Literary Significance & Criticism
Like many of Banks' characters, from Frank Cauldhame in The Wasp Factory to Prentice McHoan in The Crow Road, Isis engages in a half-unconscious search for knowledge which will inevitably turn her world upside down. (The novel thus becomes a type of Bildungsroman.)
Banks portrays the cult largely sympathetically, especially given its publication just after the Waco Siege in 1993 (which Yolanda discusses within the novel). Banks ensures that the Luskentyrian theology (in which Isis fervently believes at the start of the book) has coherence and consistency, even as events cause her to start to doubt.
Banks has called it:
a book about religion and culture written by a dedicated evangelical atheist — I thought I was very kind to them... Essentially, Isis makes the recognition that the value of the Luskentyrian cult is in their community values rather than their religious ones. She recognises that efficiency isn't everything, that people not profit are what matters.
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“Much of the wisdom of the world is not wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt superior to literary fame, and are not writers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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