Iain Banks

A wet, wet Saturday afternoon in Toronto. The rain is invincible and crafty. It manages to find its way into cracks and crevices seemingly immune to penetration. A cloak of dampness. Three thousand miles away in Britain, the weather is kinder, more bland, yet half of the population would swear that Canadian cloak was wrapped firmly around their shoulders. A General Election has just been held, giving the Conservatives another five years in office, ending the career of the leader of the Labour Party and slicing a claymore cut Culloden-deep into the hopes of Scottish nationalism. In a country where inebriated men sing their desires to return to Glasgow even when they are standing in the middle of that city’s main square, these are tough times. The quintessence of Scotland is unparalleled, exotic, unique. Read the Celtic poets, read any of the 18th century Edinburgh journalists, read Iain Banks.

Read Iain Banks. His latest volume, The Crow Road, has become one of those rare and special things, a ‘talked about’ book. Those who have read it feel the need to communicate their pleasure and satisfaction; those who have not read it feel the need to pretend they have. The story is set in contemporary Scotland and possesses a plot that gloriously defies genre and category. Bizarre deaths, broken love affairs, tenuous and tortured families, cryptic diaries and mysterious disappearances. All of this is dipped in memorable prose and sweetened with a gift for descriptions of bucolic landscape, a stimulating control of humour and often quite sepulchral wit. The book is initiated, for example, with “It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.”

Banks is a bespectacled, hirsute man, very much a Scot, very much an author. Eminently approachable and loquacious, he is the consummate contrary of the detached, patrician and aloof author so fashionable in post-war Britain. He was committed to a life of writing by the time he was 16 years old, always with some form of novel or writing project in progress. Family influences? “My mother was a professional ice skater, touring the country in the chorus of all these big shows,” he explains. “My father worked for the Admiralty but always had lots of books around. An uncle, who’s a rigger, paints watercolours.” A pause. “I suppose it all comes down to the same thing.” That same thing led him to Stirling University where he studied English and Philosophy. After college came a move south of the border down London way and a job as a draughtsman. Unemployment was and is high in Scotland, and there were simply no jobs for a bearded young intellectual in the troubled mid-70s. “I missed Scotland a lot,” he admits, “the place, my family, my friends,” and indeed a flavour of affection for his homeland permeates much of Banks’ writing.

The watershed, the turning point, the proverbial breakthrough came in 1984 with The Wasp Factory. In The Importance of Being Earnest, one of Wilde’s characters claims that she will wait forever for her lover, as long as he isn’t far away for very long. A similar paradox with the then 30 year old Iain Banks. From obscurity to triumph overnight, but that night had taken years of grinding work and inexorable revision. The book is still Banks’ most successful seller with over a quarter of a million sales, translated into various and disparate languages. “All those strange-looking characters,” he says, “I’m always surprised when, say, a Portuguese edition of one of my science fiction novels appears out of the blue.” Or Japanese, or Yiddish, for that matter.

Yet critical acclaim for the work was not universal. The outstanding but often constipated Times Literary Supplement dismissed The Wasp Factory as ‘ghoulish frivolity and preposterous sadism.’ The less outstanding but even more constipated Sunday Express complained of ‘a silly, gloatingly sadistic and grisly yarn.’ The book is, in fact, as provocative as it is poignant and stimulating, never redundantly violent or gratuitously bleak. There is a valid place in literature for darkness and terror. The narrator of the story, Frank Cauldhame, lives with his eccentric father on a remote Scottish island. He captures, tortures and kills animals as part of his perverse cultish religion. The protagonist’s brother escapes from a lunatic asylum, and while Cauldhame waits for this man’s return, he recounts his life as a child and a murderer. What shocked so many critics was the absence of authorial condemnation of or comment upon these undoubtedly diabolical activities. How myopic they were; a moral vacuum was exactly what Iain Banks was trying to convey.

Walking on Glass and The Bridge came next and this time peer praise was universal. Fay Weldon announced as only Fay Weldon can that Banks was ‘the great white hope of contemporary British literature.’ It was enough to drive a man to drink, delirium or, in Iain Banks’ case, science fiction. The genre occupies a twilight space in the literary world; the higher pundits would rather have us enjoy it than respect it. For Banks to dive into this maelstrom of galaxies, stars and futures appeared as an insult.  To compound his sin, he decided to adopt a pseudonym, that of Iain M Banks, surely a derisive jibe at the expense of the literary lords and ladies. The novel, Consider Phlebas, was a success. An enormous success. “My main concern was that this was the first SF book after three, albeit rather weird mainstream books, and it’s the sort of SF people think of when they don’t know anything about the subject, with all the big spaceships etc,” he says, his speech rapid and enthusiastic. “In some quarters of the SF community that’s almost as frowned upon as SF in general by the literary establishment.”

Two further science fiction books followed, making Banks believe that amongst some critics “there was a slight feeling of relief - ‘ah,’ they could say, ‘he’s been a closet sciffy writer all along.’ Of course, that’s only the more blinkered end of the literary scene, which I’m hardly a part of.” He is hardly a part of any scene, avoiding those stifling and claustrophobic pigeonholes with graceful determination. “In the end, all I’m trying to do is write the sort of books that I would like to read. I’m almost disgustingly happy. I take all my nastiness out on the characters in my books, so I can afford to be, dammit!”

His new book, The Crow Road, is his tenth and is a reversion to an older style, by Iain Banks expunged of that telling middle M. Yet the same intelligence and incisive understanding of character is on display, whatever his genre. Banks exploits the same delicious knack of taking a reader by the hand to the edge of a precipice and then letting go, running away and tantalisingly shouting ‘you’re on your own now!’ It never fails to work. “I enjoy changing types of books,” he explains, “it gives me a feeling of freshness, of doing something different. I can write as much as 5,000 words a day, though it’s usually nearer to 3,000.”

Banks’ next book has a title, Against a Dark Background, but little else at this stage. One thing we can be assured of is that our comfortable perception of the world will not be intact after reading the book. “My mother belonged to the Church of Scotland and I grew up thinking that everyone had a dad who was an atheist and a mum who went to Church.” (laughs). “I like taking the opposite point of view, looking at things from the other side.” The opposite point of view: read The Crow Road, read The Wasp Factory, read Iain Banks. Read Iain Banks.