Where to start with: Iain Banks
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.
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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.
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The odd one out
A tight murder mystery, Complicity stands out stylistically with its alternating sections of first- and secondperson 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”.
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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 cosmosspanning 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 Mandalorianstyle 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.
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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.
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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.
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The one to drop into conversations about AI
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.
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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.