Whit: or, Isis Amongst the Unsaved is a novel by Iain Banks, published in 1995.
Isis Whit, who has spent her entire life living in the cult founded by her grandfather (and to which she is heir apparent) ventures out into the wider world in search of her cousin Morag. On her journey she learns much about not only the wider world, but also herself and the history of her family.
This novel contains examples of:
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: Salvador Whit and his descendants.
- Combat Pragmatist: Isis witnesses a black friend being menaced by racist thugs. She goes into an ordinary shop and buys a kid's water pistol and a bottle of Tabasco sauce. She combines the two to make instant pepper spray which she uses, to devastating effect.
- Cult: The Luskentyrians are a small cult based in a farmhouse in Scotland. Although Isis is a True Believer, she's also intelligent and insightful enough to recognise that, while the cult's founder (her grandfather) is obviously the Chosen of God, he's also a bit of an old rogue. It turns out he's much more of a rogue than she imagined, while at the same time less of a fraud than the reader might expect. He really did have a religious experience, and devoted the rest of his life to figuring out what it meant. It's her brother who wants to turn it into a Scam Religion.
- Fish out of Water: Isis grew up in a mildly puritanical cult that rejects all modern technology and considers her the Chosen One. While she understands on an intellectual level that the rest of the world isn't like that, she's not prepared for how uninterested the outside world is in even trying to understand her beliefs.
- Overly Long Name:
- Isis' full name is Gaia-Marie Isis Saraswati Minerva Mirza Whit. It gets even longer when you include all her official titles.
- Her grandfather, the founder of Luskentyrism, also has an overly long name, owing to his habit of adding middle names from various religious sources whenever he feels like it.
- Pervert Dad: Actually Pervert Grandfather: Isis's grandfather deems that she has misbehaved according to the rules of the cult that he founded and she fervently believes in, so at first he has them pray together, then he insists that they undress (and she reluctantly complies)...and then she has to fight him off her.
- Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: In the Back Story, Isis's Great-Aunt Zhobelia had a vision that the large bag of banknotes discovered near Isis's grandfather before he set up his cult, and which she'd been hiding ever since, would bring disaster to the cult. So she decided to burn it. This caused the fire in which Isis's parents were killed.
- So Beautiful, It's a Curse: Played straight and unusually successfully with Isis: she's convincingly described as being gorgeous, but she's not really interested in sex which is a bit of a problem since the cult she belongs to plans to involve her in some kind of mating ritual.
- Try to Fit That on a Business Card: The Blessed Very Reverend Gaia-Marie Isis Saraswati Minerva Mirza Whit of Luskentyre, Beloved Elect of God III.
- Water Wake-up: After offers of coffee and threats of excommunication fail, Isis successfully wakes up her hungover half brother Zebediah by the graduated series of containers method. First the sleeper is drenched with a thimbleful of water, which is followed by the contents of an egg cup, a tea cup, a pint glass and finally a bucket.
