基本信息出版社：Abacus
页码：393 页
出版日期：2000年06月
ISBN：0349112452
条形码：9780349112459
版本：New Ed
装帧：平装
外文书名：商业

内容简介 在线阅读本书

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 Michel-angelo'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 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
作者简介 Iain Banks is the author of more than a dozen novels, including The Wasp Factory -- recently selected in a British poll as one of the top 100 novels of the twentieth century -- and the international bestsellers A Song of Stone and Complicity. He lives in Scotland. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
编辑推荐 Amazon.com
Iain Banks is a multi-generic, multi-task dream. On one hand, he's produced a series of science fiction novels (Feersum Endjinn, Inversions) that have achieved cult status in his native Britain. On the other hand, he has dipped into the world of contemporary fiction with a number of equally successful works (The Bridge, Complicity). Fans of both rely on Banks's acidic wit, elegantly clever prose, and sometimes befuddling but always fascinating plot twists.

The Business, a sly satire of corporate success, begins with every promise of fulfilling those standards. Kathryn Telman, "a senior executive officer, third level (counting from the top) in a commercial organization which has had many different names through the ages but which, these days, we usually just refer to as the Business," has been selected to negotiate the Business's purchase of the sovereign state of Thulahn (where "the royal palace is heated by yak dung" and the "national sport is emigration"). Corporate takeovers are small potatoes compared to the acquisition of an entire country, and Kathryn's politely scheming superiors have set their sights on a seat at the United Nations and the "unrestricted use of that perfect smuggling route called the diplomatic bag."

Kathryn's voice, at once polished and gritty, is the novel's strongest point. Her wry dissections of the Business, its motives and ambitions, its members, and the delightful irony of negotiating with Thulahn's crown prince (who is more interested in matrimony than marketeering) are sheer reading pleasure. And the notion of an ancient, omnipotent, secretive corporation is a great starting point for any number of stories. But The Business is, sadly, next to bankrupt on the level of plot. Of the two storylines that structure the novel (the takeover of Thulahn and Kathryn's growing suspicion of high-level fraud), neither amounts to much. Their development and resolution, such as they are, seem so haphazard that the reader might wonder whether Banks just lost interest in his own story.

For dedicated Banks fans, The Business may not be on a par with his other outings, but the pleasure of his prose is nonetheless satisfying. Newcomers to the Banks mystique, having no points of reference, may be well content with his arch humor and forceful characterization. --Kelly Flynn --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


专业书评 From 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 colleagueDand secret loveDin 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 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
The Guardian One of his most assured performances yet....A highly inventive piece of work, amusing and sinister by turns. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.