Why Does Everybody Hate Iain Banks?*
Helen Lewis wonders why bestselling author Iain Banks just can’t make friends in the literary playground
Iain Banks is not an author whose work cries out for literary criticism; I think it’s got far too much plot and direct speech, and all those other old-fashioned things that don’t sit well with postmodernism.
The literary establishment seems to agree: the 53-year-old Scottish writer’s first book, 1984’s The Wasp Factory, set the tone when it was decried as violent and perverse. Sportingly, later editions include all the vitriolic reviews, such as The Times’s: ‘As a piece of writing, The Wasp Factory soars to the level of mediocrity ... perhaps it is all a joke, meant to fool literary London into respect for rubbish.’ Reviewers of his latest novel, The Steep Approach to Garbadale, have been more measured, mainly confining themselves to cracks about a couple of characters who seem to have wandered into Banks’s usually comfortable lower-middle-class world from an Irvine Welsh novel. His excellent science-fiction novels have been roundly ignored. The lurking subtext seems to be: my dear, he’s just not ‘literary’, is he?
If newspaper book reviewers don’t care for Banks, perhaps the dislike is mutual: in the past, he has made much of the fact that he only writes for three months a year, trousering a quarter of a million from each book, and spends the rest of the time buzzing round Scotland on a motorbike and drinking good whisky. You can’t help get the feeling this carefree existence must get up the noses of those who believe writing should be a painful slog, preferably undertaken in a garret.
There was a minor reconciliation when The Crow Road (undoubtedly his most immediately likeable book) was published in 1992, but then he went and wrote the serial killer and speed picaresque that was Complicity, one of the most consistently nasty novels of the nineties. He told the Guardian: ‘[It] was to some extent written in reaction to my previous mainstream novel, The Crow Road,
because I thought that was a bit too comfy and middle-class. I still liked it, but I thought there was definitely a side to it that would make some people sit back and say, “Ah, signs of authorial maturity in Banks at last!” I wanted to knock that smartly on the head. So, I decided to write a novel to forestall that possibility. Something on the edge; something sharp and bitter.’
Further proof of the chasm between his popularity and his critical standing is that, although he’s never won a major literary prize, he was voted the fifth greatest writer of all time after Shakespeare, Austen, Orwell and Dickens in a BBC website poll. His books (twelve as himself, nine as his science-fiction alter ego, Iain M Banks) sell by the bucketload with paperback print runs of 200,000.
So why do I, and hundreds of thousands of others, love Banks, while the reviewers hate him? Surely it can’t be his prose style. Here’s the opening paragraph of The Crow Road, surely one of the best in modern fiction:
It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallanach.
I think I love it because it’s surprising, and because it reflects the whole of the novel in miniature. It’s got the mixture of the bizarre and the mundane that is Banks’s hallmark, it’s rooted in Scotland, and it’s already intimating that narrator Prentice’s family might be just the teeniest bit odd.
Similarly, The Steep Approach To Garbadale has a stand-out section: the description of the protagonist’s mother committing suicide. Killian Fox in the Guardian wrote: ‘There is a scene midway through Iain Banks’s new novel so brilliantly written that it has a detrimental effect on the novel as a whole … nothing else in the book comes close to equalling the lyrical force of this one short scene.’
It’s a fair cop: Iain Banks does suffer a little from what I call Charlie Kaufman syndrome, where the occasional unbelievable flashes of brilliance throw all the rest into relief, raising your expectations to an unsatisfiably high pitch.
Banks’s own favourite novel, The Bridge, suffers particularly from this. In other hands, the central metaphor could be crashingly obvious – a man in a coma imagines himself to be living on a seemingly endless bridge – but he manages to turn this conceit into a much more subtle nightmare. There’s even a barbarian who appears in discrete passages, talking in Scottish dialect – seven years before Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting – and generally parodying epic literature. All this is fantastically entertaining, but the end is inevitably disappointing. (Is he opening his eyes? Yes? Oh, it’s a miracle!)
I think another of the reviewers’ criticisms is justified, too: every so often, Banks’s old-fashioned Scottish socialism (oh, it pains me to say it) gets just a touch wearisome. The criticisms of Thatcherism and right-wing ideology are muted in the early books: or perhaps I notice them less as they belong to history now. In the science fiction, they are much better used as a stepping-off point to imagine a world where money means nothing.
But in recent works, the zeal which drove Banks in 2003 to rip up his passport and mail it to Tony Blair have become more apparent. He told Salon: ‘There’s something very stubborn and pigheaded and stupid about me, it’s almost like self-harm – it’ll do no real good whatsoever, but it just makes me feel better, makes me feel like I’ve done something, made some sort of sacrifice, to protest the war.’
He wrote Dead Air in six weeks after 9/11, and it shows. The protagonist, DJ Ken Nott, is little more than a vehicle for Banks’s rants over British and American foreign policy: most reviewers felt this completely dominated, and effectively ruined, the book. One reviewer generously wrote: ‘It’s a little flabby in parts, but the old Banksian brio keeps the protagonist’s on- and off-air rants about PC, Zionism and song lyrics on the readable side of self-indulgence.’
The Steep Approach to Garbadale also tackles contemporary political issues, in this case American imperialism, head-on. The Guardian’s ‘The Digested Read’ takes up the point in a parody of the conversation between the central character and his girlfriend:
VG is driving Alban north to Garbadale. ‘Why have you suddenly become the family rallying point for opposition to the take-over when you’ve had no interest in the business for years?’ she asks. ‘Because I’m opposed to American cultural imperialism,’ he replies. ‘I know we’ve had our differences over the Iraq war, but maybe we could commit to one another after all,’ she says.
There’s even a point later on in the book where Alban is allowed a three page rant to the shareholders of the family firm, who are trying to decide whether to sell the company to the Texan Spraint Corporation. ‘This is not intended to be just a diatribe against the US in general,’ he begins, signalling that’s what it almost certainly is going to be. He goes on: ‘The USA is a great country full of great people. It’s just their propensity as a whole for electing idiots and then conducting a foreign policy of the utmost depravity I object to.’
Now, I’m not arguing that politics and literature must be kept at a safe distance from each other – everything from Ode to the West Wind to 1984 would prove me wrong. But with Banks you begin to wish he’d just write a political manifesto and save his novels for what he does best: depicting the intricacies of relationships, conjuring up haunting images and allowing the imagination that thought up The Bridge free rein.
*You might notice that I started off by carping about how overlooked Banks’s science-fiction novels are, before gleefully ignoring them myself. I’m hoping that someone else with a greater knowledge of the genre might write about them in Pen Pusher Magazine in the future – could it be you?
