Iain Banks, writer, born 16 February 1954; died 9 June 2013
Iain Banks in Edinburgh in 2007. Photograph:
Murdo Macleod
This article was amended
on 10 June 2013. The novel Stonemouth does not open on the Forth road
bridge, but on a fictional bridge resembling it. This has been
corrected.
The writer Iain Banks, who has died aged 59, had already prepared his
many admirers for his death. On 3 April he announced on his website that
he had inoperable gall bladder cancer, giving him, at most, a year to
live. The announcement was typically candid and rueful. It was also
characteristic in another way: Banks had a large web-attentive
readership who liked to follow his latest reflections as well as his
writings. Particularly in his later years, he frequently projected his
thoughts via the internet. There can have been few novelists of recent
years who were more aware of what their readers thought of their books;
there is a frequent sense in his novels of an author teasing, testing
and replying to a readership with which he was pretty familiar.
His first published novel, The Wasp Factory, appeared in 1984, when he
was 30 years old, though it had been rejected by six publishers before
being accepted by Macmillan. It was an immediate succès de scandale. The
narrator is the 16-year-old Frank Cauldhame, who lives with his taciturn
father in an isolated house on the north-east coast of Scotland. Frank
lives in a world of private rituals, some of which involve torturing
animals, and has committed several murders. The explanation of his
isolation and his obsessiveness is shockingly revealed in one of the
culminating plot twists for which Banks was to become renowned.
It was followed by Walking on Glass (1985), composed of three separate
narratives whose connections are deliberately made obscure until near
the end of the novel. One of these seems to be a science fiction
narrative and points the way to Banks's strong interest in this genre.
Equally, multiple narration would continue to feature in his work.
The next year's novel, The Bridge, featured three separate stories told
in different styles: one a realist narrative about Alex, a manager in an
engineering company, who crashes his car on the Forth road bridge;
another the story of John Orr, an amnesiac living on a city-sized
version of the bridge; and a third, the first-person narrative of the
Barbarian, retelling myths and legends in colloquial Scots. In combining
fantasy and allegory with minutely located naturalistic narrative, it
was clearly influenced by Alasdair Gray's Lanark (1981). It remained the
author's own avowed favourite.
His first science fiction novel, Consider Phlebas, was published in
1987, though he had drafted it soon after completing The Wasp Factory.
In it he created The Culture, a galaxy-hopping society run by powerful
but benevolent machines and possessed of what its inventor called
"well-armed liberal niceness". It would feature in most of his
subsequent sci-fi novels. Its enemies are the Idirans, a religious,
humanoid race who resent the benign powers of the Culture. In this
conflict, good and ill are not simply apportioned. Banks provided a
heady mix of, on the one hand, action and intrigue on a cosmic scale
(his books were often called "space operas"), and, on the other,
ruminations on the clash of ideas and ideologies.
For the rest of his career literary novels would alternate with works of
science fiction, the latter appearing under the name "Iain M Banks" (the
"M" standing for Menzies). Banks sometimes spoke of his science fiction
books as a writerly vacation from the demands of literary fiction, where
he could "pull out the stops", as he himself put it. Player of Games
(1988) was followed by Use of Weapons (1990). The science fiction
employed some of the narrative trickery that characterised his literary
fiction: Use of Weapons, for instance, featured two interleaved
narratives, one of which moved forward in time and the other backwards.
Their connectedness only became clear with a final, somewhat outrageous,
twist of the narrative. His many fans came to relish these tricks.
In 1991 Banks moved from England to Scotland, settling in North
Queensferry, Fife, very close to his childhood home. He had remained
close to his parents, who in their old age moved to live next to him.
Scottish settings now became important to many of his novels. The Crow
Road (1992) is a Scottish family saga, though its traditional form is
disguised by narrative time shifts and witty references to popular
culture. Banks's abiding love of cars is encoded in the book, many of
whose key events – including birth, copulation and death – occur in
cars. The protagonist loses his virginity on the back seat of a Lagonda
Rapide Saloon. In 2006, finally conceding to the force of green
politics, Banks sold his two Porsches, his BMW and his Land Rover in
favour of a Lexus hybrid.
The Crow Road, with its cast of eccentrics and its exactly observed
local detail, was successfully serialised for BBC television in 1996 by
the screenwriter Bryan Elsley. The production was directed by Gavin
Millar, who several years later also directed a TV version of Banks's
next novel, Complicity (1993). This was a less buoyant and formally more
restive work. Its protagonist, a Scottish journalist called Colley,
finds himself implicated in the crimes of a serial killer. The novel
alternates the narration of the journalist, written in the first person,
with the narrative of the murderer, told in the second person.
By the time that Banks was duly named as one of Granta's Best Young
British Novelists in 1993 (aged then 39) he was an established name with
a strong and often youthful following.
In 1997 he produced A Song of Stone, a bleak political fable set in some
unnamed land where civilisation has collapsed. Always a man of the left,
Banks was animated by political causes and his pronouncements began to
attract journalistic attention. The Iraq war made him a loud critic of
Tony Blair. The impress of his political views was increasingly evident
in his fiction and it seemed to some of his admirers that they were
exerting too strong an influence. Dead Air (2002), featured a narrator,
Ken Nott, whose views seem little distanced from his author's and who is
licensed to berate the reader about political morality, American
imperialism, the Royal family and the like.
