ABSTRACT
Very few writers succeed in combining real bestseller status with 'literary' credibility. Mass-market sales of hundreds of thousands of copies and respectful attention from the critics are rarely the reward of the same writer. Iain Banks is one of the few who have managed to achieve this difficult double. Banks was born in Fife in 1954 and attended Stirling University. He moved to London in the late 1970s and began writing while he was working as a computer programmer. Banks fleshes out his story with flashbacks to the protagonist's past and explorations of her dreams and nightmares, but even the characteristic energy and liveliness of his prose fail to disguise the fact that the plot falls uncomfortably between realism and fantasy and that Banks never seems to decide which he would prefer it to be.
