was quite easy to feel disempowered and disenfranchised in the Britain of 1993, when this novel by Iain Banks was first published. It was even easier to feel that way in Scotland since it appeared, during the seemingly endless Thatcher/Major administration, characterised by increasing arrogance, repression, incompetence and corruption, that no amount of political organization or activities would bring about any change. The country was ruled from London on the basis of legitimacy provided by the solidly middle-class of southern and central England in all its hateful bourgeois glory.
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