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.