An entertaining piece of storytelling revealing the secrets behind a large family that has got rich from a classic board game, and then a video game, called Empire. It is mainly told through one of the younger members of the clan, Alban McGill, who returns from self-imposed exile to save the family business from a takeover by a larger US corporation. As he visits different relatives, and recalls incidents from his past, we learn about his mother’s suicide and his teenage passion for his beautiful cousin, Sophie. Full of comic detail and colourful characters, it is a story in which pieces are moved around a board ahead of a finale in which the family confronts the Americans and Alban takes on Winifred, the matriarch and head of the company. It pulls in themes around globalisation, imperialism and climate change and the often problematic legacy left by each generation for the next.

Despite this being widely proclaimed as a real return to form for Banks I thought it was rather an average Banks offering. I have always enjoyed his books and this was no exception but I found the central story of the long lost love a bit irritating at times and I honestly thought that most of the characters were stereotypes with little real development. The ending was both expected an unexpected and did add a meaning to some of the parts of the story that at times felt a bit odd.

Overall a long way from being my favourite Banks book but definately worth a read.

Well, it's not as bad as the teeth-gnashingly bad Dead Air, but a long way below his best work. One Amazon review even retitled it The Steep Decline Towards Garbage. It revisits a lot of old ground: extensive and eccentric Scottish family ruled by a patriarch (as in both Whit and Complicity), and the growing pains of the usual young male protagonist, torn between two loves (also features in Complicity), what seems now to be an obligatory anti-American rant, as in Dead Air (though it is perfectly in character for Alban). Here the protagonist, Alban, is almost thirty, yet he's still mooning over his long-lost cousin Sophie, with whom he had a brief fling aged 15 and has barely seen since. I ended up thinking that it is really time Iain Banks grew up; how old is he now anyway? Maybe the whole thing is supposed to be a reflection on the special relationship between the US and the UK, cousins drifting apart, but if so it isn't very profound.[return][return]It has that now trendy structure where the story constantly jumps back and forth in time and you are never sure how each bit relates to the rest. That worked in The House at Riverton, but it doesn't work here; it just seems like a gimmick to mask the absence of plot or suspense. You can see the shock revelation coming miles away. Some passages, including the final chapter, are narrated by an extremely minor character in a rather irritating Scots accent, with greengrocer's apostrophes galore -- why?? [return][return]The ending is a damp squib, as if Banks just got tired of writing and decided it was long enough already (it could indeed have been cut by 100 pages or so). There is some good writing in places, notably describing two suicides, as always there are some laughs too, and I did finish it. But I was disappointed Banks didn't make more of Alban's girlfriend Verushka, a really strong female character who just disappears from the story until the very end. Nothing I've read has matched up to Whit -- still my favourite.

Forgotten how much I like banks

Iain Banks is too patronising and easy going. He obviously wants to be known as a Scottish writer without expect Scottish people to read the book.

The story was a bit thin on the ground, and the twist was unfortunately too predictable. Shame the characters didn't make up for it themselves, the lead just kept going on and on about his cousin. yuk. it got quite tedious by the end

Prob the last Iain Banks book I'll read as I get the impression most of his books are like this (The Business was). Patronisingly simple and thin on story/character development. Shame.

oh yeah