RIP GGM

Aged 87, so hardly shocking, and I remember a foretelling of his imminent death about a decade ago, allegedly from the pen of the man himself. Though it was either fake, or he got better, as he carried on living and writing for years afterwards.

 As for the books themselves, I was flabbergasted the first time I read A Hundred Years of Solitude, but on re-reading it seemed flat, contrived and really just an endless recitation of random stuff happening.

Great ending though. I read lots of his books, and they all seemed pretty much the same, South American melancholia-by-numbers and lots of random stuff happening that was presumably meant to be portentous.

 I think the thing that annoyed me about 100 Years was the slab like pages of text, without dialogue or even paragraphs. Just endless recitation of what was going on, none of which really amounted to much. There were only a handful of key incidents in the book and the rest of it was just filling pages to give it an epic feel so it really did seem like a century had passed.

That said, the last time I re-read it, the fate of the luckless Mauricio Babilonia (yeah, I had to look up his name), a minor character I'd pretty much over looked before, struck me as incredibly sad. Fantastic apocalyptic ending. I've never been able to look at ants quite the same way since.

And still one of the iconic writers, for all my carping.

 And it is a shame he didn't get to live to a hundred, for obvious reasons.

On Iain Banks

I haven;t always been kind to Iain Banks, but now he's gone and died, grumbles about the quality of individual books tend to fade in comparison to his achievement over all. 

True, a lot of the books were either pretentious student twaddle (Espedaire Street, The Bridge, Walking on Glass) or tired and bloated (Crow Road, Dead Air, Whit). Maybe three or four of them were truly brilliant (Player of Games, Against A Dark Background, Complicity).  Which is more than you can say for most writers.

So what if he never managed to repeat the brilliance of Use of Weapons?  What matters, of course, is that he did it once.  And (at least sometimes) tried to emulate its scale.

Here is Iain Banks' final interview, shortly before his death.  Definitely worth a read, for those who have not already found there way to it.

Really drives home that while he probably wrote too much, too quickly, now that he's gone you wouldn't really have had it any other way; and what a rounded, passionate, honest human being he was, beyond the (rather variable, but all now treasurable) books.