The Business - Softcover

Banks, Iain

3.51

6,946 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349112452 ISBN 13: 9780349112459

Publisher: Abacus, 2000

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Kate Telman is a senior executive officer in The Business, a powerful and massively discreet transglobal organisation. Financially transparent, internally democratic and disavowing conventional familial inheritance, the character of The Business seems, even to Kate, to be vague to the point of invisibility. It possesses, allegedly, a book of Leonardo cartoons, several sets of Crown Jewels and wants to buy its own State in order to acquire a seat at the United Nations.

Kate's job is to keep abreast of current technological developments and her global reach encompasses Silicon Valley, a ranch in Nebraska, the firm's secretive Swiss headquarters, and a remote Himalayan principality. In the course of her journey Kate must peel away layers of emotional insulation and the assumptions of a lifetime. She must learn to keep her world at arm's length.

To take control, she has to do The Business.

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Review:

After the shock impact of the excellent The Wasp Factory in 1984, Iain Banks' work has split along two lines. On the one hand, he has written a series of acclaimed science fiction novels (with a devoted following, their own fan magazine and inclusion of his middle initial); on the other hand, a number of diverse, and eclectic, forays into contemporary fiction (for example, the successful television adaptation of The Crow Road).

The Business is the 1990s success story run riot. The eponymous organisation is ancient, rich and invisible. All it lacks is a certain political clout, something the Business has avoided for centuries but with which it is now beginning to toy. A seat in the UN is at stake as Kate Telman, Level 3 executive, is drawn into the (rather polite) machinations of her superiors. Those expecting John Grisham may be disappointed. No bad thing, perhaps: Kate's personal-professional life-- there is, of course, no conflict here for the successful individual of the 1990s--is the main concern. Banks' interest is in the moral debates about the position of the Business in a world it finds easy to manipulate, drawing the reader into a discussion of the place of the multi-national in contemporary economic and cultural life. "A lot of successful people are less hard-hearted than they like to think": is one view put forward, and not the only romantic but equivocal sentiment hiding somewhere in The Business. --John Shire

Review:

Consistently engaging....From its hilarious opening, a telephone conversation with a man who has lost his teeth, to the touching finale...it hardly misses a beat. SUNDAY TELEGRAPH ('Slick and streetwise. SUNDAY TIMES)

Bank s' ability to make you feel you're there remains as sharp as ever. TIME OUT ('.a slick, blend of thriller, dark comedy and offbeat love story, bursting with set pieces and sly wit. EMPIRE)

...Satisfyingly readable to the end (MAXIM)

THE BUSINESS is his tenth novel... and reveals no slackening in his imaginative energies (MAIL ON SUNDAY)

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