THE STEEP APPROACH TO GARBADALE was published in 2007
After years of exile, Alban Wopuld has been summoned back to his family's highland estate, Garbadale.
The Wopuld clan are closing ranks.
They have built their fortune on the boardgame Empire! - which has become a hugely successful computer game – and now the Americans want to buy them out.
As the family gathers for their Extraordinary General Meeting, old grudges, forbidden passions and dark secrets emerge. What drove Alban’s mother to take her own life? And is he yet over Sophie, his bewitching cousin and teenage love?
Iain said, “I’m quite a frustrated political writer. I don’t have the gift to properly embed politics in the book. Characters come along and spout what is obviously my rant. It’s an eternal frustration. The approach of Alban, the central character in The Steep Approach to Garbadale, was originally cautiously for the war, and I never was. I was against it right from the beginning. But I wanted to give him a sense of being betrayed, and looking back on it to think, ‘oh dear, I was one of the useful idiots.’ That was the phrase that applied to those who resisted the war, but I think we know now who the useful idiots really were – the people supposedly of the left who actually supported it. I think there are people who are just too proud to admit that they were effectively outwitted by George W Bush, and you can kind of understand that being embarrassing.”
The family name in the book is Wopuld. This is because Iain was a two-finger-typist and almost always when he went to type the word ‘would’ also hit the ‘p’ key by accident. Being Iain, he decided to turn a bug into a feature. Wopuld has appeared just once before, in The Algebraist, where it is attributed to long extinct invert spongiforms...
Asked about whether Empire! Is based on Risk, Iain said, “I was a Risk adept, I’ll have you know. Well, I thought so at the time. At one point in the early Seventies, I’d won 13 out of the 15 games my pals and I had played over the course of one summer (and, patently, remembered this statistic). I believed then that this was because I was a genius. In fact it was because I had a car. This kept me sober while my chums were all roaring drunk and often stoned as well so not taking the game entirely seriously, while I was. I even designed a sort of super-Risk that featured a variable geography board and lots of different types of units, plus different terrains and resources and so on. I never did persuade any of my pals to play it with me, though I had a lot of geeky fun test-playing it. Anyway, Sid Meier did it a lot better.”
