Complicity by Iain Banks

       

        Iain Banks’ Complicity places you in the terrible position of—and I’m sorry to tell you this—being a murderer. There are lengthy passages in which you are invading homes, tying people up, abusing them and murdering them in all sorts of grisly ways. Banks narrates these sections with the second person “you”, placing your agency as a reader in a tough spot: do you keep reading, and thereby enacting the horrific murders you are perpetuating? Or do you put the book down, disgusted by your own capacity to be drawn into the killing spree?

I want you to remember that question for later.

For now, let’s take a step back. Running opposite to the narration of ‘you’ is a first-person narration from Cameron Colley, a journalist with a penchant for the “big story.” In this case, he continues to receive phone calls from a mysterious Mr. Archer, who sends him names to investigate. Meanwhile, Cameron is trying to engage in counter-culture journalism, suggesting a corporate conspiracy in a would-be local interest story about the brewery. He’s also a drug addict, having an affair with his friend (who happens to be another friend’s wife), and he is a chronic masturbator who loves playing a computer game called Despot, which sounds like a more heavily sentient Age of Empires.

In the first half of the book, it’s perverse, but the most engaging parts are the murders and conspiracy that Cameron is trying to uncover. The hypermasculinity and hedonism is absurd, ridiculous, and gets boring pretty quickly. The transgressive nature of the text recalls works like American Psycho or perhaps Fight Club, but has that distinctly mid-80s to mid-90s  ethos of hyperreality popularized by works like William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s a work of profound excess.

I would say until the last fifty pages or so, I was a sceptic. But Banks’ conclusion delivers and justifies so much of what came before.

Around the halfway point of the book, something happens. I will try not to spoil too much here, but it’s worth noting that Cameron is pulled in for police questioning. He’s being interrogated for the murders. As it turns out, the victims are all important figures that have been specifically denounced in some of Cameron’s articles. He is forced to watch the videos of a gorilla-masked figure as he sexually abuses his male victims, severs peoples’ limbs, injects them with the HIV virus, and other more spectacular murders. After being sick, it is then that Cameron begins delving into memories. He is told to think of who else could have—might have—committed the horrific crimes.

The text devolves into a stream-of-consciousness panic before revealing backstory through flashbacks to Cameron’s youth. I think the best way to experience the book is going in ignorant, so if you’d like to preserve the sanctity of the secret, now is the chance to navigate away.

Through a series of flashbacks, we are invited to witness Cameron’s various failures. He lets his friends down in a number of ways, and it’s alluded to that there are two times Cameron abandoned a particular friend. Once, when he nearly drowned under a frozen lake, and the second—well, it’s a little ambiguous. The plot slows, somewhat, abandoning the high-octane whodunnit approach for a more ruminative exploration of old friendships. The section does a lot to humanize Cameron, which the novel desperately needs following his drug-fueled binges of self-indulgence. For example, in one scene, Cameron is enticed into performing a sex act on his slightly older male friend. An adult man then confronts them, having witnessed the act, and Cameron fails to defend his friend as the man rapes him. They then are able to attack and kill the man and hide his body. That bit of backstory gives a bit more depth to Cameron and his friend.

Banks offers effective twists and tensions throughout the book, both in the ‘present’ of the story and in the past. New details come to light and the filmic delivery of the book allows for some jump-cutting into different moments for greater impact. The tension heightens with interrogation scenes and Banks offers a great deal of impact through dialogue and sparse narration. The uncertainty of motivations, including for Cameron himself, is an excellent device for creating the atmosphere of the book. Even in the sections where ‘you’ are the narrator, your own motivations are not directly stated, which makes the project seem, at first, senseless.

When the murderer is revealed, Banks repeatedly layers the killer’s intentions. There are personal motivations, political ones, moral ones, and a healthy dose of nihilism. In the first half of the book, Banks develops a finely wrought political paranoia. It reads like a conspiracy and entices us in—just as it entices Cameron. The genius of this is that Cameron is so susceptible to paranoid fantasies that he is rendered oblivious to more obvious motivations in front of him. Through a finely crafted red herring, we, too, are pulled into the falsehoods, allowing ourselves to be deceived. It’s an odd situation where the conspiracy is a lie, but still serves its intended function and has the internal coherence of a bona fide conspiracy.

The whole situation sets up a paranoid mood, which only intensifies as the cat-and-mouse game progresses. We are led through the chase, the traps, the hunt. Even when you recognize the killer has been three steps ahead at every turn, there’s still the genuine horror of discovering the depth of the plan and the accounts of murdered and dismembered bodies are genuinely disgusting. Take that for what it’s worth from a literary perspective. As the book progresses, the ever-present killer stalks his prey and you start looking for him everywhere. In fact, the book easily could have resolved with him apologizing, disappearing, and with Cameron suspecting that he sees the murderer everywhere. That would be almost as chilling.

