Walking on Glass was the second novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Scottish writer Iain Banks

Iain Banks

Iain Banks is a Scottish writer. He writes mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, and science fiction as Iain M. Banks, including the initial of his adopted middle name Menzies...

. It was published in 1985.

Plot introduction

It has three storylines that do not appear to be linked, but eventually come together, to an extent that depends upon how much the reader wishes to read into the book.

Plot summary

Each part of Walking on Glass, apart from the last, is divided into three sections, which appear at first sight to be independent stories.

• Graham Park is a young man in love with a girl he met at a party, Sarah ffitch. Richard Slater is his friend. Bob Stock, a "macho black-leathered never-properly-seen image of Nemesis" seems all that stands in the way of Graham's happiness.

• Steven Grout is a paranoid
  Paranoia
  Paranoia [] is a thought process believed to be heavily influenced by anxiety or fear, often to the point of irrationality and delusion. Paranoid thinking typically includes persecutory beliefs, or beliefs of conspiracy concerning a perceived threat towards oneself...
  
   roadmender who believes himself to be an admiral from a galactic war imprisoned in the body of an Earthman. He believes he is under constant threat from the Microwave Gun, and reads lots of science fiction
  Science fiction
  Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
  
  , since "he had long ago realised that if he was going to find any clues to the whereabouts of the Way Out, the location or identity of the Key, there was a good chance he might get some ideas from that type of writing."
• Quiss is one of a pair of war criminals (the other is Ajayi) from opposing sides in a galactic war, who are imprisoned in the Castle of Bequest (also Castle Doors) and forced to play impossible games until they can solve the riddle
  Irresistible force paradox
  The Irresistible force paradox, also the unstoppable force paradox, is a classic paradox formulated as "What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?" This paradox is a form of the omnipotence paradox, which is a simple demonstration that challenges omnipotence:...
  
  : "What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?"

Eventually, links between the three storylines become apparent, and the ending has a flavour of incest

Incest

Incest is sexual intercourse between close relatives that is usually illegal in the jurisdiction where it takes place and/or is conventionally considered a taboo. The term may apply to sexual activities between: individuals of close "blood relationship"; members of the same household; step...

.

Literary significance & criticism

Quiss's Gothic

Gothic architecture

Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....

 castle is a combination of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

 and Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Laurence Peake was an English writer, artist, poet and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the Gormenghast books. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R...

. After saving Quiss from suicide Ajayi reads the titles of the books on the wall: "Titus Groan, she read, talking softly to herself. The Castle

The Castle

The Castle is a novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist, known only as K., struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities of a castle who govern the village for unknown reasons...

, Labyrinths

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

, The Trial

The Trial

The Trial is a novel by Franz Kafka, first published in 1925. One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor the reader.Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never...

"

Iain Banks commented that the book "didn’t do exactly what it set out to do and I think you have failed to an extent if the reader can’t understand what you’re saying. I worry sometimes that people will read Walking on Glass and think in some way I was trying to fool them, which I wasn’t."

Release details

• 1985, UK, Macmillan (ISBN 0-333-37986-1) Pub date 7 March 1985, hardback (first edition)