Walking on Glass

Rating:
Summary: Easily the most thought provoking book I've ever read
Review: How do we judge reality? Banks creates three realities, twisted through a series of connections that seem to simaltaeously disprove one another. How can we know which is real, can reality only exist in a form we can relate to, or is it indeed every bit as ludicrous as one dimensional chess? Are they all real, or creations of a mental patient in a hard hat? Each scenario is systematically destroyed by logic, stripped bare by coincidence. Not least the idea of reality Banks has us cling to. All this in the journey from an office to a girlfriend's flat. You can't say fairer than that. Five Stars.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely bloody brilliant!
Review: Of all the Iain Banks books I've read this has got to be the best! Hell! it's just addictive. I don't read very much, never have, but I couldn't put this book down. Having read the other reviews you'll be familiar with the basics of this book. Each chapter is divided into three sub chapters, and of these (depending on your nature) you will be drawn to one of these sub chapters more than the others. The natural tendency when reading is to skip the other sub chapters since their contents never seem to overlap anyway. Do this at your peril! Just like a really long, but hilarious joke, the best bit is right at the end. It's at this point that, if you've any powers of observation whatsoever, you will spot the link. And a masterpiece of a link it is! At about three quarters of the way through the book you'll find out why it's called "Walking on Glass." If you have any appreciation for genius you'll stop at this point and pay hommage to one of the best authors! of our day. If I haven't given you reason enough already to stop what you're doing RIGHT NOW and order this book, I'm about to because this book, in it's own ingenious way, questions our very existence. There's much, much more to this book than meets the eye. If you don't love it then there's something wrong with you.

Rating:
Summary: Looking through glass on people's lifes
Review: Probably it's getting a little bit boring with all these books by Iain Banks - but I'm definitively not bored by all these books. And this one is just another great example (not as good as Complicity, but certainly on one level with The Bridge and The Wasp Factory (but not bloody at all)). The content: Three different stories, their chapters woven together in the usual Banks manner. The stories are so different that they can't have a connection: A man unlucky in love, a second one totally paranoid, and a third one forced to play games like "chinese scrabble" or "one dimensional chess", which seems to be set in a castle on a foreign planet. As usual, lots of surprises at the end of the book, but then everything just falls into its place in the end - in a very simple, BANKSish way. Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Humpty
Review: This book was not a satisfying read. I feel Banks could have concentrated on one plot, rather than split it into three: the juxtaposition of "surreal" with "real" doesn't sit very well with me. Also, as another reviewer has said, the links at the end are very weak indeed. But there are brilliant moments of precise language and humour. The images presented to me via Banks were superb; they just needed a good tweaking as far as plot's concerned. But, it's worth a read. Sort of.

Rating:
Summary: Not the sum of its part, but what parts!
Review: This was only his second novel so he's not exactly at the top of his game yet, but it shows quite a bit of ambition. It's a story divided into three apparently separate parts. You have one guy who's in love with this rather mysterious girl and it goes through how they met and how he falls for her. The second part involves a rather paranoid fellow who thinks that the world is out to get him and lives his life by that assumption. And the third . . . well the third part is weird. Basically it's two people in a castle (very reminicent of a certain famous fantasy castle) who have to play games that they don't know the rules for and by winning they get a chance to answer a riddle that might let them escape. Banks basically writes three excellent short stories and then attempts to link them by the end, which is where the tale starts to fall apart. The link between the first and second (non-weird) stories are a bit on the coincidental side but at least make sense, while the other links are really stretching it and comes off as more forced than anything else. However, as I mentioned all of the parts are excellent written and stand up fairly well on their own, the first story's revelations are surprising and overall that was the most emotionally involving story. The paranoid gent in the second story was interesting and his attempts to stay ahead of the ubiquitious "they" are sort of fun, in a "glad I'm not him" sort of way, but his story seems to serve no purpose in relation to the overall theme itself. And the last one . . . I don't know if Banks had started writing his SF tales at this point but the castle and the people in it, while borrowing from that certain fantasy castle I mentioned earlier, shows ten times of the imagination of the other parts and even other SF books. The other two stories make them novel interesting, the addition of the third part pushes it into "excellent" territory and basically made the book for me. Its revelations are also the most mind-boggling (I only guessed part of it) but again only have a tenuous relation to the rest of the book. So if you go into this as reading three quasi-linked short stories in one book, you'll find this is an excellent read and Banks certainly gets points for both trying and coming pretty close to pulling it off. Fortunately, he would get better with practice (see the structure of "Use of Weapons" which is nearly flawless).

Rating:
Summary: Walking on Glass
Review: Walking on Glass is typical Banks in the sense that the main characters psyche is completely probed by the reader to the point where more than a simple relationship is formed. These main characters, actually 3 sets of main characters linked by a way you will never guess (although you will try and cry desperatley too) find themselves in a mental war with themselves and the reader is caught in the middle - as usual Banks. Their pain , their frustration and their madness is catching as if it were happening for real. Why? Because they relate to parts of our pschye that is real, and this is the connection that Banks makes. When you are caught in this mess, you can't stop reading it to try and resolve what is now, a personal issue with you the reader. This book is so original (as all his I've read are) that now, I suffer. I used to read King, A.C.Clarke, and recently "The Wheel of Time" series by Jordan. Since Banks, they all bore me. I continue to read them, but they only enforce my belief that Banks is a true artist originale and they are merely story tellers. By the way, The only place I have found these books is in a bookstore within a small shopping centre call "Parleet" in Oslo, Norway. Every trip I take to Europe I search book stores for his books and only at Parleet have I succeeded. They have all his books there and I was able to get a copy of Whit, Wasp Factory, and Walking on Glass all with original B&W covers. Speaking of Whit, that book was also truely original although not as exciting as WoG and WF.