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April 14, 2005
Iain Banks - Canal Dreams
Canal Dreams - Iain Banks
** SPOILERS **
Brooding novel about war and violence with action packed finale.
Hisako Onoda is a Japanese woman who is a celebrated cellist. Afraid of flying, she is travelling by boat from Japan to Europe through the Panama Canal. This is a politically volatile time in Panama, and her boat is blocked in the canal along with two others as it is too dangerous to proceed. She spends the time practicing her cello, and having a relationship with one of the ships crew, Philippe, who also teaches her how to sub-aqua dive.
There are numerous flashbacks to Hisako's life growing up in Japan. She is a strong willed girl, clever with languages and excellent at the cello of course. She has dreams, which are full of blood. She is remembering back to a public demonstration that she attended which got violent, and where she actually killed a policeman with a baton and got away with it.
A group of rebels take over the ships and imprison everyone. They plan to launch a missile to bring down an American plane. Things are fairly civilised, until one man tries to fight back. This initiates a struggle which the gorillas quickly overcome. And it makes them mad. They kill everyone, except Hisako, the sole attractive woman. They keep her alive and rape and torture her.
Against overwhelming odds, Hisako escapes, and in action worthy of the finale of a James Bond film, manages to kill every gorilla and blow up two boats before swimming to safety.
This is a good book, with an interesting mix of history, and action. Hisako is a particularly good character, Banks seems to do heroines well. She is complex, with many motivations, and her fight back at the end is convincing. The secondary characters however are lightly drawn, and when they all die we're not overly bothered. Perhaps that was deliberate. I'm sure Banks is trying to say something about war, and he includes the atom bomb in Hiroshima as the cause of Hisako's father's death. I couldn't really work out what it was he was trying to say though. All the Panama political history was much fresher in the public mind at the end of the 1980s when this book came out, and maybe the book was a reaction to that.
There is a really nice touch where we are told that there is a fault with the diving equipment gauges. We assume that somehow this will be important later, and it isn't till the last page that it's mentioned again, and we see it was a deliberate red herring.
AE 2
Posted by se71 at April 14, 2005 04:52 PM
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