Although there’s a proper meaning to the book, he never fails to put in a joke where he can. Whit, especially, whose narrator is a kind of Scots Candide at large in the wicked world, gets many a good joke in, even ones which aren’t fully explained like the mysterious unguent known as zhlonjiz, which is Sloan’s liniment; ‘Sloan-ji’s’ in Anglo-Indian. Another thing about Banks I noted, his characters almost never seem to have cars or their equivalent. Even the richest of the Culture characters will call up a cab rather than have their own transport; and although some do in the Iain (no M.) Banks novels, most don’t, or if they do they are villains and branded as such by their mode of transit first. Moving with the times slightly, however, in Whit the Item of Villainous Technology that tells us Allan is up to No Good is a mobile telephone. Once again, in Whit, the family is revealed finally as a Bad Thing, this being common in Banks’s novels. Isis is a Tough Cookie but doesn’t make too much of it, even when she’s facing down a rottweiler called Tyson or seeing off a pair of racist thugs with the help of a water-pistol filled with a cayenne pepper mix. Oh and Whit is the first novel I’ve read which mentions flumes