Banks's next work of literary fiction was The Steep Approach to
Garbadale (2007), a return to the territory of The Crow Road. Banks's
protagonist, Alban McGill, struggles to prevent his family's company
from being taken over by a US giant, occasioning diatribes against
American capitalism and American foreign policy that seem
straightforwardly authorial.
His science fiction works, meanwhile, seemed liberated from some of his
grimmer certainties and were notably even-handed in their treatment of
moral and ideological dispute. From Excession (1996) to The Hydrogen
Sonata (2012), he produced a sequence of seven science-fiction novels,
all but one of which, The Algebraist (2004), belonged to the Culture
series. Agents of The Culture are on a mission to spread democracy,
secularism and social justice throughout the universe. It might be
thought that they represent Banks's own values. Yet, as a novelist, he
had considerable sympathy for those who resist this imposition of
contentment.
Banks was born in Dunfermline, the only child of an admiralty officer
and a former professional ice skater. As a boy, following his father's
postings, he lived first in North Queensferry and later in Gourock,
Inverclyde. He was educated at Gourock and Greenock high schools before
attending the University of Stirling, where he read English, philosophy
and psychology. (He would later teach creative writing at the
university, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1997.)
After graduating in 1975 he took a series of jobs, including working as
technician at the Nigg Bay oil platform construction site and at the IBM
computer plant at Greenock. He visited the US and then moved to London,
where he worked as a clerk in a Chancery Lane law firm. Here he met his
partner, later to become his first wife, Annie.
While he worked he was writing. In the late 1970s he completed three
science fiction novels that failed to find publishers, though all three
would later be reworked and published successfully. Then followed one of
the more remarkable literary debuts.
In 2010 Banks publicly joined the cultural boycott of Israel, refusing
to allow his novels to be sold in the country. He was a frequent
signatory of letters of protest to the Guardian and a name recruited to
causes of which he approved, from secular humanism to the legalising of
assisted suicide to the preservation of public libraries. Banks himself
was a self-declared "evangelical atheist" and a man of decided political
views, often expressed with humorous exasperation and sometimes
requiring ripe language. He relished his public status as no-nonsense
voice of a common-sense socialism that had an increasingly nationalistic
tint.
An expert on Scottish whisky (when he won TV's Celebrity Mastermind, his
specialist subject was Scottish whiskies and distilleries), Banks
enjoyed the conviviality of a shared drink. In 2003 he published Raw
Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram, an account of his travels through
the highlands and islands of Scotland in pursuit of the history and the
special pleasures of malt whisky. He confessed to over-indulgence in
this pleasure at some stages of his life, and to the recreational use of
drugs. It was characteristic of him to state the fact in interviews with
journalists.
In 2010 he gave an interview to BBC Radio Scotland in which he spoke
with painful frankness about the breakdown of his relationship with his
first wife. But then the media interview seemed his natural forum: it is
difficult to think of a more frequently interviewed British novelist.
While his science fiction spanned inter-stellar spaces, his literary
fiction kept its highly specific sense of place. The place that gives
the title to his 2012 novel Stonemouth is fictional, but, like other
fictional places in earlier Banks novels, it is a highly specific
Scottish town. Like The Crow Road and The Steep Approach to Garbadale
–it is the story of a man coming back to his family home, and it is
difficult not to think that this is Banks's story of himself.
It even opens, like The Bridge, with an evocation of the Forth road
bridge, the building of which Banks had watched as a boy from his
bedroom window – or at least in this case, of a fictional bridge
resembling it. For all their formal inventiveness and play of ideas, his
novels remain memorable for the sense they give of their author's
personal memories and passions.
His announcement of his terminal illness provoked an outpouring of
dismay and affection from his readers – not least on this newspaper's
website. It was striking how many of those who responded to the news
spoke of having encountered him in person, often after a reading or
public interview. A significant number recalled sharing not just a
conversation but also a drink with him: he was an author whose readers
felt in close touch with him. He clearly relished this closeness,
regarding the round of literary festivals and speaking engagements,
often a chore for contemporary authors, with undisguised pleasure.
Shortly after the announcement, Banks married his partner, Adele
Hartley, and she survives him.
Iain M. Banks, The Culture
Series
A Few Notes On The
Culture, by Iain M Banks
Iain Banks, in
conversation with The Open University (full)
He catapulted to fame
with depraved, funny novel The Wasp Factory in 1984, but the much-loved
Scottish writer had a parallel career as an influential sci-fi writer
This month marks 10 years since the award-winning novelist Iain Banks
died aged 59. The beloved Scottish writer, who wrote literary fiction as
Iain Banks and science fiction as Iain M Banks, began his writing career
with the hit novel The Wasp Factory in 1984. He went on to write more
than 30 books, including novels, short story collections and Raw Spirit,
a travelogue of Scotland and its whisky distilleries. (In 2006 the
author won Celebrity Mastermind, his specialist subject being malt
whiskies.) In celebration of Banks’ rich and varied work, Steven Poole
picks out some good ways in to his world.
