Iain Banks

‘See the man bleed, see the car leak; radiator red, blood red, blood like red oil...’

To say that novelist Iain Banks writes about nasty things is a little like saying that Enzo Ferrari occasionally made a decent car.

‘...see the man drive the car, see the man not see the other car, see the big CRASH, see the bone-broken man bleed; blood the colour of the bridge.’

And the nastiness, like this from The Bridge, is often car-inspired. His books are littered with automotive references of every sort. One even has a character who wards off motorway boredom by working out the makes and models of passing cars by the shape of their tail lights.

As you can guess, he’s a man who likes cars, who knows how they work and how to drive them well. His everyday car is a C-reg 125,000 mile BMW 535i, but he also owns and dotes on a G-plate Porsche 911 Carrera 4.

Banks is not a horror writer, although nobody is going to confuse his output with Miss Read’s. His debut novel, The Wasp Factory was summed up by the Evening Standard as ‘a repulsive piece of work that will therefore be widely admired.’

To date, the man who claims that he has only ever deliberately written one novel to shock – Complicity – but found that it caused less offence than the ones that weren’t, has given his legions of fans nastiness in the form of sheep immolation, cello destruction, S&M, schoolboy-related deviancy – and the Fiat 126 he writes about in Complicity.

‘I pass through Gilmerton, a village just outside Crieff. Used to be there was a collection of three identical little blue Fiat 126s sitting facing the road there outside one of the houses; they were there for years and years and I always meant to stop off here and find the owner and ask him, ‘why have you had these three little blue Fiat 126s sitting outside your house?’

Banks cheerfully admits that the cars actually existed. “They were there for about a decade, but disappeared a few years ago. I was very sad. It felt like the end of an era.”

Obscure details like these regularly crop up in his work, allowing readers the vicarious pleasure of spotting the odd, often Scotland-related fact amongst the fiction. “I’m always asked if I see myself as a Scottish writer,” says Banks, though the words ‘aye’ and ‘wee’ are used to much as verbal punctuation as to render the question pointless.

But today Banks is climbing out of a distant relation of the baby Fiat, the rather more voluptuous Ferrari 456GT. “I have,” he announced, “the Ferrari grin.”

He’d always wanted to drive a Ferrari, and now his time had come. When we approached his agent with the idea of putting Banks behind the wheel of something even more exotic, she said, ‘I hope it’s red and Italian.’ Sadly, this particular 456GT is blue – but Banks isn’t complaining, especially as we’d also arranged for him to drive a Honda NSX. Every time we stop to take photographs, he leaps out of the car, giggling with the fun of it all.

The 456 comes courtesy of Glenvarigill, Banks’ local, Edinburgh-based Ferrari agent – whose willingness to hand over a £156,445 car for a day is only partly explained by him being a regular customer. They service his beloved ‘wee car’ as he calls his 911.

We meet him in their workshops, a place stuffed with exotic machinery, where Banks wears the expression of a very small child in a very big sweet shop.

“You can keep me waiting as long as you like,” he says, peering at the inner works of an F40. “I like having my time wasted like this.”

Success as a novelist didn’t come quickly for Banks. The Wasp Factory, his sixth novel, was published on his 30^th birthday. His first had been written when he was 16, and he’d got used to rejection letters in the intervening decade and a half: “the most imaginative blamed a paper shortage.”

He was working as a solicitor’s costings clerk when his luck changed (the memory causes him to mutter something about other forms of fiction). This was the latest in a series of braindead jobs, including a stint tying up steamers on the River Clyde, that allowed his mind to wander into the fertile pastures of authorship.

“I learned the lesson with The Wasp Factory to do a second draft. I’d assumed they would spot a rough diamond with the books I wrote, but I got better with practice.”

If Banks has suffered for his art, this hasn’t made him precious. He is soon being coaxed into some red overalls and strapped into a Ferrari seat (sans car) with an F40 nose section placed in front of him, like some monstrous pedal car. Somehow you couldn’t imagine Martin Amis doing this.

