A personal connection
Iain Banks’s novels remain memorable for the sense they give of their author’s own memories and passions.
BRITISH writer Iain Banks, who died aged 59 on June 9, had already prepared his many admirers for his death. On April 3, he announced on his website that he had inoperable gall bladder cancer, giving him, at most, a year to live.
The announcement (carried in these pages on April 9) 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 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.
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. 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).
In 1991 Banks moved from England to Scotland, and Scottish settings 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.
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.
The Steep Approach To Garbadale (2007) was 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 sciencefiction novels, all but one of which, The Algebraist (2004), belonged to the Culture series.
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 on an oil platform construction site and at an IBM computer plant. He visited the United States 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 from whom he separated in 2007.
Banks was a frequent signatory of letters of protest to the newspapers 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.
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.
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.
Shortly after his announcement of his illness, Banks married his partner, Adele Hartley, and she survives him. The publication of his latest book, The Quarry, was brought forward by Banks’s publishers at his request and was released just three weeks ago. – Guardian News & Media