WALKING ON GLASS was published in 1985.
Graham Park is in love, but Sara ffitch is an enigma to him; a creature of almost perverse mystery.
Steven Grout is paranoid - and with justification. He thinks that They are out to get him. They are.
Quiss, insecure in his fabulous if ramshackle castle, is forced to play interminable impossible games. The solution to the oldest of all paradoxical riddles will release him. But he must find an answer before he knows the question.
Park, Grout, Quiss – no trio could be further apart, but their separate courses are set for collision...
Iain said, “Walking on Glass was written before The Wasp Factory was published – I had that ‘always tricky’ second novel out of the way before the first one came out.”
He added, “Feeling a little more confident about mixing mainstream and out-of-the-ordinary, in Walking on Glass I included a strand of fantasy, with acknowledgements to Kafka, Borges and Mervyn Peake, those prophets of the irreal.”
Asked about the many games played out in Walking on Glass, Iain said “The reason games are attractive is because they’re ready-made symbols, the whole idea of the game is an automatic symbol of life, because all games are in a way small attributes of life, small sections that people try to codify and make into a game.”
“It’s also a mental exercise, we exercise our brains with games because we can’t exercise them any more by hunting for animals. So the game is a ready-made symbol for our attempts to understand life. Games are structured in the same way that novels are structured, or can be. [Games are] a self-contained universe, something that is set out in front of you.”
“A game is like a novel – it’s a set of rules and symbols and patterns, and in certain novels you have to work it out and I like to have that idea in novels. To simply tell a story, tell everything, all shown, every card on the table, not left to chance in a sense, then it’s a bit boring, actually. You could do so much more, why not make it live beyond the last page? Make the characters live, make the plot live, the ideas live. And games imply that as well, games imply a continuation of the play.”