Iain Banks is one of my favorite authors. Canal Dreams isn’t his best work, but even less-than-best Banks is better than a lot of other stuff out there.
The improbable story tells of a forty-something virtuoso female Japanese cellist who gets trapped on a ship in the Panama canal and has to deal with terrorists. They kill her friends and rape her, and then she goes postal on them and wipes them out.
Like I said, improbable.
But even with the ridiculous plot working against it, the story is well told and holds your attention. And if it doesn’t have the same sheer inventiveness of some of Banks’ other novels, it works well enough. Banks does his usual superb job of rendering the various characters’ voices, and even gets most of the Japanese stuff right. Admittedly, there are some gaffes (Japanese people don’t generally have “flatmates”), but in places his heroine’s internal monologues show that Banks has a surprisingly firm handle on Nipponese cultural priorities.
Canal Dreams is a short book, one that won’t take much time to finish. If you’re looking for something entertaining but still with some depth, you could do worse than to give it a few hours.
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