Some of the more superfluous aspects of the book take on a deeper significance in light of the killer’s omnipresence. For example, when Cameron describes his favourite video game, Despot, he talks about how he builds civilizations from scratch. He hops from individual serfs into other bodies and eventually takes on the power of a governing deity. Ironically, the game gets to know so much about your play style that if the game is on, it will play for you, though in a slightly degenerating way where your civilization slowly reverts. The game serves as an effective microcosm of all kinds of elements of the book. For instance, the fact that Cameron hops between bodies is like us at the start of the book, hopping into the body of the serial killer before shifting into an “I” and eventually taking on the position of the police department on the hunt for a killer. The omnipresence of the killer reads like the player of the game, able to manipulate the situation as he sees fit. The book also addresses themes about civilization, degeneracy, and the maintenance that is constantly needed in order for society to sustain itself. There’s something about a fictive video game that can give voice to so much.

Returning to the idea of paranoia, towards the end of the book, the serial killer is on the loose with the promise of behaving. But we all know it’s a lie, don’t we? There’s an excellent scene where Cameron’s car breaks down and someone pulls over to help him. The description does not at all match that of the killer—at first. From a narrative standpoint, though, we know that such a tense moment is likely to result in disaster, so our tension is heightened. Cameron, too, starts to recognize clues that are similar to the murderer—plus, we know that he puts on accents, has disguises, and so on. So we have this moment of a confrontation and it’s not initially clear whether it’s really the murderer. There’s a tension where you think that Cameron is in a rough enough place that he might attack or even kill this man, perhaps mistakenly. There’s a part of me that wanted to see it go that way—to see Cameron murder a man out of the lingering paranoia of a threat that no longer looms over him. That tension was just excellent.

The final confrontation with the killer is a bit super-villain-ish. It’s like the scene in every James Bond movie where, feeling he has the upper hand, the villain explains the plot in full. The killer reveals the full intentions and the message of his “work.” The philosophy teeters on the notion of a kind of Nietzschian claim to the Overman or an opportunistic Social Darwinism. The murderer, though, frames it as the natural extension of Cameron’s leftist beliefs. The rich people who exploit and kill others through their own negligence (either directly or indirectly) deserve to be killed themselves. The killer suggests it is no different that an oil baron, for example, kills any number of people through ecology than him taking one life to shock the system back into order.

The dialogue itself is a little on-the-nose, but the delivery is redeemed by giving Cameron an impossible choice in which both options are philosophical losses. Cameron could call the police to apprehend the murderer, which is the morally right thing to do, perhaps, but also would be to admit that his leftist politics (or at least the popular understanding of them) are a lie. Alternatively, he can let the murderer go free and admit that we are all complicit in a system which produces death. This is the kind of paradox I could see emerging in the work of Mark Fisher or Slavoj Žižek, if he hasn’t analyzed this book already. The seeming hypocrisy at the core of the philosophy is a profoundly challenging notion to grapple with.

I also loved the way Cameron approaches the phone call. Banks dramatizes Cameron’s inner conflict effectively and the choices of phone call on the killer’s cell phone are fantastic. First, Cameron calls his parents and receives an answering machine. Second, he calls his doctor to check if he has lung cancer. It’s a great moment that reinforces Cameron’s self-interest. He wants to know, in my reading, “am I going to die?” The answer to that question seems to impact his choice to call or not call the police—-which way the answer influences his decision is left to your own interpretation.

The ending of the book, despite the villain’s monologuing, is excellent. The final chapter shifts back to using the second person, but it’s a different second person than before—or is it? “You” used to be the murderer. Now, “you” are (seemingly) Cameron. The implications of that shifting “you” are intriguing from a political, moral, and literary standpoint. Essentially, “you” are complicit at every stage of the project. It’s an experiment in narrative culpability.

I’m not quite sure where to place Iain Banks in the literary canon. At times, Complicity feels like a conceptual literary work, at others a pulp whodunnit or political thriller. Plot-wise, I would say I was pretty consistently engaged, especially past the halfway point of the book. From the point of view of characterization, I can’t say I actually loved the characters, but Cameron’s consistency was finely achieved through his response to extreme situations. You may recall that a few months ago I reviewed John Updike’s Terrorist. This book is what that book should have been: stunningly paced, finely-wrought tension, more dialled-back misogyny, and more consistent characterization with a plot that had actual events. It has its flaws as a text (psst, your 1990s are showing), but it still feels at least somewhat relevant thirty years on.

 

Keep fighting the good fight and happy reading!