Book Review: Ian Banks' 'Complicity' (1993)

Stylish, harrowing, and funny: 'Complicity' is a delicate and VERY sinister dissection of morality- namely greed and violence, that likes to satirise the material values of our world.

Set through the eyes of the drug-abusing, gaming and nicotine-addicted, occasional partaker of light BDSM, and most crucially, journalist, Cameron, we open the narrative under the shadow of a multibillion dollar submarine. This post-cold war motif, like most in the plot, initially feels misplaced against the backdrop of a bleak yet beautifully described Scotland, yet could never feel so fitting by the end.

Banks daringly explores taboos, and viscerally describes character experiences without cowardice, constructing terror and provoking existential contemplation with alarming ease.

This is my first Ian Banks novel, and its already clear he has that superhuman ability to make aspiring authors feel near illiterate, painting a prose more captivating and grey than the gruesome plot itself.

The few chapters set from the murderer’s perspective are intricately placed, and the random change in tense loves to take you off guard. It’s like encountering a road sign labelled ‘grizzly and uncomfortable chapter written in second person ahead, drive carefully!’

All the anecdotes from Cameron and his friends’ lives become brutally clear by the end of the novel, along with their childhood experiences and mixed-bag of political allegiances, culminating in a riveting discussion on- you guessed it- moral complicity.

There are just enough curveballs to keep you guessing until the end, and just enough characters to keep you in the dark, but crucially not too many, allowing the reader to feel a certain level of attachment to each one. You literally feel you have become Cameron by the end of this read, and I've rarely encountered an author who demanded and deserved such immersion.

(Only downside is this read might induce a temporary mild existential depression.)

9/10