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Overview
The Business is a nearly omnipotent and infinitely discreet transglobal organization whose origins predate the Christian Church, if not the Roman Empire (which the Business actually owned for sixty-six days). Financially transparent, internally democratic, and morally dispassionate, the actual business of the Business seems-even to Kate Telman, a senior executive-to be vague to the point of invisibility. Counted among its vast riches are a book of Leonardo cartoons, dozens of Michelangelo's pornographic paintings, and several sets of Crown Jewels. All it lacks is a certain clout in politics, an arena that the Business has avoided for centuries but that has suddenly become of vital importance. No longer satisfied with its permanent base in Antarctica and its fortified Swiss headquarters, the Business is angling to buy its own nation in order to take a seat at the United Nations.Kate is the perfect candidate to help the Business realize its most ambitious goal: She was plucked at age eight from a bleak urban slum and groomed for membership among the Business's elite, and her personal and professional loyalties chart a single path. She has risen rapidly through the ranks, achieving a reputation as not only the firm's smartest and most beautiful employee but also its foremost expert on emerging technologies. While her loyalty never falters, as she travels the globe at the behest of her enigmatic employer she is forced to peel away layers of emotional insulation and to reassess the assumptions of a lifetime. To take control of her future, she must learn to do the Business.
The Times of London has proclaimed Iain Banks "the most imaginative British novelist of his generation." An instant number-one bestseller in England, The Business ominously imagines the ubiquitous multinational corporations of our millennial present, and the cunning with which they manipulate and determine our economy and culture.
Synopsis
The Business is a nearly omnipotent and infinitely discreet transglobal organization whose origins predate the Christian Church, if not the Roman Empire (which the Business actually owned for sixty-six days). Financially transparent, internally democratic, and morally dispassionate, the actual business of the Business seems-even to Kate Telman, a senior executive-to be vague to the point of invisibility. Counted among its vast riches are a book of Leonardo cartoons, dozens of Michelangelo's pornographic paintings, and several sets of Crown Jewels. All it lacks is a certain clout in politics, an arena that the Business has avoided for centuries but that has suddenly become of vital importance. No longer satisfied with its permanent base in Antarctica and its fortified Swiss headquarters, the Business is angling to buy its own nation in order to take a seat at the United Nations.
Kate is the perfect candidate to help the Business realize its most ambitious goal: She was plucked at age eight from a bleak urban slum and groomed for membership among the Business's elite, and her personal and professional loyalties chart a single path. She has risen rapidly through the ranks, achieving a reputation as not only the firm's smartest and most beautiful employee but also its foremost expert on emerging technologies. While her loyalty never falters, as she travels the globe at the behest of her enigmatic employer she is forced to peel away layers of emotional insulation and to reassess the assumptions of a lifetime. To take control of her future, she must learn to do the Business.
The Times of London has proclaimed Iain Banks "the most imaginative British novelist of his generation." An instant number-one bestseller in England, The Business ominously imagines the ubiquitous multinational corporations of our millennial present, and the cunning with which they manipulate and determine our economy and culture.
Publishers Weekly
Ever since The Wasp Factory first bent readers' minds in 1984, prolific Scottish author Banks has tantalized and terrified with his eerily accurate representations of humanity at its twisted best and worst. Lighter in mood than some of his previous novels, his latest, a bestseller in Great Britain, is still shot through with sinister undertones. In a recognizable but slightly tilted 1998, Kathryn Telman works for the Business, a mysterious corporation that predates the Christian church and at one point owned the Roman Empire. Plucked from poverty in West Scotland at the age of eight, she has been groomed for the fast track ever since. Thirty years later, despite her power, money and success, she is finally beginning to wonder just what the Business is all about. Why was she pulled out of Scotland just as she noticed something amiss at a subsidiary chip factory? Why has she been summoned by a munitions-collecting higher-up to talk his nephew out of writing an incendiary anti-Islamic screenplay? Why has the Business's sinister head of security sent her a dirty DVD showing the wife of Kathryn's colleague--and secret love--in an illicit tryst? And why suddenly appoint her "ambassador" to Thulahn, a remote Himalayan principality the Business is buying in order to gain its own seat in the U.N.? Banks offers a hilarious look at international corporate culture and the insatiable avarice that drives it, but he suggests the positive potential of globalization, too. Less overtly eccentric and sensationalistic than favorites like The Wasp Factory and A Song of Stone, the novel is a clever, genre-bending pleasure. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Our ReviewRisky Business
A shadowy commercial empire bent on controlling the global marketplace, a secret cabal plotting the crime of the century, and the one woman who holds the fate of both in her grasp: In his new genre-defying novel (call it a sexy-techno-comic-spy-thriller), Scottish author Iain Banks gives the brave new world order "the business."
In 1984, Banks debuted to controversy and acclaim with The Wasp Factory -- a novel that was recently selected in a British poll as one of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. Since then, the prolific author has developed something of a literary split personality: As "Iain Banks," he has penned eccentric British bestsellers such as Complicity, The Crow Road, and A Song of Stone; as Iain "M." Banks, his expansive "Culture" novels have earned their place in the space opera repertory alongside Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy, Frank Herbert's Dune series, and Orson Scott Card's Ender quartet. But the hallmark of all of Banks's novels is his unfettered imagination, informed by a dark humor and a dry, caustic wit.
The Business finds Banks comfortably earthbound, focusing his technological lens on the advances of the information age and their at-times questionable applications in the modern corporate and political arenas. Narrating this captivating cautionary tale is Kate Telman, a buff and brainy 38-year-old Level 3 executive -- part secret-agent "Jane" Bond, part Barbarella, and equally adept in the board- and bedroom -- in a venerable commercial organization that, for simplicity's sake, is referred to simply as the Business. Predating the Christian Church (though not the Roman Empire, which, at one point it technically owned), the Business has survived plague and pogrom, crusades and communism, all in the name of profit. By the dawn of the 21st century it is a vast holding company whose tentacles control myriad ventures, from the mundane to the multinational.
As the novel opens, Kate is enjoying a well-earned sabbatical when she receives a desperate -- and nearly unintelligible -- phone call from a junior operative who has been abducted on the eve of an important round of negotiations and given an unforgettable lesson in guerrilla dentistry. This brutally comic episode is but the first thread in a tangled skein of characters and plotlines that play out with typically Banksian complexity. In short order, Kate finds herself back on the global chessboard as a pawn -- or, more appropriately, a queen -- in an elaborate gambit orchestrated by a cadre of Level 1 power brokers. At stake is not only her career but also the Business's clandestine bid to buy the tiny Himalayan Shangri-la of Thulahn -- and in the process obtain a voting seat at the United Nations.
The Business is a deliciously wicked satire of technology, corporate ethics, and global consumerist capitalism that only Iain Banks could conceive, much less pull off. Imagine a giddy mix of Benjamin Barber's dialectical Jihad vs. McWorld, the historical arcana of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and the intramural menace of John Grisham's The Firm, leavened by wry commentary on topics ranging from Xerox Parc to the damp realities of trickle-down economics to the musical eccentricities of Glenn Gould and Alanis Morissette, and you'll begin to get the picture. The latest in a long list of unqualified literary successes, The Business reaffirms Banks as one of the most inventive and original authors writing today.
--Greg Marrs