Canal Dreams - Softcover

Banks, Iain M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 034910171X ISBN 13: 9780349101712

Publisher: Abacus, 1990

Synopsis

Hisako Onoda, world famous cellist, refuses to fly. And so she travels to Europe as a passenger on a tanker bound through the Panama Canal. But Panama is a country whose politics are as volatile as the local freedom fighters. When Hisako's ship is captured, it is not long before the atmosphere is as flammable as an oxy-acetylene torch, and the tension as sharp as the spike on her cello...

CANAL DREAMS is a novel of deceptive simplicity and dark, original power: stark psychological insights mesh with vividly realised scenarios in an ominous projection of global realpolitik. The result is yet another major landmark in the quite remarkable career of an outstanding modern novelist.

About this title

About the Author:

Iain Banks came to widespread and controversial public notice with the publication of his first novel, THE WASP FACTORY, in 1984. He gained enormous popular and critical acclaim for both his mainstream and his science fiction novels. Iain Banks died in June 2013.

From Kirkus Reviews:

``Dreams'' is right, as Yukio Mishima meets Hiroshima mon amour in this spare, hallucinatory novel about a world-class Japanese cellist taken hostage in a terrorist coup. Hisako Onoda, whose fear of flying has forced her to take ship on a freighter for her European concert tour, has been spending the interregnum floating on a Panama lake while the canal is closed by political unrest, brooding on her earlier losses and achievements--her widowed mother's sacrifices to pay for her lessons, her growing mastery of her instrument, her obligatory affairs--and taking up with Philippe, a French officer aboard Le Cercle. The political extremists who liberate the tanker (together with two other ships trapped on the lake) dramatically change the course of Hisako's life but not the texture of her narrative--as the slaughter of passengers and crew, Hisako's recital for and meeting with chief terrorist Earl Dandridge (CIA, of course), and her surrealistic bout of counterterrorism alternate with further memories of her traumatic first airline flight and the man she killed during an airport riot. Plenty of violence, all right--first Dandridge's men, then Hisako, fire at every available target--but it all seems to take place underwater: memory, dream, and reality merge as the novel drifts toward a symbolic holocaust. Banks (The Bridge, etc.) sets up the usual melodramatic premises of the genre but then sidesteps them for atmosphere and enigma, like the closing episodes of Twin Peaks. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 034910171X
• ISBN 13: 9780349101712
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208