Complicity (1993) is one of Iain Bank’s non-science fiction novels though still set in his beloved Scotland. Cameron Colley is a veteran journalist working for one of Edinburg’s big dailies, addicted to cigarettes, booze and speed, unhappily having an affair with a beautiful married woman. Interspersed with Colley’s chapters, written in the first person, are scenes presented in the second person of brutal justice being meted out by an anonymous vigilante (the book opens with “You hear the car after an hour and a half. During that time you’ve been here in the bedroom, istting on the small telephone seat near the front door. waiting.”).
The dead all seem to be getting punishments fit to their alleged crime. They also are all men mentioned in a vitriokic column Colley wrote a few months beforehand and at times when he can’t account for his whereabouts because he’s being fed clues to what might be a separate series of deaths of men linked to Britain’s nuclear program and a shady arms merchant. Colley picked a bad time to try and quit his abusing addictions, a really bad time.
Banks writes so well that I even enjoyed his regular bits of advertisement for Scottish tourism. By the last third of the book I really had a hard time putting it down.
recommended
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