousin Fielding finally tracks him down to inform him that the family business is to be sold to an American corporation.
The news is enough to lure Alban back into the fold and, in the process, to stir up some painful memories from his past: a thwarted teenage love affair with his beautiful cousin Sophie and the still-obscure circumstances surrounding his mother's death.
This is familiar Banks territory: dark secrets spreading rot through the heart of a powerful clan; forbidden adolescent passions; and an anxiety, evident in his last novel, Dead Air, about the catastrophic state of the world and America's contribution to it. Alban has a lot to say on this. He opposes the sale and expresses to the executives of Spraint Corp his views on American foreign policy.
The sentiment is hard to fault, but readers might hope for something a little more penetrating from a writer who sets himself up as a serious commentator on our times.
This is emblematic of the problems that, with some exceptions, beset the novel on a broader scale. Banks is at his best in moments of high drama with extremes of human emotions. Jumbled memories of a drug-fuelled weekend in Singapore are reassembled in a series of long, virtuoso sentences from which all punctuation has drained in the sheer rush of events. Alban's heady summer tryst with his cousin is captured with an intensity that matches his desire and the drawn-out anguish when it abruptly ends.
It's the slow drama of everyday life that seems to confound Banks here. Dialogue clunks along, jokes fall flat and, though he expends a good deal of ink on secondary characters, many fail to pop convincingly into three dimensions. The double act of batty great-aunts, one of whom mishears everything that's said, feels particularly cliched. This is frustrating with a writer in possession of a such fresh and fertile imagination. On this occasion, one can't help concluding that his heart wasn't completely in the job.