{"id":1897,"date":"2007-04-07T21:33:57","date_gmt":"2007-04-07T21:33:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2007\/04\/the_steep_appro\/"},"modified":"2007-04-07T21:33:57","modified_gmt":"2007-04-07T21:33:57","slug":"the_steep_appro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/the_steep_appro\/","title":{"rendered":"The Steep Approach to Garbadale"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk\/e\/cm?t=friday05-21&#038;o=2&#038;p=8&#038;l=as1&#038;asins=0316731056&#038;fc1=000000&#038;lc1=0000ff&#038;bc1=ffffff&#038;npa=1&#038;lt1=_blank&#038;IS1=1&#038;f=ifr&#038;bg1=ffffff\" width=\"120\" height=\"240\" scrolling=\"no\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" align=\"right\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><br \/>\nThe Steep Approach to Garbadale is Iain Bank&#8217;s first non-SF novel in quite a few years &#8211; indeed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/weblog\/archive\/000290.html\">Dead Air<\/a> was published back in 2002. I&#8217;d say that the novel it&#8217;s most like is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Crow-Road-Iain-Banks\/dp\/0349103232\">The Crow Road<\/a> which is probably my favourite Banks novel to date. In place of The Crow Road&#8217;s Prentice, we have Alban who starts the novel having nothing to do with his extended family who are rich thanks to a board game (and latterly computer game) called Empire! which I&#8217;m sure isn&#8217;t supposed to be remotely similar to Risk.<br \/>\nBut there&#8217;s a family gathering brewing at the eponymous matriarchal home at Garbadale in the Highlands, and Alban becomes enmeshed in the family&#8217;s affairs with the proposed sale of the family firm to an American giant. Should the sale go ahead? What&#8217;s the truth behind the suicide of Alban&#8217;s mother? Is there any future in his abruptly cut-off relationship with Sophie? And what of his new mathematical genius girlfriend VG?<br \/>\nObviously I&#8217;m not going to answer any of these questions here! That&#8217;d spoil the story, and very readable it is too. Banks really is on familiar territory with the various aunts, cousins, parents and so-on; almost to the extent that a family tree would have been usefully printed at the front of the book.<br \/>\nThe book is very dialogue heavy, and of course you&#8217;re rooting for Alban who really is much like Prentice before him in that he&#8217;s about the only rational member of a completely mad family. Highly recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Steep Approach to Garbadale is Iain Bank&#8217;s first non-SF novel in quite a few years &#8211; indeed Dead Air was published back in 2002. I&#8217;d say that the novel it&#8217;s most like is The Crow Road which is probably my favourite Banks novel to date. In place of The Crow Road&#8217;s Prentice, we have [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}