Jumping the Shark

Listening to - Early Music - Kronos Quartet

Not typical Kronos but then what is and it is obviously them.

A very strange dream most of which is probably irrelevant but had an interesting conclusion. I had to get some medication for someone who had been shot while in a sort of dogfight. They seemed very ill at the beginning and were fussed over by someone none of us liked and it became obvious that the illness was being faked to get the person to leave. My task was to locate the doctor but I only found his partner/wife who, although aware of our need for medicine, had nothing to give other than a short computer program regarding dosages. She sat down with me and went through the source code thinking her early 70's BASIC to be very good. I spent this period of instruction trying to stifle yawns and resisting saying how old-hat this all seemed. The last bit is very weird and was the wake-up section that left me feeling very odd. Ron Howard walked in with his baseball cap on but he had severe Hydrocephalus, making his head so much wider than his face. He seemed totally normal otherwise and expected me to be as well. I cannot recall what I was talking about but I don?t think it was happy days. I woke up in a weird state, expecting Mr. Howard to be waiting for me. I had to keep convincing myself that I was awake.

The Business is beginning to annoy me. The Wasp Factory was brilliant and original and all the other things that have been said about it. Many of Banks' other books have been nearly as brilliant and always slightly at odds with the normal fiction. The Business seems to be failing on all counts. The main problem is that the characters seem so flat, out of a teen-ager's idea for a novel. It is almost as if Banks has something he wants to tell us all and had foregone plot and character in order to put out his (admittedly sweeping) vision of a global pan-chronic organisation. There is the same sense of little danger that Whit had, a sort of laid-backness, but Whit had .. er .. wit and the business has an airport novel feel. Stick to the whiskey. Maybe I should stick to familiar stuff after reading Martin Amis. There you are. It is the Martin Amis affect.