“There are many silly photos of me,” he laughs, “and most of them have been published.” Despite being outside and freezing cold, this man who has written unflinchingly about behaviours, actions and forms of psychosis that must have involved probing areas of the mind most of us would rather avoid, seems genuinely deeply contented. But what is he really thinking about? What dark obsession lurks behind that cheerful façade. He soon lets us know.

“My nose is running.”

But what motivates him to write stuff which is, frankly, pretty grotesque in parts? “When you write about violence or conflict you just have to be honest. There’s got to be a reason for it being there, and it’s got to be properly described. I wouldn’t say it’s gratuitous, but that’s up to others to evaluate.”

Talking of honesty, Iain Banks admits that his first car was a world away from Ferraris. It was a Mk1 Cortina estate with a bench seat and column gearchange. A hand-me-down from his dad, Banks sometimes used it to go “rallying in the forests.”

“I took my test in that car, and in the rather innocent, pre-IRA days used to make home-made bombs with a friend. We would drive down Forestry Commission tracks to let them off.”

He even admits to having possessed a Cortina 2000E – another parental cast-off – christened the Starship Enterprise. He owned and disliked a MkII Escort, enjoyed a Fiat 124 and – amazingly – a Volvo 265. “It was black and imposing. Occasionally children would salute as we drove past.”

The Porsche was bought second-hand after his faithful BMW failed to climb a snow-covered hill and Banks decided he needed four-wheel drive.

“My wife vetoed the idea of a Range Rover. At one point we considered a three car solution; an old Land Rover, something wee like a Mazda MX-5, and the BMW. Then I remembered the Carrera 4 and thought, ‘that’s an idea...’”

I soon became intimately acquainted with Banks’ 911 and spend most of the day driving it as we hurtle around Scotland in pursuit of the flying author.

For those interested in intimate, Hello magazine-style personal details, Iain Banks listens to Radio One, his in-car CD player was broken when Mrs Banks tried to insert two discs at once, he owns a tartan-ish travel rug and has changed the Porsche’s door mirrors for later items “because the old ones looked boring.”

Boring is not a good description of the way Iain Banks drives. It is the stuff of a thousand motoring clichés as the author howls down a long, undulating lane, the blue rump of the 456 vanishing into the dips and popping up over the crests with photographer John in the squat silver Honda bobbing up and down in sympathy behind it, and the 911 in pursuit.

He regularly uses the roads leading to the Kyle of Lochalsh, where the 911’s wee-ness certainly comes in handy. “It’s a privilege to use those roads in a car like the Porsche. You do meet the odd caravan; I used to hate them, but it doesn’t really matter. You just go ‘whoosh!’ and you’re past them.”

The 456 certainly goes ‘whoosh!’ too but it’s a front-engined GT and not a manic, rear-engined sports car. It is also the first car Banks has driven with an open gate gearshift. “This is more authoritarian than I’m used to – you will go here! I prefer the 911’s rifle bolt action.”

More photographs have to be taken so we spend the next few minutes removing the travel grime from the Ferrari with paper towelling. “I thought that would be silk,” he remarks.

We have promised to buy him lunch, but Banks is enjoying himself so much that lunch becomes a KitKat at a village petrol station.

Reluctant as he is to be parted from the 456, the sky is darkening and he simply has to try the NSX. He thunders into the freezing Scottish gloom with the roof open and comes back very impressed.

“It was more immediately enjoyable than the Ferrari, beyond doubt. I loved the sharpness of the throttle, all the inputs seemed lighter. It felt that bit smaller and driving it was just wonderful.

“If I could have either car to keep, I’d take the Ferrari, beyond doubt. If I could have either car for a year it would still be the Ferrari, but if it was for a day, a week or maybe even a month, it would be the Honda and bugger all this heritage stuff. A car is what it does, what it’s capable of doing and personally I rate heritage beneath looks.

“Driving the Ferrari was the fulfilment of a dream; driving the NSX was a revelation.”