The entry point
Iain Banks’s debut novel, The Wasp Factory, granted him instant fame if
not unanimous praise. The Evening Standard recoiled at “a repulsive
piece of work”, while the Irish Times called it “a work of unparalleled
depravity”, which no doubt made the Marquis de Sade feel unfairly
forgotten. Repulsive and depraved it certainly is, of course, but it is
also poetic and horribly funny: its narrator, 16-year-old Frank
Cauldhame, comes over as a cross between Holden Caulfield and American
Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. Banks sketches the changing light and
skyscapes over the remote Scottish island where the teenager lives with
his father with as much care as Frank himself slowly reveals to the
reader the disgusting answers to our pressing questions. What exactly
are the Sacrifice Poles and the Skull Grounds, not to mention the
titular Factory itself? You don’t want to know, but you do.
The odd one out
A tight murder mystery, Complicity stands out stylistically with its
alternating sections of first- and second-person singular narration. The
use of “you” instead of “I” or the third person (Complicity begins with
the line: “You hear the car after an hour and a half”) can be an
effective way of sucking the reader into the fictional world. It also
engineers the reader’s complicity in the events of the novel, perhaps,
which works well for a story about a series of gruesome vigilante
murders. Complicity, Banks once explained, is a bit like The Wasp
Factory, “only without the happy ending and redeeming air of
cheerfulness”.
The billionaires’ favourite
Banks originally wanted to be a science-fiction author, but after
several unsuccessful drafts in the 1970s decided to write something
“normal” instead, thus rocket-boosting his literary career with The Wasp
Factory. He then started publishing science fiction as Iain M Banks,
beginning with Consider Phlebas, a phrase taken from Eliot’s The Waste
Land. It’s a cosmos-spanning romp that introduces the Culture, a
post-human galactic civilisation in which AI does all the work and no
one wants for food or other resources. (Fully automated luxury communism
– in space.)
In this first story, the smug liberal Culture is at war with the Idirans
– AI refuseniks who are waging a jihad against them. Through this
backdrop wanders sympathetic mercenary Bora Horza Gobuchul, a
Mandalorian-style drifter with a very particular set of skills. Banks’s
vision of a starfaring, post-scarcity civilisation run by AIs, in which
people can change their DNA at will and live for 400 years, is publicly
admired by tech giants such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – even as they
toil along with us in the capitalist present. Unfortunately for Bezos, a
planned Amazon TV series based on the novel was cancelled in 2020 after
Banks’s estate withdrew permission.
The author’s choice
In 2008, Banks said that his own best book was The Bridge, a
phantasmagorical story of love and coma over which looms the Forth
Bridge in both real and spectacularly imaginary versions. Three
narrators present different aspects of the same character in a highly
allusive patchwork that was inspired by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark and in
some respects also recalls early JM Coetzee. Culture nerds get very
excited about a brief mention of a “knife-missile” in the novel – a kind
of autonomous drone weapon – which to them proves that it is somehow
part of the same science-fiction universe as Consider Phlebas and the
other novels in the Culture series. Definitely maybe.
The underrated one
If Game of Thrones were set in the modern post-apocalyptic wasteland of
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, you might get something like A Song of
Stone, a claustrophobic absinthe shot of a chamber novel. Our unreliable
narrator is an aristocrat holed up with his Lady in their castle,
prisoners of a troop of anarchic guerrillas while the great senseless
conflict sweeps by outside. It’s a very European book, written against
the historical backdrop of a Europe once again at war.
Excession by Iain M Banks.
All Banks’s Culture novels feature Minds, hyperintelligent
mirror-surfaced ellipsoids that run starships and other large
engineering structures. But in Excession, the Minds become the primary
protagonists, as they debate what to do about the titular phenomenon –
an inscrutable alien artefact that seems to be older than the universe
itself – and about a barbarous competing civilisation that glories in
the name “the Affront”. As Minds are persons, they are not obliged to be
open and honest with one another or anyone else, and some conspire to
allow “gigadeathcrimes” on utilitarian principles, rather like crazed
effective altruists.
Banks always uses the names of his sapient spaceships – chosen by the
Minds themselves – as ironic commentary, and this novel contains some of
his best, such as the Ethics Gradient, the Not Invented Here, the Frank
Exchange of Views, and the Zero Gravitas. Excession is the favourite of
many Culture fans, though Look to Windward (hello again, TS Eliot) and
the extremely dark and brilliant Use of Weapons are also deservedly
revered.
The surprisingly nice one
Banks is no slouch with openings at the worst of times, but the first
line of The Crow Road has become justly famous: “It was the day my
grandmother exploded.” This, a comic bildungsroman and sweeping tale of
family secrets, is perhaps the most warm-hearted of all Banks’s books,
suffused with love for the quotidian particularities of place (Argyll
and Glasgow), conversation, and character, and containing almost no
sadistic violence at all. With this novel, Banks rebooted the
19th-century domestic saga long before Jonathan Franzen’s The
Corrections; it’s probably the masterpiece of his Earthbound output.
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