style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: #ffffff; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">It was only in April that Iain Banks announced that he had inoperable cancer of the gall bladder; he had been told he might have a year to live. Two months later he was dead. There is a certain authentically Banksian irony – macabre, gothic, even cosmic – in the fact that he had written almost all of what was to be his last novel, The Quarry, before he was diagnosed: the pivotal character in the book is also a man dying of cancer.