Barefoot over glass

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Barefoot over Glass (original title Walking on Glass ) is the second published novel by the Scottish writer Iain Banks . The English original appeared for the first time in 1985, the German translation in 1991.

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The novel consists of three storylines that initially seem to have no connection, but are brought together at the end, although this also depends on the interpretation by the reader:

  • Graham Park is a young man who fell in love with the girl Sara ffitch at a party who seems not entirely averse to his advances. Graham's buddy Slater, who shows his homosexuality very conspicuously, encourages him. Only the mysterious, macho Bob Stock seems to stand in the way of Graham's luck.
  • Steven Grout is a paranoid road worker who thinks he is a galactic war admiral trapped in the body of an Earthling. He believes he is under constant threat from a "microwave cannon" and reads a lot of science fiction .
  • Quiss and Ajayi are war criminals who fought on opposing sides in a galactic war. They are trapped in a castle where they have to play strange games like “one-dimensional chess” and “dominoes without points”. They should only be released when they can solve the riddle "What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object?" Which they find difficult.

The Gothic castle is reminiscent of Franz Kafka and Mervyn Peake and seems to be related to planet earth, which Ajayi and Quiss are initially alien to. Over time, with the help of the books in the castle, they learn the earthly languages ​​that they need for “Chinese Scrabble”, among other things. At the end of the novel, Sara Graham reveals that she only used it to cover up her relationship with Bob Stock to her ex-husband, with whom she is in a divorce process. In fact, there is no Bob Stock at all, but Sara is in an incestuous relationship with Slater, who is her brother. When Graham is on his way home angry with Sara, a beer truck accident occurs near him. A keg of beer hits Steven, who is admitted to a clinic. He can't remember much there and among other things is busy stealing game pieces from an elderly couple who are playing board games in the clinic's library. - The last chapter turns back to Ajayi and Quiss. After saving Quiss from suicide, Ajayi reads the titles of the books on the wall: Titus Groan , The Castle , Labyrinths , The Trial . There is no title on a book. She decides to read this book. She opens it and reads the first sentence: He walked through the white corridors ... - the beginning of barefoot over glass.

reception

Samuel R. Delany reviewed the novel largely negatively in the New York Times . Delany criticizes, among other things, that "all this formal gimmick" lacks special insights into the "fantasies" of the three stories and cites as an example that one does not find out where and from what Graham lives. The fantasy or science fiction strand of the story is clumsy and quirky. Even if a handful of pages are entertaining, Walking on Glass is ambitiously structured, but the execution is "amateurish and thin" scene after scene.

Karsten Kruschel wrote: “With all the weirdness of this book, which leaves conventional and conventions aside in a refreshingly confident manner: All three storylines describe only and exclusively familiar things. Everyone experiences intrigue, meanness, rejection, incomprehension and rejection in one form or another. Banks delivers highly concentrated, haunting images of it ... Although this novel appeared under the label 'Science Fiction', it has precious little to do with what is commonly imagined by it. It could have been published by Luchterhand, Hanser or another house of 'noble' literature, thirty marks more expensive and discussed in all feature sections. "

Iain Banks himself said that the book “didn't get exactly what I wanted, and I think that if the readers don't understand what you want to say, you have failed in part. I sometimes worry that people read Walking on Glass and think that I was kind of trying to fool them, which was not my intention. "

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Samuel R. Delany: In love with Sara ffitch ( English ) In: The New York Times . March 2, 1986. Retrieved August 20, 2012.
  2. ↑ In: Wolfgang Jeschke (Ed.): The Science Fiction Year 1993 , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag Munich, ISBN 3-453-06202-7 , p. 679. Also online
  3. ^ Iain Banks, quoted from: Martyn Colebrook: Iain Banks: Walking on Glass ( English ) In: The Literary Encyclopedia . Retrieved August 20, 2012.